RetroFE forums

As I've been using and theming RetroFE for a while now, I'm gonna list the things I've found that can be improved or added, maybe you guys agree. Of course I love RetroFE, I find it to be the best FE out there, but these are the things missing for it to be perfect according to my use (listed from most needed to less):

1. Recognize controller after RetroFE has started - It's annoying how sometimes I forget to turn on my controller, and have RetroFE open, but because it won't be recognized, I gotta close it, connect my controller, and then open it again. Could help make the experience more seamless. For reference, Kodi has this feature.

2. Brief screen when opening game - I find it ugly how when launching an game, RetroFE minimizes, you see my desktop for a solid two seconds, and then the game appears on screen. Takes you out of the "experience"... I would kill for it to just be RetroFE > game. Perhaps if this is just the way Windows works, adding something to RetroFe that will load a black image taking the whole screen until the game loads (so that one sees that instead of the desktop).

3. Layout hotkey - Instead of having layouts be permanent, with one loaded on startup, you could change it on the go with a hotkey. For reference, Kodi has this feature and I use it a lot there for movies because they show different aspects of the current object selected (for example my current RetroFE skin doesn't show boxart, so it'd be cool to change from a logo based one, to a "coverflow" of boxart on the go), or just because one gets bored of having the same one all the time.

4. Grouping elements - This is a design idea that concerns games or systems that have extensions. The idea is that, for example, instead of having 4 entries of "Final Fantasy VIII" (for each CD), you have one that, once entered, replaces the playlist with the 4 CD entries. Could be great for DLC games, multiple-CD games, or systemswith add-ons (example after "entering" the MegaDrive, the wheel is replaced with "Mega Drive", "32X", and "Mega CD")

5. Randomize game on platform startup - It gets tiring to see the same game every time you start a system, so it could be a good idea to break the eternal monotony by making the platform randomize the first game seen when entering. Sorted alphabetically, there's no way around it: your first arcade game will always be "88 Games" - will I have to see its logo and video every time I launch "Arcade" for the rest of my life?

6. Immediate rating - Not sure if there's a rating system implemented yet, but it'd be great to be able to quickly rate by pressing the currently selected item, like "Ctrl+1", "Ctrl+2" and so on. Then we'd be able to see how we rated a game on the UI, sort the games by rating, and so on.

7. Adapt size when changing resolutions - In line with how RetroFE loads stuff at startup and then not any more, it happens that I have my computer connected to both my desktop monitor and my TV, and I'd like to launch it on my desktop, then move to the couch and play games there, but if I do that RetroFE launches with the resolution of the desktop monitor, so it looks bad on the TV. For reference, Kodi has this.

8. Don't cut when adding favourites - When you add a game to favourites, the video resets. Looks inelegant.

9. Disable input on certain menus - Small, borderline obsessive annoyance of mine, in that nextPlaylist, and letterUp, work on the system menu, which is awkward because I don't list them by alphabet (so letterUp doesn't make sense using there), nor I have a playlist of them. It's easy as not pressing those buttons, but knowing pressing them could unleash brief chaos (nextPlaylist > only arcade and NES listed) is annoying.

10. Odd characters - RetroFE won't recognize the collection if they have foreign characters on their name. These are the ones that I had trouble with: Pokémon Mini, NEO・GEO CD, Odyssey². I named the folders in ways that would make them get recognized, but I'd love to have them with the "actual" names rather than a workaround (so that I follow my organization standards).

11. SVG support - As I tried to fill the missing logos, I found many of them were most easily accessible as .svg vectors. They undoubtedly have superior quality to .png too, so it'd be great to have support for it.

Oh alright, I think I'll just put on a solid black bar under the wheel and the obscured overlay one on top. Thanks again.

Regarding dynamic background, if I use mode="layout", and type="background" I'd be calling the images from RetroFE\layouts\[LAYOUTNAME]\collections\[COLLECTIONNAME]\system_artwork\background. So


<reloadableImage type="background" mode="layout" x="0" y="0" height="stretch" width="stretch" layer="0">
      <onHighlightEnter menuIndex="0">
            <set duration=".3">
                <animate type="alpha" from="0" to="1" algorithm="easeinquadratic"/>
            </set>
        </onHighlightEnter>
        <onHighlightExit menuIndex="0">
            <set duration=".3">
                <animate type="alpha" from="1" to="0" algorithm="easeinquadratic"/>
            </set>
        </onHighlightExit>
  </reloadableImage>

My hope is that with this, on the main menu, when hovering "Arcade",  the image background.png or default.png from RetroFE\layouts\[LAYOUTNAME]\collections\Arcade\system_artwork\background\background.png or default.png is retrieved, but it doesn't happen.

What doesn't help is that I've modified the default configuration of RetroFE a lot. So basically instead of having the path inside of RetroFE folder, I have it outside via baseMediaPath=M:/Media/Games/Metadata, and then on the wiki it says the layout path should point to "medium_artwork" instead of "system_artwork", which means I probably renamed "medium_artwork" to "system_artwork" at some point, but I'm looking at the config files of RetroFE and I'm not seeing anywhere that points to "system_artwork" (which is the folder name I'm using)... ughh I'm so confused...

Cool, just wanted to be sure.

edit: I think this is covered by the planned UTF-8 support feature but I just wanted to report that "Pokémon Mini", "NEO・GEO CD" and "Odyssey²" can't be the name of collections because if they are logo.png (perhaps neither are the games, I didn't go that far) isn't recognized and it defaults to a boring text name .

Hope I can pick up were I left Dust: An Elysian Tail one of these days, but mostly I wanted to take the opportunity to say that RetroFE is making me play frequently again. There's not a day I don't spend at least 15 minutes spinning the wheel and picking random games from it. Haven't played consistently in years, so this is just great!

I'm jumping on this thread since it's a similar request: I'd like a combination of inputs to do something. Particularly, it's such a small detail but it bothers me that this is the only program I have that I can't close with Alt+F4. I set it to exit to "F4", but I know for a fact that I don't need to press Alt+F4 to close it, just F4, so that bothers my OCD haha...

And also sometimes I pick up the mouse and instinctively rotate the wheel expecting it to do something, but then I remember there's no input called "WheelUp" / "WheelDown"... so that would be a nice addition I think.

Yeah but I wouldn't know which ones are not-working. I wanted to temporarily use a list of only not-working games and test them one by one (maybe report back which ones I found playable in case anyone cares).

I swear I had answered this! So I was surprised to see that the game is listed as not-working, since it's very enjoyable as it is unless something happens at a later stage (only  ever played the first two ones). Any chance you could make a list with the not-working games? Hopefully only the semi-working ones, if that's a thing, cause I wanna check them one by one, but I don't wanna try completely unplayable games (although if there's not other classification than "not-working", I don't mind).