I posted this in a comment before I noticed there is a forum for this stuff. I moved it over here where it should be.

I’ve set up a couple “systems” in es_systems.cfg to provide for “programs” and “admin” menus in emulationstation. I did this so I can launch XBMC, the X desktop, and some terminal based admin stuff like software updates, raspi-config, retro-config, change default desktop environment, etc. The examples I found on youtube to do this use files that end in .app, and have no shebang at the top, but appear to just be a script with no mention of a command interpreter. That is, the contents of xbmc.app is just one line, “sudo xbmc-standalone”. Everything works well enough this way but I would like to change resolution when I run tasks in the terminal using “tvservice -e (CEA 3)”, etc. I’m having problem getting this to work reliably. Changing resolution didn’t seem to work unless I used a proper shell script with shebang at the top, but scripts don’t seem to run as expected. They work best when all the commands are strung together with &&, but when I put each command on a newline it stops working. I also made 2 more scripts named res1.sh and res2.sh, and running those from new lines seems to work in some cases, not in others. I looked at the way runcommand.sh sort of wraps the resolution change around a command line arguement and thought I could do something similar, but I would prefer that the res change only apply to some of the “roms” for this “system” rather than for the whole system, so I prefer not to use something similar to runcommand.sh in es_systems.cfg.

—-es_systems.cfg entry—-
DESCNAME=Administration
NAME=admin
PATH=/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/admin
EXTENSION=.app .sh
COMMAND=%ROM%

—–raspiconfig.sh script (AKA the %ROM%)—-
#!/bin/bash
clear
tvservice -e “CEA 3”
fbset -xres 720 -yres 480
fbset -depth 8 && fbset -depth 16
sudo raspi-config
tvservice -e “CEA 4”
fbset -xres 1280 -yres 720
fbset -depth 8 && fbset -depth 16

The example above will not work unless the tvservice and fbset commands are in a seperate scripts, or if the whole things is strung into one command with &&. What little I know about scripting commands tells me that I should be able to do the same thing several different ways and get the same results, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Is there a better way to go about doing this? Am I doing somethign wrong?

I saw in another thread someone suggests COMMAND=bash %ROM%. Would this work better?