Wish list

[Anonymous]

If I could set up the RetroPie just the way I wanted it…

1. Boot logo would cover boot up code.

I appreciate that the logo comes up after RetroPie has been loaded, but it would be even better if it came up as soon as power was applied to the RPi. I’m guessing the RPi just has to show these strings as they are loaded due to its internal programing. I know on a traditional PC you can usually go into the bios to tell it to use a boot logo or not. I’m not sure if anything like this exists for the RPi. It would just give it a more finished feel for the RetroPie.

2. ROMs would be stored on the FAT32 “boot” partition.

This would make it super simple to load ROMs to the SD card. You could just pop it into any computer and copy them straight over.

Along with this, I would love to not see the temporary flash of code when dumping a ROM.

3. Rid Emulation Station of emulators that I don’t want.

I’m sure there is any easy way to kill of emulators and their associated files from the command line or in the GUI, but I have not found it yet. It would be great if you could just bring up the menu in Emulation Station and have an option to delete that emulator and all files associated with it. I will get into all the things that I would love the ES menu to do in a bit!

Well, I guess now is as good a time as any. Emulation Station menu…

4. Adding a controller should be super easy. I picture being able to power on the RetroPie software for the first time and setting the P1 and P2 button config for Emulation Station (I know it already does this, great job on this by the way).

From here, you still have to either go to command line and run retroarch-joyconfig (hypothetically, see my other post), SSH in, or go to GUI to set controls for each emulator. The Emulation Station menu could make short work of all this. If you could just go to the menu and choose “Options”->”Set controls for this emulator” or something simple like that, it would cut out all the other steps.

5. I would love to be able to delete ROMs that do not work correctly from the list in Emulation Station.

Again, the ES menu could make this possible. If you have the ROM highlighted you want to delete, you could go to the menu and choose “Options”->”Delete this ROM.” A different approach that might be more complicated but more effective might be a separate menu section… “Options”->”Manage my ROMs.” Here, you could add or delete ROMs for different emulators.

That brings me to my next wish…

6. Add ROMs from USB without going into the GUI

Through the imaginary “Manage my ROMs” section, a user could effectively add ROMs by plugging in a USB stick loaded with their ROMs and tell Emulation Station which emulator they go with. Maybe the file type could tell ES where they go, though. I know that NES games use the .nes filetype and SNES uses .smc. Maybe ES will be smart enough in the future to know where to put ROMs. Or maybe! (This is where I start tripping out) Just maybe RetroPie doesn’t need a separate folder for each emulator’s ROMs. Is it possible for emulators to use one big folder for all the system’s ROMs and just ignore the ones that do not have the correct filetype?

This whole section would be useless if emulators could just load ROMs from the FAT32 partition, but if that is not possible maybe it could be an easier way to get games on the SD card.

7. Be able to manage the sundry retroarch.cfg settings from the Emulation Station menu

I know that RetroArch is not the only emulator available for the RetroPie, but it does what I need. Thus, it would be nice to be able to set things like pixel smoothing, full screen, cropped screen, force resolution, etc. from a hypothetical ES menu “Options”->”RetroArch settings.”

This might also be a good place to be able to add a second controller to RetroArch. You could go into “RetroArch settings” and choose “Add 2nd player” to go through the button configuration.

8. Cover-flow type selection for ROMs.

UltraStar DX does a good job of making it easy to navigate through songs with attractive artwork that you can easily associate with each. It would be cool to have an NES game template that you just add the little sticker artwork and it displays it in the Emulation Station in an iTunes cover-flow style. I realize this is probably beyond the time that people want to put into this project, but hey… this is my wish list.

9. Make emulators available even if no ROMs are loaded to it.

This goes back to being able to load ROMs from Emulation Station. If no ROMs are in a particular emulator, there could be instructions displayed as to how to load them, i.e. “Press the menu button that you have assigned to your controller. Go to “Option” and choose “Manage my ROMs” to add games to this system.” This message would presumably go away once any games are loaded.

You might also have instructions about adding a controller to a particular system when no ROMs are loaded because it would likely be right after someone has flashed RetroPie to their SD card. These instructions might look like, “To add a controller to this system, press the menu button on your controller. Go to “Option” and choose “Add P1 controller.”

For this to work, Emulation Station would need to be smart enough to know to add those lines of code to the specific emulator that the person is currently in. Also, the instructions for adding a controller would go away after one has been added to that system.

10. Wireless controllers

People might have already figured this out, but I would love to have wireless controllers (either BT or WiFi) to go with the RetroPie.

I guess that’s it for now. All this stuff might seem picky, but consoles felt like they were worth the money back in the day because they were polished and well thought out.

I will attach a little diagram for how I envision a rudimentary menu system working.

Thanks for all the hard work. It makes me wish I had studied programming so that I could help with the heavy lifting!

Feel free to let me know if some of this stuff is already possible in the comments.

[teeth03]

You can already do number 3 by emptying out the associated ROM folder for like the apple2, cave story, x86, doom and duke 3D emulators

[Anonymous]

Sweet! Thanks! I also saw that you can comment them out from showing up. I guess I could do that if I thought I ever wanted to play them. For now, I will try what you said.

[Author]

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