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Yeah, saw that in the other thread, thanks!
Would be nice to have a curated list of these native pi games, which could be installed straight from the ES ports system.
I understand that the original developers want to have people to download the games from their site directly (in the case of yoyo). Makes sense if you want to control the available releases or gauge the interest.
Do you think that the devs would oppose the idea of getting a direct download from their servers, without actually visiting the page?
I can’t imagine they rely on ad revenue in any significant way, but maybe I am underestimating that side of things.

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Hey great find! These are exactly the kind of casual games you might want to include on an all-ages installation.
Also hurray for the guy wanting to give something back to the community after a succesfull carreer in the game-dev business. That’s class!

I’ll check it out.

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Hi!
Thanks for sharing your way of working.
It seems to me that part if what you are trying to do (i.e. Child-proofing the system) is also possible via my custom build version of EmulationStation. Have a look here: https://www.petrockblock.com/forums/topic/kid-friendly-retropiees-ui-modes-favorites-hiding-items-s-testers-wanted/

Combined with the latest improvements for the runcommand script in v 3.5, it will allow you to pretty much lock down your configuration.

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Will do that, thanks.

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Ow Darn!
Just found a bug.
If you delete a game via ‘edit this games metadata’ ES will crash (and restart after 5 sec).
I’ll have a look today, and update asap.

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… Or you do:
1) press select
2) edit this games metadata
3) delete
4) yes
5) while zorks remain: goto 1

Hardly rocket science, is it?

And if you feel this needs more explanation on the wiki, you could do something about it by suggesting some improvements.

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If you already have a battery and charging circuit working with a uUSB connector, then it can be as easy as plugging in an aftermarket XI receiver. They cost about $8, when you get them from China. The bases you can get anywhere nowadays, even Ikea has them.

If you don’t, well then get that first! That’s the tricky part I think, seeing how finicky the pie is with its power supply.

Be aware that wireless charging does generate some heat, plus its really slow. You might not want that.
I would opt for a solution where both wired and wireless charging would be possible.

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Well, the first step is that the set of changes needs to be looked at carefully and considered for merging into the RetroPie branch of EmulationStation.
Previously (when the main branch of EmulationStation was still under active development), this PR would have gone to Aloshi, who would be able to judge it on its merits and see how well it fits with the rest of the code, as well as any future plans he might have.

Nowadays, ES development is most likely to come from ‘third parties’ like me. It must be difficult for the RetroPie team to judge the code without a spending considerable amount of time on it. So I’m not expecting an answer anytime soon.

In any case, it might be outside the scope / too large for what the RetroPie team is willing to take on and support, especially taking into account futures where RetroPie uses a different Frontend altogether. We’ll see.

I wish these types of discussions would take place more in the open though. We all have a stake here.

Send from mobile, please excuse any brevity and typos.

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I’ve created a Pull Request to the RetroPie/Emulationstation branch for this: https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/pull/32

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Yeah, i think there are generally two ways to go about it: invent the wheel, or steal it.

Given that Recalbox already has solved this problem, I would tend to go towards the latter option. However, Recalbox has seen MANY more commits over the last year, so the overall delta in terms of dependencies might be rather big.

I am planning to do some more digging, and see what is used for sound handling in de current ES, because i think its different from what is used in Recalbox (which also supports *.ogg files).

Also, What are our requirements for this function?
A single background track for all systems?
That seems like a reasonable starting point.

Send from mobile, please excuse any brevity and typos.

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@ labelwhore: You know what, we could try and make this happen together somehow. I’ve just done some initial ES stuff in the last few months, and would be willing to get you up and running. What do you think?

Send from mobile, please excuse any brevity and typos.

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I did have a quick look at how Recalbox implemented this, but I’ll need some more time to get it in ES proper. Whats the rush?

Send from mobile, please excuse any brevity and typos.

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I agree, theming should probably not be the solution to your problem. It is an interesting notion though, to be able to see different/additional types of info in a theme.
Apart from filename, what would we like to see?
I for one would like to see some kind of condensed date +dev/publisher tag.

So instead of having three tags (“1983.01.01”, “namco” , “namco” ), I would much prefer: “1983 (Namco)”.

Send from mobile, please excuse any brevity and typos.

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There are probably many ways, but I use raspi2png (look for it on github)

My workflow:
1) Start RetroPie / EmulationStation on its own screen. And get to the screen you want to ehh, shoot.
2) use ssh to get to a terminal
3) go to the directory where raspi2png was installed (my case: home/raspi2png)
4) run ./raspi2png -p usefullfilename.png
5) use winscp to copy the bew file over to pc
6) ??
7) profit!

Send from mobile, please excuse any brevity and typos.

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[quote=112709]More sorting options
https://github.com/jgeumlek/EmulationStation-tweaked/commit/1f63858cf10e67646172f8f9bbadc502e923c34d
https://github.com/jgeumlek/EmulationStation-tweaked/commit/fd38659536fbe147fea58a2ade1f49fda3aadc52

[/quote]

Regarding these two:
They only really work once we have made the jump to a proper DB for ES, rather then the xml lists.
This was somewhat prepared by the great Aloshi, but I never got it to work. Seems that jgeumlek has, so I will give that a go and test it at some point. He/she has a lot (loads really) of interesting commits, so I am very tempted to start merging…

In other words: someday maybe, but not soon.

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[quote=112040]

zigurana wrote:

@robertybob: I like the idea, this is the easiest to implement on a gamelist level (so not across systems). I could add a menu item like SURPISE ME that would launch either
1) a random game

I’d go with this one, personally Although I also like the idea of “discovering” as yet unplayed games.. I’ll be interested to find out what others think (!).

Could it be possible to hide the ‘random’ option if it’s something the developers don’t want shown by default?

[/quote]

See: https://www.petrockblock.com/forums/topic/kid-friendly-retropiees-ui-modes-favorites-hiding-items-s-testers-wanted/page/2/#post-115616

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Update UImodes v5
Ok, this is probably going to be my last update for this particular feature.
Actually this was supposed to be a separate feature, but I got stuck. So I descoped it untill it was at least usable and stable.
What the hell am I talking about?

Random games! (also known as useless feature #1)

The original plan was to get a random game starter that could be triggered as some sort of screensaver, and act as a stand-in for an actual attract-mode. So I got to work on getting file lists (of course taking into account all the filters that I had introduced for UIModes so Hidden and Kid games). I got it working up to the point where it is an option in the guiGameListOptions (what you get when you press ‘select’ while in a game-list view):

This will change the view focus to a new random game, in any of the systems that have games that are visible given the current UI mode. This takes place in the viewcontroller code in ES-app.

So far so good.
Then I found out that the screensaver mechanism is implemented in the ES-core side of things, as a low-level function for the ES window. The problem now is that ES-core works as one giant include for ES-app. As such ES-core is completely unaware of anything that goes on in ES-app. This is by design, you could say that ES-app is just a particular implementation of ES-core.

Anyways, lets stop this over-technical detour by concluding that there is no clean way to add a new screensaver mechanism to ES that depends on higher-level functions, without a redesign bigger than I am willing to do right now.
So we are left with a rather meager harvest for all this digging: just the menu option that you need to call manually.

I’ve updated my repository, and installation via the script should work fine.
Let me know what you guys think. The next update will probably on something different again.

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Very Nice!
I am trying to decide on a button layout (1 person), how do you like it so far? Especially the L+R at the bottom seems less than conventional, but might work well.

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Hey, I have no idea whats going on, but this logging is what I see all the time, using the old firmware, and an otherwise functioning ES.
That is all there is for logging?

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As soon as ppl have had a chance to trie this out, and no dirty bugs pop up, I will create a pull-request on de RetroPie – ES branch. Then others will be able to have a more explicit look at the code, before accepting it into the general build.

Re: Improved theming for ES, i’ll have a look at that in due time. It certainly is on my list!

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Progressing slowly, i’ve made a (final?) update to the kid ui branch. Now working on starting a random game from the game-menu, as a sort of “I’m feeling lucky” function. Also nice as a type of screensaver type.
Really, I’m putting off having to work on the theme handling. ?

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Nice!

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if you exit ES with f4 I think it doesn’t save any gameslists. I might look at changing the exit so you have exit + save and exit without saving options or so

I think this is correct.
While we are used to think that the gamelist.xml files are the endpoint, for ES they are of course only the stored values of an internal construct (in working memory) that contains all metadata of a given system. So when a certain system is exited (you go back to the system overview), it will store the current version of that internal struct in our newly scraped xml file. It does this to update the values for “# times played” etc.
The build-in scraper alters the internal info, which is then written to file as regular.

I would be willing to try and see what needs to happen in order to tie sselph’s scraper into ES nicely.
Not sure if actually making it part of ES would be the way to go, though. That would make further development for the scraper more involved, and we would lose flexibility. Maybe it’s better to let the scraper write to a second set of xml files, which are then somehow imported into ES?

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(which means: feel free to make it happen, we’ll gladly have a look at what you have come up with. )

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UPDATE (Gui_Modes_v4)
I’ve just pushed my latest changes to my repository. If you run the install-script via retropie-setup -> option 4 ‘Experimental Packages’ -> option 306 emulationstation-kids, you will be able to download and install it.

This update includes the visualization of the metadata items Favorite, Hidden, and Kidgame using simple icons:

To see these changes, you will also need to update your theme(s). To make a start, I’ve updated the Carbon theme to include these new elements (had to push things around a bit).
You can download it here (I hope this does not break my Dropbox account due to over-usage ;-) )

In any case, it is not perfect, but I am not really the artistic type, I leave that in the good hands of other willing to play. Make sure you increase the xml formatversion number (specified on the second line) to 4.

I would be most gratefull if you could give this a try, and report any difficulties/bugs you might encounter.

Known issues:

• Somehow, with my setup, the binding of x and y gets lost and I need to rebind the buttons via “Configure Input”, if I want to use these buttons to quickly toggle the fav / kidgame values. I would be interested if others see the same behaviour.

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Hi!
This is a sign of life post, I am working hard on an update, but a nasty segmentation fault is throwing me off schedule.

[quote=113405]
This is all that I could find regarding the issue, but I don’t see any instructions on how to enable X and Y to toggle the new tags for favorite and kid.
[/quote]

Yeah, sorry about that.
I was planning to opload an updated theme together with the next code update, as the situation will be different after that.

What I am planning is this to use icons rather than a textual representation of the new metadata boolean types Favorite, KidGame and Hidden. To do this, I had to extend the theme handling in ES.
How that looks like is something like this:

Hopefully stating the obvious here:
Heart = Favorite
Teddybear = Kid friendly
Eye = hidden
(Now, of course this is a weird situation – why would you want to hide a favorite game? But this was for illustration purposes only).
These images are toggled, based on the metadata value true/false, so they will not be there when the value = false.

To know the paths and screen locations of these images, ES looks at the theme. In my theme I have added the following:

		<image name="md_hidden">
			<pos>0.17 0.165</pos>
			<path>./art/hidden.svg</path>
			<maxSize>0.06 0.045</maxSize>
			<origin>0 0</origin>
		</image>
		
		<image name="md_kidgame">
			<pos>0.10 0.16</pos>
			<path>./art/teddy.svg</path>
			<maxSize>0.06 0.06</maxSize>
			<origin>0 0</origin>
		</image>

		<image name="md_favorite">
			<pos>0.03 0.165</pos>
			<path>./art/heart.svg</path>
			<maxSize>0.045 0.045</maxSize>
			<origin>0 0</origin>
		</image>

The corresponding images are in a folder ‘art’, which will be either system specific, or set globally, depending if you want to have system specific images or not. (Looking at the memory issues we had in the past, I guess not).

Again, I am planning to update the carbon theme with these new values, so people can have a go. It just that everything always takes longer than expected, so bear with me.

And if anyone can get me up and running with debugging segmentation faults using gdb or something else, please let me know.

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So I know nothing about svg’s, but I would be willing to try and update the svg library that is being used in ES (nanosvg).
To be able to test this, could you please send me the (links to) test files that should work but currently do not, as well as those that do work? (for reference: I assume that the rasterization in Chrome can be taken as a gold-standard?)

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Well, I hope not, but if you do find them, let me know. :)
As for the other feature requests, I will focus first on the leftovers for the UI modes feature:
-mechanism for theme where favorites, hidden, and kid status are shown
-example of such a theme, based on carbon
-maybe: look at automatic scraping of ESRB ratings and set the Kid filter to one of those levels

And timelines, well, it proceeds at its own pace, depending on unforeseen issues, availability of time, presence of christmas, etcetc.

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[quote=112172]

LodanZark wrote:

I was thinking about the usefulness of the “restart system” option in the “kiosk” and “kids” mode, and over my experience I didn’t use it at all since there are no available settings in those modes that requires restart, maybe quit section would became straightforward to shutdown system or even show up a pop up”are you sure you wanna quit? yes/no”

well quit it useful if you plan to update roms etc on a regular basis, imho

[/quote]
Sure, the restart and quit features are useful in a full ui context, but in a reduced/protected mode not so much.

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Update (GUI_MODES_v3)
So I’ve just crushed the robertybob’s bug where playing with a clean install of this ES branch would land ES in an infinite loop because there was nothing to show.
Now the user is confronted with an image like this:

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Well, if we combine with the power menu proposed earlier, the whole menu item can be hidden.

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@robertybob:
What i think is happening: there are no Games that have the Kidgame tag set to true, so the system tries to populate based on a list with no content (size=0,hence the out of range error) .
Could you try with at least 1 game kid enabled?
I’ll put this on the todo list anyways, because there should be a way to catch this case gracefully.

Thanks for the bug-hunting!

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[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

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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”).

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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?

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