Humble project

[Jason Sperske]

I’ve just started getting into RetroPie but I have been a life long hacker/gamer (my first project was a basic Wolf3D texture editor). These days I’ve been building a 80’s/90’s themed guest bedroom and the RetroPie fits right in. I’ve been collecting cartridges (loose and boxed) for a while now (I’m up to over 250 across various systems, so it is by no means a mega collection), but the RetroPie has taken some of the pressure off of the desire to track down a physical copy of more expensive games like Earthbound (for the SNES) or the even more outrageous Nintendo World Championship 1990. So far I’ve been finding some parts of the setup screen don’t work well with CRT (4:3) monitors, and some of the processes to manage the filesystem (I feel) can be easier.

I’m working on a basic web front end (written in Python and tested on the latest RetroPie) that I think can grow into a simple process to manage ROMs and possibly to configure more complex aspects of the RetroPie. The project is called RetroPage and the full (and open) source can be found here:

https://github.com/jasonsperske/RetroPage

So far it only handles basic file uploading (placing each file in the correct ROM path). The code is designed with some very RetroPie specific assumptions (in terms of how folders are structured (though there is configurable flexibility). I’d like to extend it so you can upload ZIP files and have them uncompressed automatically (which I think will be needed for DOSBox support), as well as the ability to rename or delete uploaded files. Beyond that I could see system stats or front end configuration (enabling or disabling different cores or updating splash screens). This project is to scratch a personal itch, but just in case anyone else found it useful I figured I’d share.

[karloss]

This looks really interesting, i assume i just need to gitclone your tree and run the command?

could this be used/extended to allow the editing of the gamelist.xml files, so we can “scrape” images and info for games?

keep up the good work :)

[roman]

I see a lot of potential in this project, I was able to run the server from my mac and I like the fact that you’re using bootstrap.

I also think that this would be great to create/edit gamelist.xml and scrape the images like karloss said. Having a UI for the game list would be awesome.

Great initiative, mate.

[Jason Sperske]

Thanks for the encouragement. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve added a quick update that reports the free space you have on your RetroPie and lets you rename and delete files from the web interface. Now I’m going to get working on the gamelist.xml editing code and possibly a splash screen uploader (to make customizing easier). This is so much fun to work on for me, I hope it can be of use to others :)

[petrockblog]

I also like the idea of this project. I am curious where this leads to …

[karloss]

any ideas how to get this to run at boot? I have tried, but only seem to be able to get it to run as root, and it then doesn’t seem to run properly…

if i work it out, i will post back..

thanks

[Jason Sperske]

I was able to get this working:

https://github.com/jasonsperske/RetroPage/blob/master/RetroPage-init-script

I placed it in /etc/init.d and gave it 755 permissions. To make RetroPage compatible with this approach I had to update it to request port 1980 inside it’s source, though in the process I ended up figuring out how to combine start-stop-deamon with command line arguments, so if needed I can always pull the port 1980 code out. The service should run as the pi user and I’ve been testing it with my Raspberry Pi. I’ve plugged it into a 27′ CRT TV, it’s amazing, though now I’m working out the best video out settings, (I think I’m close) and I’m wondering if a restart device button and a config editor page wouldn’t’ be helpful.

[karloss]

Thanks for doing that jason, i will git pull for the update, really enjoy what your doing…

if we could get some of the additions people have suggested, mine :) then this thing would be awesome..

keep up the great work :)

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