Front-End Question
  • fsa317
    Having fund playing around with PiPlay. As I've been googling I keep running into references to RetroPie and EmulationStation. From what I can tell RetroPie is an alternative to PiPlay (not a complement) and EmulationStation is potentially an alternative front end for each. Is this correct? Can emulation stations be used with PiPlay? Anyone have thoughts on that?

    More specifically I was looking to change the interface so that the roms weren't displayed to the user as a list after selecting an emulator but just as a list of games (images) and then let the selection determine which emulator to run. Do anyone of the technologies support that better than others? I dont mind getting my hands dirty and coding a little if necessary just would hate to waste time if a better solution exists.
  • mholgatemmholgatem
    You won't be able to get Piplay and retropie running together. Piplay uses raspbian while retropie uses arch Linux. It would be pretty easy to modify Piplay to do what you want. I'm on my cell phone right now, so i can't go into a lot of detail right now. How many roms are we talking? Like a handful or a couple hundred?
  • fsa317
    Hmm, when I read up on retropie it said "The project uses Raspbian as OS at the bottom and integrates a large set of emulators for a wide variety of computer systems from the past decades" so I figured the architecture of the two (piplay and retro were similar).

    Personally I'd prefer to stick with PiPlay as I got it running and the support int he forums has been great :-)

    I probably plan to have 50-100 roms total. Right now I'm just trying to understand what the fundamental pros and cons of the various options are, probably wont get to doing any modifications for a bit.
  • mholgatemmholgatem
    Hmmm.... Maybe i was wrong on that. I was pretty sure that they used arch Linux. But after checking again, you are indeed correct. So it could be possible. You would need to install several things to get them both working.
  • fsa317
    Yea, not really worth it unless there was some substantial benefit. I think right now I'm not getting any meta data from the scraper so my user interface looks pretty dull which had me looking into what other tools I could use. Have you tried using emulation station with piplay?
  • mholgatemmholgatem
    The information is out there, the problem is the code to display it is not fully written into piplay (yet). That is actually the project that I am working on right now.
  • fsa317
    When you mentioned the information, do you mean the game data or how to configure PiPlay the way I mentioned (showing a list of games)?
  • mholgatemmholgatem
    The game data. When I wrote the scraper, I included the code to grab game info as well. The problem is that as of right now, we have no code for displaying that info in piplay.

    That's what I'm working on right now. I'm putting everything into a database that will be stored locally. So pretty soon we will not only have descriptions, but also the ability to sort games based on genre, # of players, co-op ability, publisher, or developer.
Add a Comment

Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

Sign In Apply for Membership

Categories

Recommended Accessories