Finally unpacked my Pi after having it for a couple of months, had a version of PiPlay that was just as old and as soon as I booted, ran auto update and BAM! I’m up and running. Great work guys, really excited for the future and to also give Ignition a try (perhaps a partnership of the sort will come down the road).

Two things I noticed that may be nice during setup:

1. A quick representation of disk space used/allowed in the web interface, maybe just a df output on the Tools menu? I found while I was FTP’ing that my files were going to 0 bytes, took me a while to realize I had to reallocate space on my SD card from raspi-config.

2. Custom splash screen or animation? This may be more of a noobie linux question I can answer with a few google searches but figured I’d ask anyway.

Edit – I forgot number 3!

3. Any chance to add in an N64 emulator in the future? I saw some articles showing it works, and a link to some compiled code which points to… Shea’s blog for download!

A stand alone program we can run as a mock up theme creator to help testing and making themes faster? Maybe a drag and drop interface to move things around, edit fonts within ect
Might seem daft but the reset time multiplied by every little change we make adds up plus those that are noobs to rpi (like me) who love every helping hand we can get 😀

Have the controller config ignore already used inputs per controller

Have the controller config also do others players

Thanks mholgatem – I’d like to second (or third, or 28th) the request for HiFi or Wolfson audio card support as well. I know there is likely no need for Wolfsons 5.1/7.1 audio support, but the prices are similar so thought it was worth mentioning.

Also along with luisusmc’s request, I was thinking the same for some background music while selecting your emulators or games, or while the unit sits idle. But based on the processing I see going on the Pi right now that may be a little overbearing for the little guy to handle that much.

Started playing around with this the other day. I must say, it’s very nice! I especially like that my Mayflash SNES dongle was recognized and the navigation *just worked* (though it took me a little time to figure out to use the X button to select — not an intuitive choice)

Some suggestions:

Support folders in ROMs list. Navigating with arrow keys takes a very long time, and I have a ton of ROMs. I have divided them by letter in subdirectories (and further like BA-BE in the B/ directory), but piplay doesn’t pick up anything not in the root folder.

Sorting like above automatically might be nice (the algo isn’t hard :-), but it might be a stretch.

Additionally, it seems input is blocked till the image on the right is loaded and there’s no auto-repeat. In order to browse through long lists of ROMs, auto-repeat should be enabled and the image load should delay for .5~1s when the navigation stops. (nitpick)

Since I’ve just got 2 SNES controllers plugged into the thing, I don’t have spare buttons for things like “Exit to menu” or “Reset emulator”. It’s also a bit of a pain to connect a keyboard for these buttons. What I *do* usually have within reach is a tablet/smartphone with a web browser on it. It would be nice to see buttons like those in addition to Reboot/Shutdown on the tools menu of the web portal. Extra credit for additional emulator keys like Load/Save Savestate 🙂

— seems that a lot of folks here want to build an arcade cabinet with this, and these suggestions might go against that “goal”, if it indeed is one. Hope I’m not too far off-base.

Thanks for all your effort! It looks great so far.

Thanks for the fast response, mholgatem.

And thanks for the navigation tips. I’ll use those more at my next opportunity and see how it feels.

I s’pose I was jumping to conclusions on some implementation details there. I am using a 32GB Transcend SD card (cheaper, but slower than SanDisk/Kingston on the Pi, from my observations — despite them all being C10) and I could see how that might be affecting it. I’ll see whether installing it on a better card makes a difference.

Thanks again! Will be following this project.

Some thoughts concerning pi(mame)play-menu :

– if nb_items_to_show == max_nb_items_per_screen then don’t create a new page menu, just show the items since they fit on a single page.
Why : cause it looks better ^^

– option (config.yaml?) to disable or enable joystick/pad _in menu only_
Other way could be to make joystick less sensible in menu, but that sounds tricky imho.
Why : some are too sensible/unstable (while perfectly fine in game) and are a pain to deal with within piplay-menu, changing the selected item “by themselves”. (this one is medium to high priority imho)

(those last ones are obviously suuuper low priority, just some thoughts for 0.9 or 1.0)
– Regarding themes, i think something’s wrong in the logic between config.yaml and theme.yaml files, i believe it should be easier to localize the UI for example.
– Regarding loading screen / launchmenu : it is far better in the last beta, but still not fast enough imho. Maybe it’s a matter of feeling rather than real performance though.

Here’s an early patch to enable the “disable pad” option 😉
Seems to be working fine so far.

* pmconfig.py :
class PMOptions:
def __init__(…)
[…]
self.allow_pad = opts['allow_pad']


* mainscene.py
def handle_events(self, events):
[…]
to disable axis, change from :
if event.type == pygame.JOYAXISMOTION: action = self.CONTROLS.get_action('joystick', event.dict)
to :
if event.type == pygame.JOYAXISMOTION and self.cfg.options.allow_pad: action = self.CONTROLS.get_action('joystick', event.dict)

same logic applied to the next line to disable buttons too, if needed (i didn’t) :
if event.type == pygame.JOYBUTTONDOWN and self.cfg.options.allow_pad: action = self.CONTROLS.get_action('joystick', event.dict)


* config.yaml :
choose
allow_pad: False
or
allow_pad: True

In next or future versions of piplay (this great project), can be useful include a context menu (with a mouse right click over an icon) in main screen with several options that allows, for example:
– emulator configuration (if it’s possible)
– setup controller (only for the selected emulator)
– or any other that void edit configuration files

Add an option in the main screen pop-up menu to enable/disable emulator or special options (like “exit” or “shutdown”) visualization

Add an on-screen keyboard can be useful too

@danx – really? I havent had anything not run on dgen yet. what games are you having problems with, I’d love to do some testing.

@mholgatem : try this one http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Squadron or this fix it felix homebrew http://68000.web.fc2.com/felix/index.html and let me know what happens with dgen. Also Dgen is not working with EmulationStation with composite output (but it’s not a problem for piplay).

I’d like to get VectorMAME running on there- there’s a board “Zektor” that used the parallel printer port to drive arcade vector monitors. (color/B/W)

That board is no longer available but I think the functions (+_12V, 4 channels) can be reproduced and added to the pi. And a standard oscilloscope would also be capable of displaying the games..

@lateo, I just worked in a fix for the controller sensitivity issue that you are having. It should be available in the next update, or you can grab it off of my repo. The only files that need to be updated are pimame-menu/controller.yaml and pimame-menu/pmmenu/pmcontrollerconfig.yaml.

No, sorry @kristoffer55. It will never happen. The ps3 is way to powerful to emulate on something like a raspberry pi.

hi there!
my requests

1. a “vertical” edition – at least for mame (to use vertical games with right-up displays)

2. i would prefer a file struktur like
/emu/mame_037b
/emu/fceux_v2.2.2
/emu/mednafen_v0.9

pimame could be located in its own folder like
/emu/pimame

imho it would be easier to maintain settings/programs and so on – indipendent if using pimame or another frontend (e.g. copy settings from another image to the piplay image and use the same config-files for mame and so on)

In the settings, have the option to check what you want displayed and what you want hidden. For example it will show me a list of all the things that I can have displayed and then I can just un-check what I dont want, like the restart option, and rom scraper…etc

Is there a quick hide all emulators with no Roms setting?

I actually have a couple site related feature requests of my own 😀

@SSilver2K2
I think the PiPLAY site (www.piplay.org, www.pimame.org) needs a bit of an update.
The emulator list, video, and quick start guide are all (really) outdated…
And I think a few more tutorials would be good.

Also, I think we need a tag system or something on the forums. Or maybe categories. I just think it needs to be a bit easier to find stuff.

Anyway, thanks!

@azapatero –
1. That’s a pretty excellent idea and shouldn’t be too hard to implement. We are thinking about going to a true database to store the rom info, so as we do that, I’ll keep this feature in mind.
2.Yes! There is a way to go straight back to the game list! just grab the latest update, it has that feature built in.

There’s just one thing that misses for me: a driver that enables the use of (S)NES-controllers connected to the Pi’s GPIO

Really liking it so far; you’ve provided something that has finally turned my Picade from an expensive shelf ornament into a useful and fun toy! 🙂

A few of my feature requests:
Customise mappings so that there is standardised controls across all emulators (EG “Back to PiPlay Menu” button is the same in all applications.)

In the FAQ/similar, within the PiPlay menu itself, provide a list of the formats/versions of roms each of the emulators expects (EG, does it want a .bin or a .gen file, does it support zipped roms, etc.)

Make Bezel support work out of the box in MAME4all (IE, this: http://www.pimame.org/forum/discussion/21/solved-artwork-bezel-not-appearing/p1) and add these as something that is scraped like the artwork. Add automated scraping of sound samples (EG for Berzerk etc.); these things aren’t roms and the MAME community generally considers these things as ‘fair game’. 😉

Eliminate the humming/low static on the menu (EG play a looping 1sec silent .wav or similar).

+1 for scraping of sound samples and bezel/cabinet artwork.

+1 for the MP3 player!

MP3 player – I looked into this a bit and found that MP3 support is not natively built into pygame. It doesn’t mean that we can’t add it, but it’s going to take some doing. I added background music as a theme option in the meantime, but it’s limited to .wav and .ogg file formats (wav is better, uncompressing the ogg file puts a lot of work on the rpi cpu).

@dmroeder
Brilliant suggestions! Thanks

Is it possible have a video player or a way to run XBMC from PiPlay?