Announcing Pegasus Frontend

fluffypillow

As for the "system bar" on the top of the current theme, it loops like the carousel, and shows as many as it can while the name of the platforms remains visible.

fluffypillow

This week Pegasus got open sourced, and is available here. There are no proper releases yet, since it's still in alpha, but you can already build it from source. Automatic build testing has been set up for desktop Linux, Pi1, Pi2 and Windows. It is also confirmed working on Windows 10.

mattrixk

@fluffypillow You're doing some great work mate. I'd love to try this out for windows, but have no idea how to get it from your github to a usable program on my PC.

meleu

@fluffypillow can you be more specific about the dependencies on the README? I mean, which debian packages do I have to install to build the pegasus-frontend?

meleu

@fluffypillow Well, I kinda figured out the dependencies. I'm trying first on my Linux Mint x86. I installed qtdeclarative5-dev and qtbase5-dev and it brought a lot of other packages.

And then I've got this:

$ make
cd src/ && ( test -e Makefile || /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/bin/qmake /home/meleu/src/pegasus-frontend/src/src.pro INSTALLDIR=/opt/retropie/supplementary/pegasus-frontend/ -o Makefile ) && make -f Makefile 
make[1]: Entrando no diretório `/home/meleu/src/pegasus-frontend/src'
cd backend/ && ( test -e Makefile || /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/bin/qmake /home/meleu/src/pegasus-frontend/src/backend/backend.pro INSTALLDIR=/opt/retropie/supplementary/pegasus-frontend/ -o Makefile ) && make -f Makefile 
make[2]: Entrando no diretório `/home/meleu/src/pegasus-frontend/src/backend'
g++ -c -m64 -pipe -O2 -fPIC -fno-exceptions -Wall -W -std=c++0x -D_REENTRANT -DQT_DEPRECATED_WARNINGS -DQT_RESTRICTED_CAST_FROM_ASCII -DQT_NO_CAST_TO_ASCII -DQT_NO_EXCEPTIONS -DQT_NO_DEBUG -DQT_QML_LIB -DQT_NETWORK_LIB -DQT_GUI_LIB -DQT_CORE_LIB -I/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/mkspecs/linux-g++-64 -I. -isystem /usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5 -isystem /usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/QtQml -isystem /usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/QtNetwork -isystem /usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/QtGui -isystem /usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/QtCore -I. -o Api.o Api.cpp
Api.cpp: In member function ‘void ApiObject::onLoadingFinished()’:
Api.cpp:54:11: error: ‘qInfo’ was not declared in this scope
     qInfo().noquote() << tr("Data files loaded in %1ms").arg(m_loading_time_ms);
           ^
make[2]: ** [Api.o] Erro 1
make[2]: Saindo do diretório `/home/meleu/src/pegasus-frontend/src/backend'
make[1]: ** [sub-backend-make_first] Erro 2
make[1]: Saindo do diretório `/home/meleu/src/pegasus-frontend/src'
make: ** [sub-src-make_first] Erro 2

It seems that we have some problem in Api.cpp file.

fluffypillow

Yeah, the documentation is a bit lacking, I plan to add proper guides/wiki eventually.

The Qt version is important (and I've just added a version check to the project file for checking), especially on embedded systems due to the optimizations in the later releases. Unfortunately the Qt packages are outdated on all Debians (including experimental), which is what you've just experienced too (qInfo was added in Qt 5.5, two years ago). For desktop only (X11/Windows), you can download the official development kit from here, and I'm also providing my own Qt builds for and RPi 1/2 and X11, which I've uploaded to the GitHub releases tab (eg. qt58-x11.tgz). These are used for build testing too, but they don't include the debug libs or Qt Creator (making them way smaller than the official release). If you want to use them, you have to extract them to /opt, and use /opt/qt58-xxx_hosttools/bin/qmake.

Cross compilation to Pi is a somewhat more difficult topic, and I could (and probably will) write a whole post about it. In short, you can find the required tools on GitHub, extract them to /opt, add the toolchains' bin directory to your $PATHand use theqmake from rpi1/rpi2_hosttools. You can set up remote deployment in Qt Creator as well.

fluffypillow

Also a few additional notes:

Gamepad support improvements will be added in Qt 5.9; it's going to be released at the end of this month, and I'll increase the required Qt version then
There's no main menu yet, that's what I'm going to work on this week
Please note that Pegasus is less than 2 months old, and is still in alpha
If you do manage to run it, bug reports and suggestions are welcome!

fluffypillow

Had some errands to do this week, so I worked mostly on the main menu only (demo: http://webmshare.com/play/Prq5q).
Shutdown and reboot works too, and running custom scripts before them will be supported in the future.
You can also navigate using the mouse.

herb_fargus

@fluffypillow glorious :) well done

fabio78

@fluffypillow Beautiful, clean, fantastic usability, all made even more impressive by the fact of it being a one man project. Well done, mate, I'll be watching this closely now.

Hex

Built and Installed nicely. Question: artwork missing? Game lists are all scrapped properly in ES

fluffypillow

@Hex the documentation is still work in progress, sorry about that! Right now the XML is used for the metadata only; instead of reading the files from a gamelist, for a given asset type Pegasus tries to find an image file that matches certain name patterns. For example, if your rom file is Contra (U).nes, and you want a box front art, it will check (at the moment) the following directories:

[directory of the rom]/media/
$HOME/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/

for the following files:

Contra (U)-boxFront.jpg
Contra (U)-boxFront.png
Contra (U)-box_front.jpg
Contra (U)-box_front.png
Contra (U)-boxart2D.jpg
Contra (U)-boxart2D.png
Contra (U).jpg
Contra (U).png

and use the first one it finds as the box art. Similarly for the other assets too. If you can read the code, you can find the full list of the currently supported suffixes in src/backend/Assets.cpp, but of course this is something I intend to document properly.

Hex

@fluffypillow Need any help with Pegasus? I am currently working on some features for ES so I am in good shape to contribute here too.

Also I would recommend putting the GitHub repo url in the first post. This prevents users from having to go fishing in the comments

fluffypillow

@Hex, thanks; it's still quite early in the development, I can't guarantee that even the project structure won't change while you work on a feature :) I'd like to complete the basic features first and release a beta, then there'll probably be enough feature requests to work on. If you've found some bugs or had any issues though, feel free to ping me!

fluffypillow

As for the weekly changelog,

Gamepad layout editor is in the works; I've also spent the some time learning Inkscape to make it fancy (screenshots next week)
Added OSX build testing
Deployment improvements (this means I can make release packages with one command, and such a package will contain all the DLLs/SOs needed by the program)

fluffypillow

Here's how the vector looks so far: https://snag.gy/53KQGi.jpg (sorry for the misalignments, this was a test/work file)

Allanbuzzy

Considering the work of Pegasus is going well, I wonder if it's possible for us to switch from either ES or Pegasus via a setting on RetroPie. That'd make users not be mad when they can just switch frontends.

cafarellidigital

@Allanbuzzy I'm very excited about Pegasus, but I think it's too early to add it to the RetroPie script. Right now the only people who should be installing it are developers and testers, not the general public.

shantigilbert

@fluffypillow Pegasus looks great! thanks for sharing.

I am trying to compile it for Libreelec, but I ran into a problem, I get this error:

Project ERROR: Unknown module(s) in QT: qml

I am not sure this forum is the best place to discuss this, as its not related to RetroPie, but I didn't want to open an issue on Github as I am sure it is not a bug, but do you think you could help me figure out the error?

Thanks!

fluffypillow

@shantigilbert I'm not familiar with LibreELEC, but I can try it this afternoon. It seems some Qt modules are missing; on many distros you have to install them as separate packages. You'll need these parts:

Qt 5.8 core
QML
Qt Quick 2 (may be a QML package with different name scheme on some distros)
Multimedia (might be called as MultimediaQuick)
Svg module
Gamepad module
Multimedia libs depending on the platform (eg. gstreamer1.0-omx on the Pi)

If these are not available, you might need to build Qt manually (which I did for the Pis). I'm not sure about the name of the packages, as it seems every distro calls them differently, or uses some complicated naming scheme.

Of course, I'll add these details to the build guide (which I actually started writing last night).