Announcing Pegasus Frontend

fluffypillow

@Darksavior The number of rows visible depends on the images and your screen size. Since that's the direction you scroll, I don't plan to limit their count.

I you mean columns thought, yes, I'd like theme-specific settings in the future, where things like this could be tweaked.

AndersHP

In extension of an update to Retroarch 1.6.9 going bad, I have to either go back to my backup of 1.6.7 or try a fresh install.. But I just realized that the downloaded_images folder is on the sd-card... Sorry if this is slightly offtopic, but still a bit related to Pegasus:

will moving the entire scrapings to the USB with the ROMS (yes, running roms off USB) slow pegasus down instead of having these on the sd? In the future, it could be cool to have scrapings and roms together, in case I need to start all over (again).
If no to above's speed question: Is there a way to move these maaaaany many files a fast way? I can only access the sd when it's placed in the pi, through Filezilla, putting it in my mac only shows very few folders and files.

fluffypillow

@AndersHP Unfortunately, yes, loading is currently slower if your assets are on USB (Pegasus checks which files are accessible, and that's slow). However, this could be improved, and it's exactly something I plan to fix in one of the next updates.
As for Mac, apparently there's something called OSXFuse you can use to mount ext4 file systems. No idea if it works though.

AndersHP

@fluffypillow Thanks for the reply. I will stay with Retroarch 1.6.7 until your next updates then.

AndersHP

Anyone else in here experiencing problems with Retroarch 1.6.9 stated here?

It would be nice to know if this is related to Pegasus.

Darksavior

@andershp said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

Anyone else in here experiencing problems with Retroarch 1.6.9 stated here?

It would be nice to know if this is related to Pegasus.

No. Everything is fine here. I must've updated Pegasus last week from retropie setup if it matters.

fluffypillow

@AndersHP Pegasus doesn't touch your emulators, and can only run when you launch it. If the problem occurs using other frontends or when Pegasus isn't even installed, I assume the problem is caused by something else.
You've mentioned it works fine with RetroArch 1.6.7 but slows down with 1.6.9, looking at the changelogs (1, 2), I see lots of changes; perhaps some of them are causing you trouble? Or maybe during the update to 1.6.9, something got wrong (eg. during the build)?

AndersHP

In this thread I can confirm that my issues are gone after a simple .cfg file deletion and regenerating.

fluffypillow

Yet another huge patch has just landed in Pegasus: this time I've updated the way games, metadata and assets are found, resulting in improved loading speed.
On my Pi 3 with a Class 10 SD card, I have 3400 games and about 10800 assets; it is loaded by Alpha 5 in about 8-8.5 seconds, while the latest Pegasus loads them in 3.4-3.6 seconds, making it over twice as fast.

Of course, your mileage may vary, as I've only tested it on a Pi 3 + SD card; I'm not sure how much it brings on eg. USB drives.

halfmanhalfcake

Great work :)

Any ETA on a theme guide? I've tried to play around with QT Creator but no luck in terms of a working theme

AndersHP

@fluffypillow impressive work, can't wait to try it out. What about placing images on USB, will this be equally fast or still faster on SD?

fluffypillow

@halfmanhalfcake hopefully before Christmas :) The plan is that now I start working on the config file format, as it'll be used by the themes, then I start writing the theming guide.

@AndersHP as far as I know, they both should have the same possible reachable speed on a Pi. But unless you have a very fast SD card (UHS class), USBs in general might be faster.

AndersHP

With about 5000 games read from USB and assets off SD, Pegasus loads in 21 secs in Alpha 5 but 24 secs in the newest release. Maybe I should try moving artwork to USB also... Should this just lie in the roms/media folders?

fluffypillow

@andershp hmm this difference is really interesting... I'll see if I can figure out what causes this slowdown. As for game assets, they are searched in [game's directory]/media, see this comment.

AndersHP

@fluffypillow My USB drive with the games are probably not very fast, and I have video, logo and boxart per game, ran from the microSD (class 10).

Assembling all these on the USB thumbdrive, maybe a faster one, could bring the loading time down I guess? But still, it's quite a lot more time than your setup? Maybe a fresh Retropie install is needed?

Darksavior

@fluffypillow With the new build my ~2000 games from USB load in around 5 seconds, nice. @AndersHP I got better speeds from microsd, so I keep my artwork there. Videos crash or glitch out on pegasus the last time I tried so I don't use them.

AndersHP

@darksavior Hmm. What USB drive do you use? Something fancy? There's a long way up to my 24 secs.
I think video previews are so nice, which glitches have you encountered?

Darksavior

@andershp I'm using a 128gb SanDisk USB 2.0 stick. I don't remember if it's formatted to 32k or 64k clusters.

Maybe it's changed lately, but the last time I tried videos, like 6 months+ ago, some videos would give me a garbled image and if I started to scroll down, Pegasus would crash. No real loss...I still have a ton of artwork to scrape.

AndersHP

I'm considering a fresh install with less games also. Really, this has been a big test for my build, but the "paralyzation of choice" is kicking in with so many games. It's unnecessary.

I have only experienced that Pegasus occasionally quits to terminal when scrolling through many games, but I still hope @fluffypillow introduces a Page Down/Up function at some point, and this might help, since Pegasus then doesn't have to load so many videos redundantly when scrolling.

fluffypillow

@andershp yup, still on my todo list :)