Announcing Pegasus Frontend

PlayingKarrde

I've been thinking a bit about how to manage adding roms a little easier for people and while this may not be the most elegant solution, if you were to write a Launchbox parser to go along with the single collection and metadata file, that would basically cover you for any future games you add. The process for adding roms would then be to just add the rom and scrape it with skraper. No extra steps necessary as far as I can tell. If you don't know, Launchbox has the entire database downloaded as an XML file locally and it's updated periodically.

I know you have Launchbox support on your list so I'm really just thinking out loud here. It would inevitably throw up thousands of errors when you launch the app though since it would look for a ton of games that aren't there so I'm curious how much of a performance/boot up time hit this would have. If it takes as long to load as Launchbox currently does it probably wouldn't be the best solution.

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde

However, I just tried it out and it doesn't appear to be working.

Hm that's interesting, it certainly works for me with that layout, even tested subfolder support too. Do you see anything in the log? It should at least print the number of assets found (which in this case probably 0).

if you were to write a Launchbox parser to go along with the single collection and metadata file, that would basically cover you for any future games you add

With LaunchBox being Windows-only, that doesn't particularly make scraping easier for me :) Or you mean generate metadata files based on LaunchBox's data? That is certainly possible and not too difficult, would be a good feature in a metadata editor.

As for the technical side, after installing LaunchBox the only issue I see at the moment is that the metadata files have a slightly larger size, searching in ~200 MB of data might take some seconds. Shouldn't be slower than LaunchBox though.

PlayingKarrde

Yep I get

2018-11-19T10:03:00 [i] Skraper: Looking for assets...
2018-11-19T10:03:00 [i] Skraper: 0 assets found

Or you mean generate metadata files based on LaunchBox's data?

Yeah I just mean to generate a metadata file based on their database xml that is local anyway. In terms of startup, mine already takes over 4000ms but I think the reason why it doesn't feel so bad is that you have a loading bar whereas Launchbox just doesn't do anything for this time so you're not even sure if it's been launched. Would be curious to see at least.

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde Hm just to make sure, you have a layout like this:

- media/
  - box2dfront/
    - gamename.png
- gamename.ext
- collections.txt

, and the directory of collections.txt is added under "Set game directories", right? I've just tried it on Windows so I suppose it's not platform related. I can also make a very verbose build if nothing ends up working.

PlayingKarrde

Correct (although I'm using collections.pegasus.txt).

The test I did was on a directory that already worked (in this case Dreamcast). I deleted my media folder and scraped it again with Skraper and didn't change anything else.

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde Ok, here's a more chatty build. This should log in detail the Skraper asset searching.

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@PlayingKarrde Ok, here's a more chatty build. This should log in detail the Skraper asset searching.

Thanks. It looks like it's truncating a couple of words in my path:

2018-11-21T11:25:35 [i] Skraper: asset file found: "D:/Dropbox/Emulation/PegasusLauncher/roms/dreamcast/media/box2dfront/ChuChu Rocket! (USA) (En,Ja,Fr,De,Es).png"
2018-11-21T11:25:35 [i] Skraper: expected game (wo. ext): "D:/Dropbox/Emuncher/roms/dreamcast/media/box2dfront/ChuChu Rocket! (USA) (En,Ja,Fr,De,Es)"
2018-11-21T11:25:35 [i] Skraper: game "D:/Dropbox/Emuncher/roms/dreamcast/media/box2dfront/ChuChu Rocket! (USA) (En,Ja,Fr,De,Es)" not registered

But it should be:

D:/Dropbox/Emulation/PegasusLauncher/roms/dreamcast/media/box2dfront/ChuChu Rocket! (USA) (En,Ja,Fr,De,Es)

fluffypillow

@PlayingKarrde Heh, didn't expect to see that. This build should fix it.

PlayingKarrde

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@PlayingKarrde Heh, didn't expect to see that. This build should fix it.

That did it. Thanks!

Purg.Derren

nvm

fluffypillow

No major updates this week, as I was busy with some internal restructuring. There was a bug in the path handling of the Skraper support, as discussed above, this is now fixed.

PlayingKarrde

I realise this is likely not a Pegasus issue but I'm curious if anyone else has had this problem? I'm trying to run at 4k hdr but I get crazy flickering when running the frontend. I noticed it also with EmulationStation as well as the retroarch overlays if I use gl as the renderer (it's fine in vulcan). Could this be related to the renderer Pegasus (and ES) uses? I've managed to rule out bandwidth issues with my cable which is what I originally suspected it was.

-edit-
Nevermind it WAS a bandwidth issue haha. For anyone else wanting to display in 4k hdr, make sure you go into your Nvidia control panel and set the color mode to yCbCr422 and the color depth of 10 bpc. If you have an HDMI 2.0a card you won't need to worry though.

hooperre

@PlayingKarrde - Great job on the theme! From what I've read on here, it seems like maybe this will change soon, but I'm having trouble getting all the functionality out of your theme. I'm still a noobie when it comes to Linux and QML both, so if you wouldn't mind pointing me in the right direction, I would appreciate it!

Am I able to run your theme effectively from a gameslist.xml file?

Here is what I've tried:

	<game>
		<path>./Dragon Force (USA).cue</path>
		<name>Dragon Force</name>
		<image>./media/images/Dragon Force (USA).png</image>
		<boxart>./media/boxart/Dragon Force (USA).png</boxart>
		<wheel>./media/wheel/Dragon Force (USA).png</wheel>
		<logo>./media/wheel/Dragon Force (USA).png</logo>
		<video>./media/videos/Dragon Force (USA).mp4</video>
	</game>

Vidoes and mix files (as image) both work where I would like them to. The logo/wheel art, however, does not. Any help would be much appreciated! Maybe I should just wait until the update, but I'm trying to figure it out! :) Thanks!

PlayingKarrde

@hooperre I'm not too sure about gamelist files as I convert mine to metadata.txt files. I'm not 100% sure how Pegasus converts the information into it's own data. If you're using skraper and have the latest update though, you shouldn't need to include the media urls in your gamelist.

hooperre

@PlayingKarrde said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@hooperre I'm not too sure about gamelist files as I convert mine to metadata.txt files. I'm not 100% sure how Pegasus converts the information into it's own data. If you're using skraper and have the latest update though, you shouldn't need to include the media urls in your gamelist.

Thanks. I was getting a gamelist.srm file, but I'm not getting one generated anymore after messing with settings. I think it probably has something to do with why my pictures aren't popping up. I "re-installed" the latest Skraper and am still having that issue.

Do you have a gameslist.srm file in your folder contents?

PlayingKarrde

@hooperre No I don't. Are you telling it to scrape for emulationstation gamelist.xml? The xml that mine creates that i convert looks like this:

<game source="ScreenScraper.fr" id="13677">
<path>./Bomberman Online (USA).chd</path>
<name>Bomberman Online</name>
<desc>snip</desc>
<rating>0.7</rating>
<releasedate>20011030T000000</releasedate>
<developer>Sega</developer>
<publisher>Hudson</publisher>
<genre>Action</genre>
<players>4+</players>
<hash>00000000</hash>
</game>

The resulting metadata.txt would be:

file: Bomberman Online (USA).chd
title: Bomberman Online
developer: Sega
genre: Action
release: 2001-10-30
players: 4
description: snip
rating: 70%
x-id: 13677
x-source: ScreenScraper.fr

hooperre

@PlayingKarrde Thanks for the response.

Well, shoot. My gameslist.xml file and location of my image files looks like this:

    <image>./media/images/Dragon Force (USA).png</image>
    <boxFront>./media/boxFront/Dragon Force (USA).png</boxFront>
    <logo>./media/logo/Dragon Force (USA).png</logo>
    <video>./media/videos/Dragon Force (USA).mp4</video>

And my metadata.xml file is:

file: Dragon Force (USA).cue
title: Dragon Force
developer: SOJ
genre: Strategy
release: 1996-11-30
players: 1
description: Stuff
x-id: 13088
x-source: ScreenScraper.fr

No luck on getting a wheel/logo image, though. :( I see that with the 11/25 commit the file organizer.exe file was removed. Is this still necessary?

PlayingKarrde

@hooperre If you have the latest Pegasus (like from a couple of days ago) then it isn't necessary, that's why I removed it. Have you gone into data sources and made sure Use Skraper Assets has been checked? Your metadata.txt looks fine.

hooperre

@PlayingKarrde Solved now :) It was checked, but because I only had 1 game in there, I didn't have a collections.txt file, which is why it didn't work. Oops... Thanks for helping me figure it out!

So that's kind of interesting that only the logo/wheel/marquee doesn't work with given Emulationstation default images. When I have both Skraper Assets AND Emulationstation checked, it results in using my mix images (located in media/images folder) instead of box art, video works, and logos work. If only Skraper Assets is checked, it works exactly how yours is presented in the video. Kinda neat. Just so you are aware :).

Anyway, love the theme and love Pegasus. Thanks to both @PlayingKarrde and @fluffypillow for your work! You're taking my Pi from looking like a hacky machine to a big company released retro-gaming console! :)

herb_fargus

Post 1000. Just cause I can.

Keep up the good work.