Building ES, which branch to use?

[zigurana]

Hi!
I am thinking of (trying to) implement some new features in the otherwise awesome emulation station. To do so efficiently, I have some questions up front. I am not well known with Git, so bear with me here, and forgive any stupidity.

1) Which version/branch/fork of ES does retropie 3.0 employ? At Github, i see: https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation, and I assume this is the one being called by the retropie script. What are the differences with the latest version by Aloshi? (or rather; how can i find out what the code differences are?).

2) I would like to extend the database functionality as implemented in this fork: https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation/tree/gamelistdb. I wonder if there are merge-tools out there that

3) compiling/building: As I understand, compiling on the pi2 will take a long time, is it possible to cross-compile on my faster windows system, using free SW? (no VisualStudio at home alas thank god).

I hope someone can give me some pointers as how to make this as smooth as possible.

[zigurana]

Ok, a small update, and some more questions. This will get deep into Github territory, so bear with me.

Using Netbeans, Ive managed to get a reasonable IDE working in which I can work with and navigate around ES. No SDL syntax support, but it will have to do for now.
Ive had the Gamelist_db branch of ES compiling successfully, by copying the sources to my pi2 and changing the amount of GPU memory to something really low, like 32MB.

My initial approach was to build on the database branch, because it would enable me to set filters (or rather queries) that would accomodate things like favorites and child-proof only games. This seems much more than is currently implemented, so much more, that I became disheartened and started poking around at other peoples Github forks to see if there are other interesting developments going on.

Surely enough, I found this: https://github.com/kaptainkia/EmulationStation.git, which has implemented a favorites list system on the non-db branch, so using the good-old gamelist.xml approach. Fine, now how to get it?

Ideally, I would like to create a fork of the retropie\emulationstation fork, and then somehow, gracefully, merge this pull request into it. As Aloshi is very busy with other things atm, I do not plan on waiting for him to get it in the main emulationstation master/origin (even assuming he likes the changes).

So I started around with creating many forks locally, and trying to find a way to get the changes in, while still keeping the history intact. No luck yet, and I am struggling to find the info on how to approach this. (The frustating thing is that the actual changes only over about 20 files, and if I would have used a manual merge tool like kdiff3 I would have been done by now…)

So great minds of RetroPie, any thoughts on how to get two distant forks together?
I would love to contribute to this project, but need to get some help getting started!

Thanks!

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