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

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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?)

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[quote=112040]
Could it be possible to hide the ‘random’ option if it’s something the developers don’t want shown by default?
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Ehm, as I see it, *we* are the developers right now for this feature. That is the beauty of open source! :)

That said – I think it is important not to create a christmas tree of menu-items and only show options that people will actually use. So the way this goes is: someone creates a new feature/option and people try it out. If it turns out no-one uses it, it should be removed from the (default) UI. It is easy enough to introduce a settings item to show/hide some additional features.

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@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
2) a random game from those that were never played before
3) the least played game / game played longest time ago.
What do you think would be best?
A mix of those options should be possible as well, so go wild!

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I Like !

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@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;
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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”;
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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/ ;
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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
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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.

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Its an interesting idea, maybe not even all that difficult.
Many games will display some kind of attract-mode behaviour when left at the startup menu for long enough. It should be doable to predefine games that show that behavior, and start those automatically from ES.

There are some usability issues though:
1) what to do when the user returns? should the current games be sticky, or should the system return to ES menu?
2) should the system switch games after some time (tricky) , or pick one randomly and keep with it (probably much easier).

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Update here.

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[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.

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

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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”.
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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.
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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!

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@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!

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[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?

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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.

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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.

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For your second item, please have a look at https://www.petrockblock.com/?post_type=topic&p=111729

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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.

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More on moving towards a Kid-friendly ES UI

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If you are still working on this, please have a look here

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Update

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Just out of curiosity, how do you measure the input lag?

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That’s awesome! I’ll need to work on updating themes soon, so this will come in handy!

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I am killing some of the nastier bugs right now, and will do a post on it tomorrow (probably).

Verstuurd vanaf mijn XT1068 met Tapatalk

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I think the word you are looking for is parental, unless you want to restrict this new functionality to dads only ;-)
As it stands I am currently working on an implementation of exactly this in ES. If you are interested to be an early beta tester, let me know.

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Cool subject, and looking at your outline here, very thorough!
For the TLDR: what is your conclusion, how far can we go?

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Ok, a small update, and some more questions. This will get deep into Github territory, so bear with me.

Using Netbeans, Ive managed to get a reasonable IDE working in which I can work with and navigate around ES. No SDL syntax support, but it will have to do for now.
Ive had the Gamelist_db branch of ES compiling successfully, by copying the sources to my pi2 and changing the amount of GPU memory to something really low, like 32MB.

My initial approach was to build on the database branch, because it would enable me to set filters (or rather queries) that would accomodate things like favorites and child-proof only games. This seems much more than is currently implemented, so much more, that I became disheartened and started poking around at other peoples Github forks to see if there are other interesting developments going on.

Surely enough, I found this: https://github.com/kaptainkia/EmulationStation.git, which has implemented a favorites list system on the non-db branch, so using the good-old gamelist.xml approach. Fine, now how to get it?

Ideally, I would like to create a fork of the retropie\emulationstation fork, and then somehow, gracefully, merge this pull request into it. As Aloshi is very busy with other things atm, I do not plan on waiting for him to get it in the main emulationstation master/origin (even assuming he likes the changes).

So I started around with creating many forks locally, and trying to find a way to get the changes in, while still keeping the history intact. No luck yet, and I am struggling to find the info on how to approach this. (The frustating thing is that the actual changes only over about 20 files, and if I would have used a manual merge tool like kdiff3 I would have been done by now…)

So great minds of RetroPie, any thoughts on how to get two distant forks together?
I would love to contribute to this project, but need to get some help getting started!

Thanks!

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Hey there!
What kind of suggestions / feedback do you want? I mean, nice work with the duct-tape. :-)
I am currently in about the same phase for my bar top, designing the enclosure and building cardboard prototypes. I will not be able to get away with duct-tape only, as mine needs to be hooligan child proof from the get go. ?
What I would like to know about your build is how you judge the ergonomics, with the screen fully vertical like that. Also, are your hands not in the way of the screen?

I would consider some kind of storage space to hold additional controllers /keyboards, at least, that’s what I am planning.

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Yeah, I agree it’s fairly easy to gut the interface until only the bare functionality remains. However, it would b nice to retain some flexibility. Do you recon its feasible to run two separate installations of ES (one full, one gutted/simplyfied) and switch them at boot-time?

That would solve the gamelist issue at the same time (as soon as the — gamelist-only option is restored).

In any case, I’ll let this rest until i have all the HW, which will be after the summer holidays. Thanks for now!

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Hey thanks for thinking with me here. I’ll have a look into doing a private build for ES. As I don’t have the HW yet, its difficult to build and debug on the real thing.
In any case, do you think this is something that needs to be tackled in ES only? In that case i will open up a thread there as well.

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I think this would be a great idea when used in an arcade build, similar to the lcd display above a pinball machine. Would be cool to have a banner that scrolls the current game title.

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