Retro Fe, the future?

[klopjero]

Hi, I'm new, well depends on how you look at it. I consider myself new.

I'm learning to code, sort off, I try to. my goal is to be able to contribute at some point, coding wise.

I like this front end, it can be greatly customised. but I keep asking my self, what would make this frontend even better?
It's cross platform, it's opensource, it has a community full of creative people that are able to either make a theme using code or make apps that makes setting up retroFe easier.

So I wonder, and at the same time I'm afraid that what I will list will come over as critisism or perhaps whiny or otherwise demanding.
If I look at say emulation station, they have a build in scraper. that's an awesome feature.
and if you look at Launchbox, it has this awesome features that scans your computer for PC games
Hyperspin has those awesome transitions that whoosh you from one system to the next. this is masking that chunky and abrupt theme loading ofcourse but it does look snazzy.

Practical feature would be, for windows users at least I suppose some graphical user interface for managing and configuring the FE. Linux users are happy using the terminal I suppose.
Another Practical feature would be a graphical WYSIWYG theme builder.
To be able to mark games as favorites from retrofe it self.

I'm not even sure why I post this here, as most of these things have been mentioned earlier..

[Pieter Hulshoff]

Most of that's on the to-do list already; I could certainly use a few extra hands coding though.
You can already mark games as favorites from RetroFE; just assign and press the keys accordingly.

I'm not that impressed with scrapers in general. Sure, they can pull in a lot of artwork, but in general it's not nearly as good as the material that can be found at sites like HyperSpin and EmuMovies. I'd much rather work together with truRIP to get complete sets ready for people to download; it's much quicker, and generally more accurate as well.

[klopjero]

I suppose that's true, but what I would say is a real time saver is the meta data that can be pulled from those sites. Reviews, game description, that sort of information is. would be cool if you could write review in retro-fe and it would show up on the website... But let's get brainstorming.

[Pieter Hulshoff]

True, though truRIP already supplies all the metadata through their (super)dat files. I'm sure they could use some help though, especially in the art gathering department. Complete sets for people to download, perhaps with filtered include.txt files so people can filter out certain types of games, that would be ideal to me.

[klopjero]

Okay but consider for a moment that you are someone who just found out about emulation. And you have the Roms already that you want and you found out about retrofe. And in order to fully unlock the awesome that is retrofe you're forced to download gigabytes of Roms..after which you need to manually sort the artwork and find out where to place this thing called a superdat file  it's not very user friendly.. what would be great if trurip was wiorking on an API that would give access to the same information....if anyone else has a great idea please pitch in

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[Pieter Hulshoff]

Well, the idea is to have a single point of download, and simply provide drag-and-drop material. That way a (new) user doesn't have to figure anything out; just download, and enjoy. Kinda like I did with the EmuMovies set (including preconfigured emulator), but then one step further.

[Pieter Hulshoff]

Having a separate scraping tool might be useful though.

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[klopjero]

Yes! what a great idea. what about a plugin system :p

[Pieter Hulshoff]

I know Emb was working on a LUA plugin system, but it's not really my area of expertise, so I'd either need some help on this one or time to figure it out.

[klopjero]

1.4 — A first look at functions and return values

Yes I'm slow. 

[NeoID]

I love the way RetroFE works. I've been using HyperSpin and Launchbox and I'm not particular fond of any of them.. for the reason klopjero mentions in his first post.
HyperSpin had a lot of issues when I last used it 3 years ago and I was never particular fond of all those animations... it's just too much in my opinion. Launchbox/Bigbox is even more terrible with the way you have to import the roms and I feel you completely loose control of your roms and media. While I love working in Visual Studio, I actually prefer the simple XML themes RetroFE uses.

There's not much I miss except search and a plugin system would also be awesome. However, I've made a small application myself that adds proper search, coins, rfid and retroboxCP (my fork of cpwizard) support to RetroFE and it works amazing. I've also made a scraper that is way more advanced and better then the one in emulationstation, but I haven't yet released it. One of the problems is that I don't want to write the information (like player count and such) to the meta.db file as I consider this just a cache. I could update the XML files, but I'm not particular interested in that either. I'll try to make a proof of concept video of it soon.

Just keep up the good work Pieter!

[klopjero]

Looking forward to your demonstration. and I'm curios what you use the RFIDs for.

Yes the way Launchbox starts eating all of the assets is a weird design choice, it's optional though ( I think). Pointing the program to the ROM path should be enough. and I understand the appeal of flat file theme-ing. But you have to admit that it could be daunting for people who are not so skilled at coding.

[cassette]

I love the way RetroFE works. I've been using HyperSpin and Launchbox and I'm not particular fond of any of them.. for the reason klopjero mentions in his first post.
HyperSpin had a lot of issues when I last used it 3 years ago and I was never particular fond of all those animations... it's just too much in my opinion. Launchbox/Bigbox is even more terrible with the way you have to import the roms and I feel you completely loose control of your roms and media. While I love working in Visual Studio, I actually prefer the simple XML themes RetroFE uses.

There's not much I miss except search and a plugin system would also be awesome. However, I've made a small application myself that adds proper search, coins, rfid and retroboxCP (my fork of cpwizard) support to RetroFE and it works amazing. I've also made a scraper that is way more advanced and better then the one in emulationstation, but I haven't yet released it. One of the problems is that I don't want to write the information (like player count and such) to the meta.db file as I consider this just a cache. I could update the XML files, but I'm not particular interested in that either. I'll try to make a proof of concept video of it soon.

Just keep up the good work Pieter!

Wow, this sounds really good, excited over here to see where this leads too!