aloshi / emulationstation Goto Github PK

After upgrading themes with the Retropie script, the menu's font size is increased.

Any way to change the font size?

Using a Wireless Playstation2 controller connect to the pi via a Playstation2 to USB adapter. The controller works fine within the emulator and within SDL games (Ur-Quan Masters for example). When I attempt to bypass the screen it ignores the input from my IR wireless keyboard.

At this point I can SSH and reboot the system, but if I actually turn on the PS2 controller things lock up. I can browse SMB shares and ping the pi, but cannot log in via SSH (it allows login then sits there being unresponsive)

Hi

Just a feature request, close if you don't like it or think it's unrealistic.
I'd like EmulationStation to dim the entire screen after x seconds of being idle. Not sure on the number, but may be 60 seconds.

OK so I LOVE this frontend! I've been looking for something like this for years, and the closest thing I've found to what I want is HyperSpin, but that's Windows only and EXTREMELY unoptimized. I would try to code something myself, but it takes me forever to write something that even works let alone works this well. I want to help, but the only thing I'm good at is graphics, video and styles. So I want to offer my services in that capacity. (Link to my freelance projects on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/73v1n) Here are some features I would desperately like to see added to this wonderful frontend. Some of these things are probably too much for the Rpi to even handle, but I wanted to throw these ideas out there anyway.

Going in order of use:

Boot Video/Image. When ES start have it play a short (no more then 10 second) video. The format should be MP4 so we can make use of the Raspberry Pi 1080p30 h.264/MPEG-4 AVC high-profile decoder. (I'll even whip up a default EmulationStation one!). If a Boot Video is too much, a Boot Image would work too. Add a fade in and out and it would be perfect.

System/Game Selector Fade In. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to make the system/game selector fade in at the start, but this would add a heaping spoon of quality feel to the interface. Maybe make a black image fill the screen and just fade that out to reveal the interface...

Fast Browse. Hold select and press up or down to jump to the next or previous alphabetical name. This really helps when you want to play "Metroid" and have 700 games to go through.

Music System. I know I'm bordering on bloat here, but for many people (including me) the music is almost as important as the gameplay. I think there should be a general music system and a per game music option. The general system starts playing when ES starts, but if you stop browsing for more then 2 seconds on a game that has music defined in the gamelist.xml file it will fade out the general music and start to play the game music file instead. When you browse away it will resume the general music. The music system will have controls in the Menu settings and select controls. The format would have to be MP3 to keep the file size down.

Skip Music Track. Hold select and press left or right, or press left or right bumper buttons (SNES gamepad)

Play/Pause Music. Hold Select and press "A"

Press Start or Double Press Select to see the Menu. Double pressing select is for gamepads like the Genesis that don't have a start button.

Scrolling Tips. Have tips scrolling on the bottom of the screen with different control information. For instance: "Press Start or Double Press Select for Menu." "Hold Select and Press Up or Down to Fast Scroll." etc.

Menu options to control configuration file.
Example:
Menu
-Options
--Music
---Volume
---Skip Song
---Play/Pause
---Enable/Disable
--Sound
---Volume
---Enable/Disable
--Boot Video/Image
---Enable/Disable
--Scrolling Tips
---Enable/Disable
--Layout
---Double Column/Single Column
-Close EmulationStation
--Warning! This will dump you into Linux.
---Okie Dokie!/Nevermind...
-Restart System
--Are you sure?
---Yep!/Nope.
-Shutdown System
--Are you sure?
---Yes/No

Two Column Layout. One column is for the System Image, Game Image and Game Description. The second column is for the games list. The columns should center to the available screen size. That is you could draw a line down the middle of the screen space and then make two boxes for the columns and the column data would be centered inside its box. The Information Column would be split into 20%/30%/50% rows. 20% for the System Image. 30% for the Game Image. And 50% for the Game Description. If any of the pieces are missing information, the other rows maintain their positions. 10% margins on all sides. (You may have already done this with the latest build of ES. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet.)

System Image. Add an option in the .es_systems.cfg to define a System Image. This image can be a lot of things, but the system logo or a picture of the console itself immediately come to mind.

System Font. Add an option in the .es_systems.cfg to define a .ttf font for a specific system also its size and color. This is a fairly lightweight way to differentiate the various systems.

System Background Image or Color. Add an option in the .es_systems.cfg to define an image or solid color (hex code) for a system. The image should have the options of stretch, scale vertical, scale horizontal, or tile. Stretch means it will distort the image to make it meet the top, bottom, left and right of the screen. Scaling vertical means it scales the images at a 1:1 ratio to meet the top and bottom of the screen. Horizontal is to the sides of the screen. And tile means it will not scale the image at all but will tile it to fill the screen from the center.

System Sounds. Add an option in the .es_systems.cfg to define unique sounds for browsing and selecting games in a system. I think MP3 for file size, or WAV for fast access time would be a suitable compression.

Default System/Menu Sounds. Nothing too special. Menu Open. Menu Close. Browse Up. Browse Down. Select. Cancel.

System Selector Bar Color. Add an option in the .es_systems.cfg to define a color (hex code) to be used as a System Selector Bar. (the bar that moves up and down to select the game you want to play) An image would not work well here because it would have to be stretched depending on the size of the column. It might be useful to make a glowing or blurred selector, but that's all I can think of. Of course you could make an image based selector by making a center repeat area and then end caps (ala css style) but that would be a bit complex to code I would think.

Game Description/Image Fade Ins. Make an option in the gamelist.xml to define a type of fade in for the Game Image and Description. This is purely fluff, so don't think too long on this.
Ideas for fade ins:
Fade In
Typewritter/Computer Code (description only) (Example: http://www.thepixelart.com/demo/jticker/ )
Mosaic In (like Super Nintendo transitions) (Example: http://activeden.net/item/dynamic-xml-slideshow-with-mosaic-transition/5833 )
Slide in from Left
Slide in from Bottom

So there are my ideas. I'm gonna make a mockup to show what I'm thinking. Please keep in mind these are all just suggestions. I just want ES to be the best emulation frontend there is! The Raspberry Pi could prove to be the best emulation platform out there with the proper support.

I'm willing to work on any graphics that you may need. Just let me know.

On Arch Linux, DejaVu font is placed in /usr/share/fonts/TTF/DejaVuSerif.ttf, but EmulationStation assumes it's in /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSerif.ttf and throws an exception on this.

If I load ES with a gamepad plugged in, the gamepad works. If I remove and reinsert the gamepad then ES doesn't detect it. Is it possible to make it scan for new gamepads on some interval (every 15 seconds?) while in the menu?

The games and especially the folders should be displayed in alphabetical order.

A theme tag that specifies a path to an image to display if the game image for a game is not set or is invalid.

EmulationStation uses about 25% CPU on a Raspberry Pi on idle.
If possible it should use less

I checked es_log.txt just to be sure there wasn't an error showing, but I couldn't find anything.

When launching the emulationstation, I see the rom description and a picture of the rom. But when I highlight a rom name the blue bar goes over the rom name. No transparency. Maybe its supposed to be behined the text? Maybe i'm missing a package?

Not sure if this is an issue with emulationstation or with the theme package im using from http://aloshi.com/emulationstation#themes

btw, im using the january 8th theme package and the newest build of emulationstation. This is an issue with my snes roms. I currently dont have any other roms or consoles to test with yet.

Using the RetroPie script I can install the ZX Spectrum emulator "fuse". using fuse from the command line via

fuse

brings up the fuse main screen from where I can start a rom file.

Since there is the possibility for ES to define a system without the %ROM% tag I defined such a system as

NAME=ZX Spectrum
PATH=$rootdir/roms/zxspectrum
EXTENSION=.z80
COMMAND=fuse

The same holds for ScummVM, which can easily be installed with

sudo apt-get install scummvm

starting with

scummvm

from the command line works out of the box -- black screen with ES :-(

However, when I use ES to execute fuse, the screen turns black and nothing happens. Do you have an idea what I might change or try here?

So I want to start EmulationStation from ssh, not to play on my computer but on my tv. The thing is that i have two controllers and a Wifi dongle and i can't connect a keyboard. So my question is, can i through ssh tell my raspberry pi to start EmulationStation? The other reason that I would like to do this this way is because when i let EmulationStation connected to long it just freezes and i have to restart the whole machine.

Thank you

I have compiled and recompiled the retro-pie system more times than I would have liked to and I keep running into the same problem. I am in ES for 10 seconds and it freezes and I have to unplug it. I am using a powered hub to run both keyboard and mouse and am running ES from the original shell. Everything works fine in the X GUI but once in ES nothing works. I have had the same problem when trying to create the input config with a controller. Please help, I have spent so much time on this and I just would like my effort/time to finally produce something I can use.

I messed up the initial setup when I plugged in my controller, and I know I am supposed to delete the .cfg file, but I can't find it in the emulation station folder. Was there a change to where it is stored or it's name?

I've begun adding initial theme support, and I've put instructions in the README.md. There's still a lot to do, but now you can insert any images you want and have them scale.

Off the top of my head:

1. Allow color definitions for the game list - e.g. game name color, folder color, selector color.
2. Add an option to hide the header text.
3. Add more positioning options for images (right now X is the center of the image and Y is the top...confusing!)
4. Add a tile option for resizing.

I have no artistic talent, so I'm essentially making tools I won't use, and as such, won't get tested very well. So if you're trying to do something and it seems harder than it should be, tell me! Odds are I can fix it. Looking forward to seeing what you guys make.

Just a suggestion:

It would be nice if there would be a category "Favorites" or "Recently Played". This category is generated and organized by ES and shows the (10, 20?) recently played games.

Most descriptions are too long to comfortably fit on the screen, I think, especially at smaller resolutions. One potential solution is for the text to automatically, slowly scroll.

Hey m8,

Since I'm kinda busy with programming for the Pi myself ( Wanted to make this program, then saw you already created it ) is there anything you need help with? Can we stay in contact for some brainstorming? Just get back to meby e-mail or something ( didnt see an in github message system )

Greetings, Webrow/Rowan

For game images used in gamelist.xml, docs say " Images will be automatically resized to fit within the left column of the screen" but this isn't happening for me. I am running the latest ES as of now and I'm running it fullscreen with a resolution of 1366x768 if that makes a difference. I used the scraper.py tool to download images and setup my gamelist.xml file.

Example screenshot:

http://imgur.com/KqnYd

Sometimes I add more roms or something to my emulationstation setup. when I do this I have to reboot my R Pi (I only have a gamepad connected, so I can't exit and re-run emulationstation). It would be nice if there was a way to get emulationstation to restart (without a whole OS reboot). Possibly a 'reload' option on the exit/restart menu?

I observed that when I try to start ES not from the ES directory a segmentation fault occurs. If I change into the ES directory via "cd" and call "emulationstation" from there, the segmentation fault does not occur.

The mame_bg.jpg line in mame's theme.xml file has an extra slash. Remove and the background will work again.
//.emulationstation/themes/mame_art/mame_bg.jpg
...needs to be...
/.emulationstation/themes/mame_art/mame_bg.jpg

Hello

I would just like to report that this app doesn't work when run in rotated mode, i.e. rotate_display=1,2 or 3 in config.txt. (On Raspberry Pi)

It opens and you can move through the menu fine, however as soon as you try open something it goes to black screen with no keyboard support (frozen) or if you close using f4 it does the same...

I would really love if the issue could be fixed as its the last issue I have with my Arcade Machine and will be helpful to others building Arcades with rotated displays.

Best Regards

Right now, ES renders at about 5fps - making input a little laggy and animation impossible. Moving to another rendering framework would be good - perhaps Qt, as it has a Pi-specific release? Whatever the renderer, it needs to be able to display text and load/display images.

Thanks a lot for the OpenGL update!

I have a problem with starting ES:
Every time I start ES it says that es_systems.cfg was found but contained no systems. I provide exactly the same configs as with the older SDL-based front end, which was working before. Do you have an idea what I could do wrong or do you need any further information?

Using SDL_gfx, all screenshots can be resized to similar sizes. This would simplify automatic gamelist.xml generation, as well as allow for higher resolution images on higher resolution screens.

At startup the first few roms display their images, and desc nicely from the gamelist.xml. After scrolling through a long list of games, then all the games no longer display any info, even the ones that worked in the beginning

With the theme engine working, I think it would make sense to include at least one or even more themes that the users could choose from. What do you think?

Unfortunately, my "clever" trick to use ints internally to represent SDL colors kind of backfired. The getSDLColor helper function at the top of Renderer_draw.cpp needs to be fixed. I believe the problem involves endianness.

I don't think this is a bug, just struggling to fix it:

Assertion 1 failed at pulsecore/flist.c:168, function pa_flist_pop(). Aborting.
/usr/bin/emulationstation: line 9: 1457 Aborted ./emulationstation

I know the RetroPie installer removes pulse audio so i'm not sure why it's a problem?

Any ideas?

Crashes when ROM names contains "()", "][", or "&" characters, e.g. "Battletoads & Double Dragon (E).nes"

P.S. Please, write me e-mail, if you want. I can help you with GUI graphics and some ideas about improvements. I'm making console based in RPi too.

I have 2 joypads that are exactly the same.
I've configured them both with the retroarch-joyconfig, everything was fine.
What I've noticed, is that when I'm playing a game (snes is the only one where I tested this) , the player 2 controller only works when I press a key in player 1 controller, either the controller or the keyboard.
If I hold any useless key on a game, on player 1 , player 2 works fine. If no keys are pressed, player 2 won't respond..
whats happening? what can I do?
(on lsusb command, the joypads are identified as Dragonrise Inc. Gamepad )
thanks , and I'm sorry if I'm posting this in the wrong place

Trying to compile on a RaspBMC, so if you say "buzz off, it's not supported" I understand. :)

pi@raspbmc:~/RetroPie/EmulationStation$ make
g++ -c -Wall src/SystemData.cpp -o src/SystemData.o
src/SystemData.cpp: In member function 'void SystemData::populateFolder(FolderData_)':
src/SystemData.cpp:91: error: 'struct std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits, std::allocator >' has no member named 'string'
src/SystemData.cpp:95: error: 'struct std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits, std::allocator >' has no member named 'string'
src/SystemData.cpp:97: error: 'struct std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits, std::allocator >' has no member named 'string'
make: *_* [src/SystemData.o] Error 1

Hey Aloshi,

Ive been checking around and the function I think would be nice to implement is a tarfile download. in the ES_SYSTEMS you could specify a fixed url for a tar file so people with own hosting sites etc, could download their tarballs from there.

This way embedded raspi's ( like mine ) onley need to be connected to the internet for importing new roms.

tl;dr: Download Tar in the system menu
extract the tar to the right folders ( basic sort on extensions )

Greetz, Web

A small menu that allows you to jump to any letter of the alphabet.

As the title says, add a tag %BASENAME% to the config file code,that works like %ROM%, e.g. if %ROM% is "/bla/rom/atetris.zip", %BASENAME% becomes "atetris".
This enables you to run AdvanceMAME etc.

Is there any way to exit emulationstation with the gamepad i missed?
When hitting the start-button it shows me an menu giving the options restart and shutdown, but no option to exit back to console. Would be nice to add such an option.

RetroArch will lose keyboard input if EmulationStation is started from X. ES should warn users not to do that if possible.

Thionk it might be valueble to use a query on the whole list, so 90000 games dont have to be scrolled torugh ? I know this can be fixed by sorting out gamelists, but since im emplementing the ES in a suitcase I wont always be able to edit gamelists... :/ Installing Linux later today so I can have alook at the source etc ( new HD ! SSD 256GB / Samsung pro )

The OpenGL renderer is pretty much done, but since I've changed so much (over 1,000 lines according to git), I'm going to release a beta to those interested before I push to the main repository.

There might be a fancy way to do this with branches, but I barely know git - so instead I've just made a .zip archive: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2816162/EmulationStationGLBeta.zip

The README has not been updated to reflect the changes. The new libraries you'll need to build are FreeType and FreeImage:
sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev libfreeimage-dev (SDL/Boost are still needed too, but you should have those already).

I am particularly interested in:

• Do images with alpha work (also the alpha tag is no longer read, all images should have alpha support now)? I may have gotten the OpenGL function wrong and I don't have any images with alpha to test.
• Do things look right at resolutions other than 1920x1080?
• Have I broken any theming things (the GuiImage class was almost completely rewritten)?
• Do fonts look good? Is the spacing good?
• Do joysticks still work?

The goal is for this release to be functionally the same as the previous one, but with a new renderer. There are no new features (unless you count a 600%+ speed increase).

If I reboot the board after the first run of emulationstation, upon my next load of emulation station I am presented with a menu that gives me the options only to shutdown or restart the board. I have done several reloads, and run into the issue every time.

Using on Raspbian, tried F1 command with no luck. I'm stuck in the reboot/shutdown menu.

I purchased a mini itx case and an i3 mobo and an internal usb hub and am making a little emulationstation project. I also purchased 4 usb dongles to plug in sega genesis, snes and nes controllers. I made ports on the front of the case and have multiple configs for retroarch. My last step is to make it so all these controllers can browse through games.

How can i do this?

I'm going to start working on adding some simple menu sounds next.

I'll be using the SDL_mixer library instead of the standard SDL audio functions (because the standard SDL audio functions don't support playing multiple sounds at once).

I'll be testing with WAV files, at least for now. The SDL_mixer library looks like it supports OGG and MP3, but I'm not sure if you need to include any extra libraries to set them up.

Now that almost all the features I need are added, I'm going to start making proper bug reports. =)

Origin .5 .5 does not set to center. Origin appears to only work when the values are either 0 or 1. Almost like it is rounding up or down it seems.

I'm trying to use "sudo emulationstation -w 720 -h 336" to change the resolution but cant for the life of me do it, I've tried changing the settings in retroarch.cfg and that has no change at all either, have you got any ideas? it needs to be that size to fit the screen of a project at university.

Thankyou in advance!

I run ES-scraper to get the information for my XML file.

The gameslist.xml file says...

/home/erfg12/roms/snes/Super Mario Kart.smc

When I try pressing ENTER on the game to launch it, it says...

Attempting to launch game...
retroarch /home/erfg12/roms/snes/Super\ Mario\ Kart.smc

Which obviously at this point it cannot find the file so it doesn't launch. I noticed this happened to my Super Mario World smc game before and I renamed it several times to get it to work again.

I'm using Ubuntu 12.10 64bit, and I'm using the mv command to rename my files. For example: mv ./"Super Mario Kart [i].smc" ./"Super Mario Kart.smc"

I'm unsure if maybe that's the reason...

At the moment text rendering uses a FontSize. It should be reworked to use Font objects, which will easily allow a theme to use custom fonts.

(a basic Font object is already in the new OpenGL renderer)

Allow using more than one file extension for a system.

I followed the install intructions but when I try to launch emulationstation from the console it says:

EmulationStation cleanly shutting down...esnt?tion/es_systems.cnf was found, but contained no systems.

Also when I try to access the config file all I get is permission denied

Any ideas???