Announcing Pegasus Frontend

fluffypillow

@ectoone Yes, that's the one. The layout would then look something like this:

- roms/
  - game1.zip
  - game2.zip
  - media/
    - game1/
        - box_front.png
        - screenshot.png
    - game2/
        - box_front.png
        - screenshot.png

So that would be the new media dir based asset searching. As for the ES2 module, the main source of assets is the <image>, etc. tags from the gamelist.xml. In addition, Pegasus also looks for assets with known suffixes under ~/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/, like in the media dir currently. This searching will continue to work... is what I wanted to write, but now that you mention it, as this is something ES itself doesn't even do and the layout is changing on Pegasus' side, I guess this searching could be removed actually? Some people did use this feature though ( @Darksavior ?), perhaps a customizable media-dir-path option could be added to the collections file instead.

EctoOne

@fluffypillow Your layout might work. When I tried it, I also had the Roms in the corresponding subfolders and apparently ES is not capable to directly access those files.
I have to see if your layout is easy to manage or if I keep my current layout with subfolders for each media type within the rom directory. Although I currently prefer my layout because I can easily switch image paths by renaming the folders instead of editing the gamelist.xml.

Darksavior

@fluffypillow My setup is to use as much scraped art as I can from ES for backwards compatibility with ES. I did add the logo and screenshot art that's pegasus exclusive to go in the ES folders /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/downloaded_images/

I faintly remember the logo/screenshot art default was the roms folder which is in my usb stick. I prefer to have all my scraped art together which is on my microsd.

I also remember what a pain in the butt it was to scrape or add the art manually. I hope pegasus can have a scraper of its own in the future. Another step to get away from ES.

nemo93

hi @fluffypillow! I'm still amazed by the progress and functionalities you keep adding on a very regular basis ;) If you don't mind I have 4 additional feedbacks I'd like to share.

I'm doing a lot of testing these days with adding/removing multiple roms as well as refreshing images/video/metadata. I couldn't find an easier way but to reboot the Pi every time I want to add a new rom or whenever I change my "gamelist.xml" with more/less data. Any chance to see a "restart Pegasus" item or even better a "refresh roms/metadata" item in the menu?
since you added the key binding and metadata directories stuff I can see a mouse cursor on top left corner of Pegasus UI. Definitely not an issue just a minor annoyance as I'm using Pegasus only with a controller. If you could implement an option to show/(auto)hide the cursor that would be great.
I've made some stability testing as my Pi is on 24/7/365 (poor thing!). Pegasus proved excellent on that matter. Not a single crash in more than 2 weeks with some precautions. It seems that the more videos (previews of games) Pegasus plays the slower the UI behaves. By slower I mean that after playing several dozens of videos then the UI stops responding for few seconds (when moving to another game boxart) and then it goes back to normal speed. I've also experienced one crash after I left Pegasus on the default system (Amiga in my case) playing back a preview over and over again. After some time (I can't be precise) but it should be around 12-14h perhaps the Pi crashed completely. I had to hard reset. So basically anytime I reboot the Pi I take care to not let the UI playing back a video. I go to the Retropie section where there's no video or go to some game without preview and then everything goes absolutely ok. All to say that to restrict the number of time a video could play would help a lot to improve stability.
Also but this might be related to Pi hardware itself it seems that previews of mp4 video with high profile (+high bitrate) in 60fps do make playback to stutter. Should I decide to re-encode the video with lower profile and bitrate playback is smooth.

If I've missed something or done something wrong please keep me honest. Thank you once again for this amazing frontend.

fluffypillow

@EctoOne @Darksavior then for now I'll leave the ES2 downloaded_images as it currently, and change only the media dir searching. We'll see how that turns out then.

@Darksavior Actually I did play with the idea of making a scraper, but then started working on Pegasus :) Some kind of external scraper support will likely be added in the future though.

@nemo93

Yes, a reload function is planned, but that will require some more work on the whole data loading. It'll certainly come in some form in the future.
Hm, a cursor should only appear if the OS detects a plugged in mouse device. Perhaps some controllers are also detected as having mouse components (eg. the DS4's touch pad)? You can list the connected devices with ls -l /dev/input/by-id in the terminal, see if there's anything funny there. Other than that, defining the environmental variable QT_QPA_EGLFS_HIDECURSOR can also hide the cursor (eg. add export QT_QPA_EGLFS_HIDECURSOR=1 to ~/.bashrc or to the top of /opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh). [Side note, does RetroPie load .bashrc on start?]
3-4. Thanks for the detailed testing! I think the video-related issues are caused by GStreamer, the playback backend used on Linux (at least, that tend to produce warnings during playback). I'm afraid I can't do too much about that other than waiting for upstream improvements, but playback limiting could be indeed added as a workaround. I wonder if there's any other GStreamer-using video player available for the Pi (Banshee? Parole?), so we could see if the issue happens there too.

EctoOne

@fluffypillow Would it be possible to add an option to ignore subfolders for certain systems?
Then a folder layout like this would be possible without the need to enter the subfolders:

/system
 /game1
  game1.zip (or whatever rom extension)
  game1.xml (contains the basic metadata for that particular game)
  boxart.jpg
  thumb.jpg
  logo.png
  video.mp4
/game2
  game2.zip
  game2.xml
  boxart.jpg
  thumb.jpg
  logo.png
  video.mp4

Again, this is an available option in Kodi when you link an movie folder to your database. I currently don't want that for any paths, just to hide subfolders for certain systems (if they are not declared in the gamelist).
Since I currently don't know how gamelists are created by Pegasus, I use ES as example to make one. That's why I want to have the xml files in the rom folder so that they can be combined by a script or directly with Pegasus (whatever is possible) . So whenever you remove/add a game by adding its folder you can re-run the script to rebuild/clean the gamelist. Only downside would be to loose information for lastplayed and playcount (but I personally don't care for those anyway).

A simple xml would then look like this:


	<game>
		<path>./game1/game1.zip</path>
		<name>game1</name>
		<desc>game1 description</desc>
		<image>./game1/folder.jpg</image>
		<marquee>./game1/logo.png</marquee>
		<video>./game1/video.mp4</video>
		<thumbnail>./game1/game1.jpg</thumbnail>
		<rating>0</rating>
		<releasedate>19910101T000000</releasedate>
		<developer>someone</developer>
		<publisher>someone else</publisher>
		<genre>pewpew</genre>
	</game>

Setting up new files would then require only to change the paths and the file name of the rom.

This it a suggestion for easier game management and not necessarily for media paths.

fluffypillow

@ectoone So if I understand correctly, you'd like to keep the one game = one directory setup, and generate the gamelist-equivalent for Pegasus with a script, right? This is possible; first you'd create a collections.txt file under /system/ (in your example above):

collection: My Games
extension: zip
launch: myemulator "{file.path}"

Then you'd have a metadata.txt (or whatever you'd like to call it) in each of your game directories, like this:

file: $CWD/game1.zip
title: Game 1
description: The #1 of Games
assets.boxFront: $CWD/boxart.jpg
assets.video: $CWD/video.mp4
rating: 99%
release: 1991-01-01
developer: Someone
publisher: Someone Else Ltd.
genre: pewpew

Then you'd run a script that goes through these small metadata files, replaces a piece of text with with the path to the game directory and merges the results together into a /system/metadata.txt file. Something like this:

#! /bin/bash

rm metadata.txt
for i in $(find $(pwd) -name metadata.txt); do
	sed "s|\$CWD|$(dirname $i)|g" $i >> metadata.txt
	echo >> metadata.txt
done

In this example I've used $CWD as something that will be replaced with the file's path. You can use whatever you want, or, if you're good with regex, you could actually use just a dot too and tweak the command accordingly.

(The file format itself is documented here.)

EctoOne

@fluffypillow I'm a noob when it comes to write scripts but yes, I believe you understood what I meant.
My question still is, what will show up in Pegasus afterwards. A bunch of folders with the corresponding games or just the games?
If it's the later that would be perfect.

fluffypillow

@ectoone Just the games :) You can use the script above as-is (save it as eg. get-meta.sh under /system/) or you can use the following one-liner after cding into /system/:

rm metadata.txt; for i in $(find $(pwd) -name metadata.txt); do sed "s|\$CWD|$(dirname $i)|g" $i >> metadata.txt; echo >> metadata.txt; done

fluffypillow

I've just made a script that converts the current media layout to the new one, you can get it here. Copy it next to the media dir, make it executable (chmod +x convert_media.py) and run from there (./convert_media.py). It will ask for confirmation before changing anything, but you might want to backup/zip your current media dir first.

nemo93

Thanks @fluffypillow. I do confirm that I had a wireless keyboard/mouse combo connected to my Pi hence the cursor! Your workaround works nicely. Regarding the player to be honest I don't know. Seems like OMXplayer is the other player available for the Pi but not sure it's as flexible as Gstreamer. I'm wondering if the fact most of my previews are running at 60fps can be a cause of the crash.

SephirothX2004

I have Pegasus running great on my android phone however i would like to request the ability to have different wallpapers for each system if at all possible.

fluffypillow

@nemo93 sorry for the late reply; 60fps shouldn't be a problem, unless GStreamer itself has a related bug (haven't found bug reports about that yet, but could happen). Another thing I suspect is perhaps the Pi is getting a bit hot, causing the playback to crash. Or maybe the system runs out of memory (and/or VRAM). I think if you launch Pegasus through SSH, you might be able to see GStreamer warnings, that might help.

@SephirothX2004 the default theme shows the screenshot for the selected game (if there's any). There's no built-in way to change that, however, it's possible to change the the default theme to load a custom image instead (but that'll need some minor coding).

fluffypillow

And this week's update has just landed:

Breaking Change: the way assets are searched in the media dirs is changed to the model described here, ie. assets for a particular game are now stored under media/<gamename>/)
A script for converting the current layout can be found here
ES2's downloaded_images will continue to work, even with the "Pegasus-exclusive" asset types

Meanwhile I've also started working on themes, and almost finished porting the ES2 Simple theme:

tronkyfran

@fluffypillow WOW!!!!Awesome work as always!! It will have carousel for system selection? Having some more example themes will be a game changer for theme makers(at least for those with less programming savvy as me).
Thanks!!!!

fluffypillow

@tronkyfran yup, that part works too, here's a video: https://my.mixtape.moe/bdfxqx.webm (made mostly out of memory, so may not be 100% accurate). Also using this as a template, it would be possible to port pretty much every ES2 theme to Pegasus too.

halfmanhalfcake

@fluffypillow Amazing work. Look forward to more themes.

tronkyfran

@fluffypillow I was thinking about that port possibility. It would be as easy as make a little script to convert to Pegasus format or are you planning ES theme "support" out of the box? In any case It would multiply the theme choices forma pegasus

fluffypillow

@tronkyfran technically it would be possible to automate the porting, but I'm not sure I want to deal with all the possible cases an ES theme might have (at least for now, we'll see later). I do plan to make the Simple theme commented instead though, so it could be used as a template for further porting.

fluffypillow

Ok, I think the theme is ready for a public release, I've just uploaded it here, give it a try!

What's missing:

help prompts
scrolling descriptions
filtering/searching
page up/down in the game list

Also I've just noticed that unlike in the previous video, background doesn't scroll in real ES2, but I've left it as is (it's more fun this way). The theme code is not really trivial, so I've added a bunch of comments. Feel free to tweak things!