Running script when launching rom

[jamiem777]

Hi, I am trying to run a script to find the latest played game when launching a rom, so when launching at the rom boot it should read it as the currently playing rom. I am using the gamelist.xml to achieve this and then output it to a 16×2 lcd display. This is all working the only problem I am having is getting the script to run when launching a rom. Can anyone point me to where I would need to look to launch this script when launching a rom. Thanks in advance
Jamie

[sselph]

The Emulators are started with the command listed in /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg

You’ll see each system listed with a command that is invoked.

  <system>
    <fullname>Nintendo Entertainment System</fullname>
    <name>nes</name>
    <path>~/RetroPie/roms/nes</path>
    <extension>.nes .NES .zip .ZIP</extension>
    <command>/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 4 "/opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch -L /opt/retropie/libretrocores/neslibretro/fceumm_libretro.so --config /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg --appendconfig /opt/retropie/configs/nes/retroarch.cfg %ROM%" "neslibretro"</command>
    <platform>nes</platform>
    <theme>nes</theme>
  </system>

So you might be able to modify this script to invoke your script. /opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh

[sselph]

If this approach works a simplification could be to pass $command in the bash script to your script. Since the command typically has the rom path as the last argument you should be able to parse it to extract the currently playing game. Might be easier than trying to figure out which gamelist was updated last. This would be before the eval $command which actually starts the emulation. Then after that you can add a call to the script to update the screen to remove the currently playing game since you have exited.

[jamiem777]

Thanks Sselph, The first post has helped me I was able to run the script and it worked perfectly apart from the gamelist.xml doesnt appear to get updated until after exiting emulation station so it really makes that method of searching rather redundant now. I am now trying to incorporate the details from your second post how would I go about passing the $command into my script. I should be able to work out how to fix it up so that I can get the right details out of it just I haven’t got an idea where to start with this. Here’s my code so far.

from AndyPi_LCD import AndyPi_LCD
import lxml.etree as ET
root = ET.parse("./RetroPie/roms/ports/gamelist.xml")
lsp = root.findall(".//lastplayed")
mylist = [t.text for t in lsp]
newest = max(mylist)
gname = root.xpath("./game[lastplayed/text()='{}']/name/text()".format(newest))
print(gname)
namelcd = "".join(gname)
print(namelcd)
lcd=AndyPi_LCD()
lcd.lcd_init()
lcd.led(512)
lcd.static_text(1,"c","Latest Game:")
lcd.static_text(2,"c",namelcd)

[sselph]

In the bash script you’d do:

your_script.py set $command
eval $command
your_script.py clear

You might have to do
your_script.py set "$command"

Then in your python script you do something like this. sys.argv[1] has the action and sys.argv[2] has the full command in it. So you’d need to try and extract the rom file name off the end but since it could contain spaces the split is tricky. Then you could optionally look up the pretty name from the gamelist. There might be a better way to do the xml look up and there are bound to be typos or errors but you get the idea.

import sys
from os import path
from AndyPi_LCD import AndyPi_LCD
import lxml.etree as ET

# Clear the screen
if sys.argv[1] == "clear":
  lcd=AndyPi_LCD()
  lcd.lcd_init()
  lcd.led(512)
  lcd.static_text(1,"c","RetroPie v.2.6.0")
  lcd.static_text(2,"c","")
  return 0

# Assume the command was set.
command = sys.argv[2]
file_path = command.replace('\ ', '___').split()[-1].replace('___', ' ')
dir, file_name = path.split(file_path)
root = ET.parse('%s/gamelist.xml' % dir)
namelcd = file_name
for game in root.iter('game'):
  if game.find('path').text == './%s' % file_name:
    namelcd = game.find('name').text
    break

lcd=AndyPi_LCD()
lcd.lcd_init()
lcd.led(512)
lcd.static_text(1,"c","Playing:")
lcd.static_text(2,"c",namelcd)

[jamiem777]

That’s great thanks Sselph. I will try this out and let you know how I get on.

[sselph]

Hi,

Never heard back so don’t know if you got this working but I needed a similar ability so I created a library to monitor the running emulator and rom. I went ahead and create a standalone binary for this use case. If you need to try it you can see how to use it at:

Script to Monitor Running Emulator and ROM for other scripts

It is alpha state right now.

[Author]

Posts