Announcing Pegasus Frontend

PlayingKarrde

BTW should the frontend be using as much GPU resources as it appears to? It seems to use between 90 to 100% usage right now.

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde it shouldn't, in theory (it can run on Raspberries or phones after all)., though it is possible that there may be platform-specific issues. For me on Linux + Intel GPU the default theme takes around 15-22% load (depending on video playback). The number of active graphical elements of a theme greatly affects the GPU load, though your theme from last time didn't cause a huge load for me either.

fluffypillow

Weekly update!

Android updates
- App icons are now loaded properly
- Added metadata support: descriptions, screenshots, etc. will be downloaded for apps available on Google Play
- Fixed Android support not appearing in the data source settings menu
- Fixed missing Android logo in the main theme
Language updates
- Updated all translations to work with the current version
- Updated Hungarian translation
- Added German and Russian translations (by Purq, thanks!)

I've also marked this release as Alpha 10. With that done, the main task planned for the next weeks is to make some breaking changes to the metadata formats and the theme interface, and trying to get through all those old bugs, like the main theme scaling problems.

PlayingKarrde

Just coming back to the performance thing again, I just managed to test my theme (and obviously your default one) and both run smooth as silk on MacOS. It's most definitely a windows issue (I will test on Windows 7 shortly and on a Shield later tonight). Judging by your comment on the usage on a Pi being only about 20% I'd assume it works fine there too though.

Also, definitely only video related as themes with no video (or disabling video in my own) allows it to run at full speed. Having now seen it running at a smooth speed it makes the Windows version even harder to use now haha.

I'm almost ready to release my first version of the theme. I wouldn't consider it finished. I still need to do a proper details view as well as implement search and filters but since I see you are making some changes to filters - which sound really exciting - I'm going to hold off on that until I can implement those features. I'll add it to GitHub probably tomorrow or later today depending how busy I get.

EctoOne

Sooo, since I've spent some time to install RetroArch on my Tablet, I also decided to try Pegasus again. Info: I've only set up PC Engine and GameBoy collections so far.

I wasn't able to figure out how the global collection works. I thought I could just merge all individual collection.txt files. But then no collection showed up.
I installed all the themes I could find on your github, but none of them worked as expected. None of them showed the correct gamelists. Eg. the ES2 simple theme showed the PC Engine games although I was in the GameBoy selection. The Flixthingy showed the correct images, but I still could only access the PC Engine games.
I don't know if that's an issue on my end, but the navigation with my XBox One Controller (using bluetooth) was almost impossible. Every press on the DPad was registered twice, so it skipped one entry.

SephirothX2004

I installed pegasus on my WikiPad thats running jellybean 4.2.2 and pegasus finds my games and images but when i try to launch the games nothing happens.

This is in the run log:
[i] Executing command: `am start --user 0 -n com.retroarch/.browser.retroactivity.RetroActivityFuture -e ROM "/storage/emulated/0/ROMS/PS1/Crash Bandicoot.cue"

[w] Could not run the command am; either the invoked program is missing, or you don't have the permission to run it.

fluffypillow

@EctoOne

Global collections are still kind of experimental, which is why it's not well documented. It should still work as you've tried, with all individual collections merged. The only difference is that every Collection entry in the global file should have a directory field that tells where should Pegasus search for its games.
That's interesting, could you show your collection files? The Flixnet theme was not updated for some time now, so it may not work correctly at the moment. The ES theme is a recent one though and should work fine in theory.
Yes, happened to others as well, likely a bug in some lower-level code. Will try to fix it soon.

@SephirothX2004 That's really interesting, perhaps app launching is not permitted this way on the WikiPad, for some reason? Jellybean shouldn't be an issue, but I'll double check that too. Could you post the collections file, just in case?

SephirothX2004

collection: psx
extensions: cue
launch: am start --user 0
-n com.retroarch/.browser.retroactivity.RetroActivityFuture
-e ROM "{file.path}"
-e LIBRETRO /data/data/com.retroarch/cores/pcsx_rearmed_libretro_android.so
-e CONFIGFILE /storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.retroarch/files/retroarch.cfg
-e IME com.android.inputmethod.latin/.LatinIME
-e DATADIR /data/data/com.retroarch
-e APK /data/app/com.retroarch-1/base.apk
-e SDCARD /storage/emulated/0
-e DOWNLOADS /storage/emulated/0/Download
-e SCREENSHOTS /storage/emulated/0/Pictures
-e EXTERNAL /storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.retroarch/files
--activity-clear-top

EctoOne

@fluffypillow my collections looks the same as the one from @SephirothX2004 but with other cores of course. Directly copied from your site and confirmed that the paths are the same for me.

PlayingKarrde

Following up on my last post, performance on my Shield TV is great. Wasn't able to run games but I suspect that's just down to not knowing where the retroarch apk is stored on the shield yet.

Cederick

I just read through everything in around 2h and I'm so excited to try this tomorrow!

I would love to see a theme in the style of the switch nes theme and these texts from the Sonic Mania trailer.

So it would be a clean look with some nice bouncy/sliding animations and maybe jumping letters for the loading screen in the bottom right corner when booting up. and the same-ish color scheme like in the trailer (around 0:55):

PlayingKarrde

Here's the first release of my theme, gameOS. I am still considering it alpha as it is missing the filters and game details, but I feel like it's ready for testing (and I've been working on it for too long already).

gameOS theme

https://github.com/PlayingKarrde/gameOS

This is definitely a theme that requires more media than the default EmulationStation scrape. I recommend Skraper.net to scrape and using @fluffypillow 's metadata converter to build your metadata.txt files. After that, place the exe I have provided inside each rom folder and run it to organise your files.

The metadata that you should be scraping for is:

screenshot (gameplay)
wheel
video
boxfront2d
fanart

You can obviously scrape more media if you like but those are the bare minimum for this theme. Scraping like this will also benefit any other theme on Pegasus since it will organise the files into the correct format Pegasus is looking for so it is worth putting the effort in in my opinion.

Definitely welcome all feedback.

Purg.Derren

@PlayingKarrde Ooooh, i'm so excited to test a new theme.
For myself, i not really understand Qt - i could edit some themes, or even make the "simple theme"-tutorial theme (that didnt work w/o some changes for some reason) ... but for example the ES2 Simple theme do not work for longer time, and i can't get whats wrong with it..

So happy to see a new theme out here :D

edit: if some-one have the time, i would like to see a theme from ES2 in pegasus, it looks quite simple, but for me it would take months i think to make it work ^^ ... it called Art-Book. It's a simple greyish theme, but i like it much.

Purg.Derren

@PlayingKarrde so, i just tested the theme, both on windows and my android box.
Great work so far!

On Windows machine i did not notice performance issues.
For the media / assets: think you should include some own "standard" media - kind of a placeholder - for cases when there is no marquee/scrennshot/background/artwork file for a certain game - but i think in future you already planned this. At this moment, when a artwork (background image) is not available, the theme seem to use one of a nearby game..
For alpha/beta you maybe could use just a black image or smth.

On Android (6.x) i have some performance issues,
the one i noticed first is, the big number within the decoration (game rating) is not readable. I'm not sure what the problem is, Qt is known for looking exactly the same on every platfrom i think...

a smartphone foto on my googledrive

the other one is a big performance drop when i open the "menu" (systems list), i believe it is because of the blur effect, because the drop in performance is not just few seconds, it stays slow while the menu is open

Next one is maybe not an issue, but your side-menu uses the same key (Button B) like Pegasus uses for the main menu, but that's less a problem, the button "Start" still work i see now ^^

Next, just some thaughts: I LOVE the way your grid is organized, when select a game, the marquee/grid-image is replaced by video, the the popup and the golden-yellow border and the way to mark favorites by a simple button press! (im not sure if it just optical for now or the games really get marked / added to favorites?)

That's for now from me - hope to test new stuff soon! :)))

PlayingKarrde

@Purg-Derren Great feedback - thanks! Interesting your windows didn't have performance issues. I've tried it on 3 different machines and every one performs not fantastically. I wonder if it's because you're comparing it to your Android version? Just out of interest what hardware are you running? My Shield runs it buttery smooth.

I was expecting the blur to maybe cause some concerns. I will either wait for the theme options additions that @fluffypillow said is thinking about adding so I will allow for turning stuff like that off or maybe make a separate version for lower end systems. I need to test this on a Pi3 - if that has performance issues I think that's a pretty good indicator of needing to fix that across the board.

Everything else you mention I'll definitely get around to in the next release I think (the font one is weird though. Not sure how that could happen - although I do see it render as a different font on MacOS. But my Shield version is fine. I'll try on the Pixel and see if I can recreate it there).

Thanks again.

-edit- ok I was able to reproduce the font issue on my pixel. Very strange it's a portable android only issue.

Purg.Derren

@PlayingKarrde
No, really, on Windows it is really smooth. Only sometimes, if there is much media and i scroll fast through your 3x4 grid, and the next one is loaded there is a milisecond freeze, but thats normal i think, when media is loaded.

My android box.. you cannot compare it to an shield of course, as far i know, the shield is still the most powerful android platform out there. My box is a Xoro HST 260 - with a Amlogic 905D (quad cortex a53 @2.00 ghz), a mali 450MP4 gpu and 2 gb of ram. the roms are stored on a 64gb usb (3.0, but the box supports only 2.0 i think) stick.

But on the android box, i have performance issues with the in-built theme, too. At least since alpha9 or so, first tries - with alpha8 where much better, for some reason ... but that's an other topic.

The Font issue looks different nearly every time i start pegasus.. second time i could see the whole Rectangle colored in white or golden, third time it seem like all ratings (from all games of the active platform) overlapped.

An other thing i just noticed is, on my Windows machine - in your side-menu, the n64 is listed as "Nintendo 64" and on the android as "n64"
... i was not sure if you just made the menu out of the shortName of the platforms, so i didnt mentioned it.

Windows:

Game Boy Advanced
Nintendo 64
NES
Super NES
psx
psp
Sega Dreamcast

Android:

Game Boy Advanced
NES
Super NES
n64
psp
psx

PlayingKarrde

@Purg-Derren ok that's very strange with the rating. I think I have an idea though so I'll give it a shot a little bit later.

Its very weird to me that your windows performance is so good when mine is so bad. I wonder if it's something to do with the media I'm using. Or perhaps the codecs I've installed. I used k-lite for each of my builds fwiw.

The n64 thing is definitely strange also. Im not using the shortname at all. I am manually shortening nes and snes due to their longname sizes just being ridiculous but n64 (and the others you listed) shouldn't be affected...

Purg.Derren

@PlayingKarrde Im also using K-Lite, and i notice, that when i run Pegasus, the LAV Video, LAV Audio Decoders and the LAV Splitter is running

Cederick

Could we actually get the theme choosing application as an install script for RetroPi-Config as well and maybe Pegasus and the FE chooser as an option in ES itself?

And a Themes Installer in Pegasus?

SephirothX2004

@PlayingKarrde

I love your theme on my android phone.
It runs pretty smooth and is very nice with the logos over the videos that i have.
Its pretty silent not hearing my videos though so is it possible to have background music playing like DIG or Arc Browser?