Kid-friendly Retropie/ES (UI modes, favorites, hiding items) [B-TESTERS WANTED!]

[zigurana]

TLDR
Ive added support for Favorites, hiding items and options to ES, would you like to test?

Background
My use-case for Retropie is not only to play old-school games like its 1999, but also to show these games to my two kids (age 5 and 3). I am really looking forward to using my Retropie setup as an informal museum showcasing the evolution of computer games in the period 1975 – 2000. My goal is therefore not to have all possible games installed on the system, but rather to create a well curated collection, including descriptions, box art for all games. I believe that ES + Retropie will allow me to build and maintain that, but currently there are some features missing.
For instance, it is currently not possible for my kids to play unsupervised with my small bartop build. When attempting this, it becomes painfully clear that ES and Retropie are both designed by geeks adults, for geeks adults. It took my youngest a mere 30 seconds before she was deep in the ES config settings. She does not understand what a scraper is (she does not even speak English). Suffice it to say that when she was finished “playing” things were slightly less well organized then before…
So I set out to make a feature request for ES, maybe bribing a dev with bottles of whiskey. After finding out that the EmulationStation project is currently on hiatus, Aloshi having an actual job etc., I decided to try and do it myself. What then happened was a black hole of github, man pages, C++, compiling on the pi and loads of other fun activities! Fast forward a couple of months of excrutiating pain hobbying…
The result of these efforts I would like to introduce to you now. There are a number of new features I have introduced: UI modes (plus unlocking), favorites (merged in from this PR), hiding game entries, hiding SW options.

UI modes
Central to this excise was to improve ES by creating some kind of user differentiation. My kids do not need to edit the metadata for a game, nor will my visiting friends. Having all these extra features around really complicates an otherwise very well designed UI, and I would rather hide these features when they are not needed.
For my use cases, I can think of three modi operandi that make sense:

1. Full user interface (aka admin mode) – This is the current UI, it has all the options, bells and whistles.
2. Kiosk mode – This mode hides most of the ui options, such as CONFIGURE INPUT, UI SETTINGS, SCRAPER, but also EDIT THIS GAMES METADATA, etc. In addition this mode also hides those entries in the gamelist which have their metadata-tag ‘hidden’ set to true.
3. Kid mode – This mode has all the restrictions of Kiosk mode, but also -only- lists games which are explicitly white-listed. This can be done by setting the metadata-tag Kid-game to true.

Ive implemented a new menu option under UI OPTIONS:

Getting back to the Full UI
Ok sounds good, maybe? But once you are in one of the restricted modes, the UI options (where I put the UI Mode selector), is not shown anymore. So how to return to the full UI once your in Kid/kiosk mode? Well one way, is to go to the /home/pi/.emulationstation/es_settings.cfg file and edit the UI_mode value manually:
<string name="UIMode" value="Full" />
I found this a rather cumbersome way, but it is good to keep in mind as a backup. As an alternative, I’ve implemented an input listener that tries to catch a predefined passkey sequence that you can enter while you are anywhere in the ES ui. The default passkey is [up,up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a] which some of you might recognize as the Konami cheat code from olden-times. This can be changed in es_settings.cfg if need be:
<string name="UIMode_passkey" value="uuddlrlrba" />
Now, if done properly, this mechanism should trigger all kinds of list-updates, but I am not sure which ones, or how to do it atm, so I just save the setting, and dump the user to the console/prompt, so you better have a keyboard nearby to get back in ES. (This is on my todo list).

Favorites in ES
So if you have been paying attention, you might have spotted three new metadata tags for the gamelist.xml files, plus a method to filter the displayed list based on those tags. I will admit I had no real clue how to go about implementing something from scratch. Luckily, this part was greatly simplified by kaptainkia, who submitted this awesome pull request for a favorites system in ES. Much of the work of what I needed to do was prepared for me. Great! He/She even included an option to display only favorites, while hiding the rest of the games! Wow!
Another feature that I needed to introduce was a way to hide entries from the game lists. This is the negative counterpart of showing “favorites only”. In this way approach, we would like to show all, -except for- those entries that are unwanted.
While the Full UI will still show all entries in the gamelist.xml, the Kiosk and Kid mode uses the ‘hidden’ tag to, well, hide those entries. For example, I plan to make all entries in the RetroPie ‘system’ hidden.
So this is the current situation, comparing the full UI with the kid-mode UI, using the same gamelist.xml:

Gamelist.xml and theming
So in three new tags have been introduced: favorites, kid game, and hidden (all boolean).

<game>
	<path>./BartVsWorld.zip</path>
	<name>Bart Vs World</name>
	<desc></desc>
	<image></image>
	<thumbnail></thumbnail>
	<rating>0</rating>
	<releasedate>not-a-date-time</releasedate>
	<developer>unknown</developer>
	<publisher>unknown</publisher>
	<genre>unknown</genre>
	<players>1</players>
	<favorite>false</favorite>
	<kidgame>true</kidgame>
	<hidden>false</hidden>
	<playcount>4</playcount>
	<lastplayed>20151210T220327</lastplayed>
</game>

Of course, these are currently not present in the gamelists you have, but once you edit the metadata for a single game, they will be added for that specific system’s gamelist.xml. If you want to edit your gamelist.xml files in some other tools, you will need to take these new tags into account.
Another thing to remember is that the visualization for these tags are NOT included in the current themes out there. They are easy enough to add, but it will need to be done if you want to see the status of these tags in the detailed-list view. In his/her original pull request, kaptainkia suggested to increase the xml version to 4 to indicate the availability of the new favorite tag. I would agree with this approach. At least from the ES side of things, you can then keep on using the old themes, without anything breaking. You will just not be able to see the values at a glance, or toggle them quickly using x for favorites and y for kidgames. When you open the metadata editor though, they are shown and editable:

Screenshot of quick-toggle options when supported by theme:

Note: When you try out this version of EmulationStation, it will rewrite your gamelist.xml files with the new tags included.

But did you know the old version does the same, but only with it’s own list of tags? Upon exiting EmulationStation rewrites the complete collection of gamelist.xml files, dont ask me why. That means that if you just spend a lot of time defining which files should be hidden or not, do -not- run the original version of ES, because all those changes will be lost ! (Don’t ask me how I know).

TODO:
There is of course stilll a lot to do, here is the list:
Must-Haves:

• Beta testing! There are bugs aplenty, and I would be most grateful if some of the more adventurous minded among you would be willing to take this for a ride and report back to me what your findings are. For more details see the section below.
• Runcommand. This is a bit of a sore spot. It is a really hacky implementation for something that really should have been part of ES from the get go. I understand it’s use, but it simply cannot remain in any kid-proofed system. One quick way to minimize the impact is to disable the joy2key part. Then you can only actually access the menu when there is an actual keyboard attached, which will not be the case when the kids are playing, at least not in the near future. Better would be to have two different runcommands, one for the full mode, and one for the kiosk/kid modes, that just takes the pre-set emulator+settings. An even better way would to allow the user to choose the core from within ES, but that will need some thinking.

Somedaymaybe:

• Add mechanism for showing / hiding image in a theme to quickly show favorite / hidden / kidgame boolean status. Currently only text output is supported (except for the rating component), but I think the detailed view is rather too detailed as it is. I am also considering introducing some simpler tags, such as:
  – year (rather than date)
  – a combined developer/publisher label eg: “Konami/Konami”
  – a combined times played / last played label eg: “played 23 times (last: dd-mm-yyyy)”
• Other sort options: Popularity (favorites first, sorted by last played date, then the rest, sorted by last played), favorites across systems. All these things realistically speaking need the newer sql database version of ES, which has never been fully deployed. I have had a look at it, but found it very frustrating to understand, maybe when someone else has time?
• Make sort type persistent: add settings option, small thing I found as a todo left in the code.
• Show some image of relevant controls when starting a game as a way to illustrate which keys are going to be used.

Beta testing / Giving this a try
So you want to give this branch of ES a try? Great! Here is a how-to list:

1. First, make a backup of every thing you are not willing to fix/re-install/re-scrape later.
2. No really, this is buggy stuff, do the backup.
3. Ok, you can find the repository here: https://github.com/zigurana/EmulationStation/tree/UI_modes_Kiosk_Kid_Full
4. To get this running on your pi you need to follow the excellent instruction here: http://emulationstation.org/gettingstarted.html#install_rpi_standalone up to the section “Compile and install EmulationStation”.
5. Then use the following commands at the prompt to finally install (this assumes a Pi2):
   1) git clone https://github.com/zigurana/EmulationStation/
   2) cd EmulationStation
   3) git checkout UI_modes_Kiosk_Kid_Full
   4) Pi2 specific config:
   ../configure --host=armv7l-raspberry-linux-gnueabihf --disable-pulseaudio --disable-esd --disable-video-mir --disable-video-wayland --disable-video-x11 --disable-video-opengl
   5) Now, build using:
   cmake -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=g++-4.7 -DFREETYPE_INCLUDE_DIRS=/usr/include/freetype2/ .
make
6. You can now start the program from the directory where you installed it using (wait, did you really do that backup?)
   ./emulationstation

When debugging, start the program from the command line using:
./emulationstation --debug

Oh btw: this is my first contribution here, and my first encounter with Github, so if you have any comments/suggestions, please tell me!

[robertybob]

Sounds very exciting! Can I install this over the top of my current RetroPie setup, or am I best to start from scratch?

[zigurana]

If you install it as described above, it will be a separate installation alongside the original ES. Just keep in mind that the two will ‘share’ gamelist.xml files, and will keep rewriting them everytime you exit ES.
Like i said, make sure you have backups in place when trying this out.

[LodanZark]

Nicely done, I finish to install and looks great, i will give a further testing.

[dankcushions]

this looks great! one thing to be mindful of if anyone doesn’t already know – any metadata changes are not saved unless you ‘exit emulation station’ or press f4 – shutting down or terminating does not exit ES cleanly.

[zigurana]

this looks great! one thing to be mindful of if anyone doesn’t already know – any metadata changes are not saved unless you ‘exit emulation station’ or press f4 – shutting down or terminating does not exit ES cleanly.

Actually, that was one of the things I fixed in this branch. Now when you save, it actually saves to the xml file right then.
The re-save upon exiting the program is still in place, it is used to save things like # times played (which is also saved in the gamelist.xml). This is also the reason why the new tags are removed when you would run (and cleanly exit) the old version of ES. It simply rewrites the whole set of xml’s everytime.

[robertybob]

[quote=111740]If you install it as described above, it will be a separate installation alongside the original ES. Just keep in mind that the two will ‘share’ gamelist.xml files, and will keep rewriting them everytime you exit ES.
Like i said, make sure you have backups in place when trying this out.

[/quote]

Sorry if this is a really dumb question, but how does it work?…how could I switch between the default Emulationstation and your one? :)

[tronkyfran]

This is awesome!!! Ill try to do some testing next week. Im tempted to ask for some things, now that youre hands on the code…hehehehe…wink wink :P

[InsecureSpike]

awesome very promising!
I have some ideas, I’ll be in touch!

[zigurana]

[quote=111765]

zigurana wrote:

If you install it as described above, it will be a separate installation alongside the original ES. Just keep in mind that the two will ‘share’ gamelist.xml files, and will keep rewriting them everytime you exit ES.
Like i said, make sure you have backups in place when trying this out.

Sorry if this is a really dumb question, but how does it work?…how could I switch between the default Emulationstation and your one?

[/quote]
It’s not a dumb question at all.
First of all, this new version of ES is not part of the RetroPie distribution (yet). So if you want it, you will need to:

1. download it from github
2. build the sources
3. run from the command-line

These steps have been described above in my first post.

As long as you do not run sudo make install the newly build version of ES will not publish its existence to the rest of the system. This allows you to build+run it next to the older version of ES. There is no GUI to switch from one version of ES to the other, this will need to be done using the command-line. In practice that means that upon booting, my retropie installation comes up first with the old version of ES, which I quit out of, then I start my newer version manually by typing:

cd ES
./EmulationStation

In this example, ./home/pi/ES/ is the directory I downloaded+build my version of ES to.

[zigurana]

@tronkyfran & @InsecureSpike: Sure, I can not promise I will be willing or able to help you with your requests, but I am at least willing to consider them!

[shoothere]

Now this is a noble goal and some of the features (especially the Hidden one) would be welcome in any distribution!

Showing kids the evolution of home consoles/gaming as well as them being able to enjoy the classics in this day and age of 3D, shooters and violence will surely make them appreciate the current generation even more (or not! :P)

Although I will not be testing it (too little time to fiddle) I must commend you for your effort!

[LodanZark]

So far, the only bug that I’ve found was in sound settings when I did disable the sounds (that annoying bips from game selections), didn’t save that option in next start up, but i guess this issue it’s also happening in original emulationsation. I will keep doing further testing.

EDIT:
I’ve tried this lines into es_settings.cfg

<string name="UIMode" value="Kiosk" />
<string name="UIMode_passkey" value="uuddlrlry" />

And the input did restarted the emulationstation but stayed in “Kiosk” mode instead switch into “Full mode”.

By my experience I´m enjoying the changes, yet I feel like the removal of volume settings from “Kiosk” mode was a bit unnecessary since it’s an essential option that all common users would understand, yeap I know lot of users can control the volume of TV with remote control, but for arcade machines can be annoying going to full mode just to change volume.
Also the feature “Exit Emulationstation” feels like an “full” mode feature to be available in other modes.

[zigurana]

Hey thanks so much for giving this a bit of your time! That’s really great!

[quote=111835]So far, the only bug that I’ve found was in sound settings when I did disable the sounds (that annoying bips from game selections), didn’t save that option in next start up, but i guess this issue it’s also happening in original emulationsation. I will keep doing further testing.

EDIT:
I’ve tried this lines into es_settings.cfg

<string name="UIMode" value="Kiosk" />
<string name="UIMode_passkey" value="uuddlrlry" />

And the input did restarted the emulationstation but stayed in “Kiosk” mode instead switch into “Full mode”.
[/quote]

I will have a look at this, but without any look at the code, I think these two issues might be related. The ES_settings.cfg is really the only location where settings are stored persistently. The file is updated (rewritten) once you exit the games menu. However, the functionality becomes active immediately. So what could have happened is that the new settings were somehow not saved to the cfg file when you restarted using the passkey sequence.
Again, I am not sure, just guessing, I will have a look when I get back home.

[quote=111835]
By my experience I´m enjoying the changes, yet I feel like the removal of volume settings from “Kiosk” mode was a bit unnecessary since it’s an essential option that all common users would understand, yeap I know lot of users can control the volume of TV with remote control, but for arcade machines can be annoying going to full mode just to change volume.
Also the feature “Exit Emulationstation” feels like an “full” mode feature to be available in other modes.
[/quote]
Agreed, I was doubting those two already. Volume can stay, at least in Kiosk mode, for Kid mode, I can imagine turning the volume down for sanity-related reasons :-).
Exit ES should be hidden from all views except Full, but it speeds up debugging a lot, so I’ll make it depending on debug mode then.

Not sure when I will have a new version available, prob somewhere this week.

If anyone has more suggestions, let me know!

[LodanZark]

Well I have a few suggestions:
-Option to start up the system into the gamelist section of a specific platform, which is very handy for the users that only have ROMs on a single platform;
-Option to hide certain platforms, which is useful to hide them before finish curate the games, or even to hide the retropie config “platform”;
– Make the shutdown button more visible for thekids for example this approach:
https://www.petrockblock.com/forums/topic/power-menu-link-to-files-included/ ;
-Disable the Launch Options screen for Kids and Kiosk mode, actually this could be something hard to do since that feature inst related with emulationstation (I guess), the only way to found to disable it was by edit manually the file /opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand.sh by changing the value IFS= read -s -t 1 -N 1 key </dev/tty to IFS= read -s -t 0 -N 1 key </dev/tty in the section:

# check for x/m key pressed to choose a screenmode (x included as it is useful on the picade)
clear
echo "Press a key (or joypad button 0) to configure launch options for emulator/port ($emulator). Errors will be logged to /tmp/runcommand.log"
IFS= read -s -t 1 -N 1 key </dev/tty
if [[ -n "$key" ]]; then
    get_all_modes
    main_menu
    dont_launch=$?
    clear
fi

[LodanZark]

For the ones that had difficulties to install this module, gizmo98 made a awesome script which isn’t pulled into the master build yet, but you can install by:

wget -P /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/supplementary https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gizmo98/RetroPie-Setup/emu-kids/scriptmodules/supplementary/emulationstation-kids.sh
sudo ./RetroPie-Setup/retropie_setup.sh

then select “Experimental packages” -> “emulationstation-kids”
and to conclude the process reboot the system after finish the process.

[zigurana]

[quote=111905]For the ones that had difficulties to install this module, gizmo98 made a awesome script which isn’t pulled into the master build yet, but you can install by:

wget -P /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/supplementary https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gizmo98/RetroPie-Setup/emu-kids/scriptmodules/supplementary/emulationstation-kids.sh
sudo ./RetroPie-Setup/retropie_setup.sh

then select “Experimental packages” -> “emulationstation-kids”
and to conclude the process reboot the system after finish the process.

[/quote]
Wow that’s awesome!
It really makes the installation a breeze. Good work gizmo98!

[robertybob]

[quote=111905]wget -P /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/supplementary https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gizmo98/RetroPie-Setup/emu-kids/scriptmodules/supplementary/emulationstation-kids.sh
sudo ./RetroPie-Setup/retropie_setup.sh[/quote]

I’ve just done this but no where does it say how to run this new Emulationstation (?).

[LodanZark]

@robertybob
If when you press “start” on emulationstation, it will show a popup called “MAIN MENU”, if the bottom of that popups says “EMULATIONSTATION V2.0.1A_GUI_MODES_ZIGURANA” means you are using this build.

[zigurana]

@LodanZark, Thanks for your great input!
I’ve implemented your suggestions for the sound volume menu item (for all UI modes now) and the Quit ES option (only in full or debug mode). Those changes should be available via the github location and the script by Gizmo98 now.

Regarding your other items, I would like to discuss things a bit first, before committing too much time to something that we might do not quite want/need after all.

[quote=111883]
-Option to start up the system into the gamelist section of a specific platform, which is very handy for the users that only have ROMs on a single platform;
[/quote]
Seems useful for single platform builds, but would you also expect the UI to be reduced to that one single system? What if a user ‘backs-out’ of the system, up to the top-level, what is the he/she supposed to see then, only the one system and maybe the retropie menu?

I mean, if it truly is a single platform setup, and all the others are empty, you will not see them in the system overview anyway. Maybe this is really about booting straight into the gamelist for that system? I just want to make sure we have the use-case clear here. BTW: I think it is doable, especially because the complete list of all systems is hard-coded into ES. Let’s get the requirements clear, and I’ll put it on the todo list!

[quote=111883]
-Option to hide certain platforms, which is useful to hide them before finish curate the games, or even to hide the retropie config “platform”;
[/quote]

To be clear, this is already possible for the current branch, you just have to set all hidden tags for items in a system (for example retropie) to “true”, and the system will be gone from the overview, if the UI mode does not allow it.
Now, if you have a couple 100 of games in a system, this becomes an issue, but a simple find-replace in the gamelist.xml would do the trick.
From within the ES UI, this is more tricky, as the “edit this game’s metadata” menu is way to cumbersome for many files. I could add another shortcut key that would toggle the hidden status much like the favorites / kidgames (nb: you need to create/get a theme that supports it!).
Finally, I could extent the /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg
file to include a hidden-tag, to switch the complete system at a single point. The reason I am hesitant to do just that, is that there is no nice read-write mechanism for the es_systems.cfg file in place as there is for the gamelist.xml. You would need to go in and change the tags yourself, and then this option is about as much work as find/replace in the gamelist.
Personally, looking at the current workarounds, I am not sure this feature is worth the effort.

[quote=111883]
– Make the shutdown button more visible for the kids for example this approach:
https://www.petrockblock.com/forums/topic/power-menu-link-to-files-included/ ;
[/quote]
Yes, I like this as well, nice big buttons! It is more or less finished, right?
I think this could be included in the retropie distro as is. Combined with this ES branch, users could manually hide the two/three items, and the whole thing would go away. Is there anything for me to do there?

[quote=111883]
-Disable the Launch Options screen for Kids and Kiosk mode, actually this could be something hard to do since that feature inst related with emulationstation (I guess), the only way to found to disable it was by edit manually the file /opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand.sh
[/quote]
So Ive looked into this a bit, and the way this mechanism is implemented:
in es_systems.cfg, for each system a command string is defined. Currently for all systems, this string is: <command>/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 _SYS_ snes %ROM%</command> (replace snes by the pertinent system name).
Upon game launch, ES replaces %ROM% with the selected game path+romname. The other arguments (0 and _SYS_) are interpreted by the runcommand.sh script to figure out if and how a savegame / resolution and what ever we need to be able to game properly need to be set.
My point here is: there is precedent for argument interfacing between ES and the runcommand script, and I would argue that we could extend both ES and the script to pass along something that toggles the “press a key”-pause to be shown or not. I would like some feedback from some of the retropie devs on this though.

[robertybob]

[quote=111991] @robertybob
If when you press “start” on emulationstation, it will show a popup called “MAIN MENU”, if the bottom of that popups says “EMULATIONSTATION V2.0.1A_GUI_MODES_ZIGURANA” means you are using this build.

[/quote]

Thanks for your reply. I installed the package earlier via the script but haven’t yet had the chance to test it – I wasn’t sure if the script overwrote my existing Emulationstation or not , as if it didn’t then I wasn’t sure what text to enter at the command line to run this updates one.

[zigurana]

I’ve asked Herbfargus to split of the discussion of general ES improvements that we might do into a new topic. That way we can focus here on the shielding / protection of ES from lay-users and vice versa.
So if you have further ideas for a kid-friendly ES please bring them on!
Other suggestions I am more than willing to discuss in the other thread.

(also, nobody found any more bugs?)

[robertybob]

EDIT

If I choose Kiosk mode and Show Framerate, I get a seemingly infinite loop of error messages:

/usr/bin/emulationstation line:20 2492 Aborted $es_bin “$@”
Emulationstation will restart in 5 seconds. Press a key to exit back to the console.
terminate called after throwing an instance of ‘std::out_of_range’
what (): vector::_M_range_check
/usr/bin/emulationstation line:20 2498 Aborted $es_bin “$@”
Emulationstation will restart in 5 seconds. Press a key to exit back to the console.
terminate called after throwing an instance of ‘std::out_of_range’
what (): vector::_M_range_check
/usr/bin/emulationstation line:20 2504 Aborted $es_bin “$@”
Emulationstation will restart in 5 seconds. Press a key to exit back to the console.
terminate called after throwing an instance of ‘std::out_of_range’
what (): vector::_M_range_check

etc.

[LodanZark]

I used the gizmo script to upgrade to the latest build of parental emulationstation, yet I feel I am reinstalling the previews version since there is no volume settings in kiosk mode and I still have issue by being unable to go to admin mode over UIMode_passkey.

[robertybob]

Edited my last post. In addition to this, I get the same error messages in a loop when selecting Kid mode. Not having much luck :(

Perhaps Gizmo98’s script is pulling an old version like LodanZark suggested (?) I dunno.

[zigurana]

[quote=112070]
If I choose Kiosk mode and Show Framerate, I get a seemingly infinite loop of error messages:
[/quote]
Trying to reproduce this: I assume that you tried to switch to Kiosk mode while the ShowFrameRate option is turned on?

[gizmo98]

@robertypop
My script clones zigurana’s repo with all current and future changes. Don’t run this script within emulationstation. I don’t think you can update emulationstation if emulationstation is running. If it is not working post your build log (/RetroPie-Setup/logs/). There could be a bug or error.

[robertybob]

[quote=112097]

robertybob wrote:

If I choose Kiosk mode and Show Framerate, I get a seemingly infinite loop of error messages:

Trying to reproduce this: I assume that you tried to switch to Kiosk mode while the ShowFrameRate option is turned on?

[/quote]

I’m in Full mode, select Kiosk and turn on Show Framerate , save changes and then the error occurs.

To stop th endless loop of errors I have to edit the configure file and change the settings back.

[robertybob]

[quote=112099]@robertypop
My script clones zigurana’s repo with all current and future changes. Don’t run this script within emulationstation. I don’t think you can update emulationstation if emulationstation is running. If it is not working post your build log (/RetroPie-Setup/logs/). There could be a bug or error.

[/quote]

Oh right, fair enough then :) I quit Enulationstation before installing this new one, so can’t be that then lol.

[LodanZark]

I’ve found why UIMode_passkey wasn’t switching to admin, its because my file “es_settings.cfg” was attached to root permissions, after give permission to “pi” it solved the problem.
gizmo98’s script was recently updated, I’ve tried reinstall the parental emulationstation yet I still not having access to volume settings on kiosk mode and i still be able to see the option “exit from emulationstation”.

[zigurana]

Ok, to prevent any update confusion, I’ve changed the version string to: “V2.0.1A_GUIMODES_V2”. This is the version where volume access is back for Kiosk and kid modes.

I’m also trying to update via Gizmo’s script (after updating the retropie setup script!), and will let you know how that turns out.

@LozanZark: Good to hear you have at least part of your issues figured out. Any idea why your es_settings.cfg was not writable by pi to begin with?

[zigurana]

Ok the installation via Gizmos script works well for me now, but first I had to remove my local build (which I installed using sudo make install into “/usr/local/bin/emulationstation”).

[zigurana]

[quote=112101]
I’m in Full mode, select Kiosk and turn on Show Framerate , save changes and then the error occurs.

To stop th endless loop of errors I have to edit the configure file and change the settings back.

[/quote]

Hmm, I can do the same thing, without any issue. (aka: I cant reproduce your problem, please give me more specifics!)

• Can you switch modes without involving the frame-rate option?
• Do you have any non hidden items that can be shown at all, I think a completely empty result over all systems could be problematic, I should try that.
• Do you get any logging when running with the debug flag? emulationstation --debug

[robertybob]

[quote=112114]

robertybob wrote:

I’m in Full mode, select Kiosk and turn on Show Framerate , save changes and then the error occurs.

To stop th endless loop of errors I have to edit the configure file and change the settings back.

Hmm, I can do the same thing, without any issue. (aka: I cant reproduce your problem, please give me more specifics!)

• Can you switch modes without involving the frame-rate option?
• Do you have any non hidden items that can be shown at all, I think a completely empty result over all systems could be problematic, I should try that.
• Do you get any logging when running with the debug flag? emulationstation --debug

[/quote]

With Kid mode as soon as I switch the error comes up. Kiosk mode works fine for me unless I enable Show Framerate.

Give me about 4hrs and I’ll have a go with the –debug bit :)

I don’t understand what you mean by non hidden items being shown – I’m using a fresh installation with no roms (only the ports that come with RetroPie).

[LodanZark]

[quote=112111]
@LozanZark: Good to hear you have at least part of your issues figured out. Any idea why your es_settings.cfg was not writable by pi to begin with?
[/quote]

:\ I did backups important files into my computer over WinSCP, and when I did restore them I forgot to change the permissions.

[Author]

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