Need a better Front End, ideally Attract mode.

Locke

Hi all,

I have not been on the forums here mush but I was a original kick starter backer and have been checking back in from time to time.

I have seen that people have worked on better FE's but I have not been following to closely. Are there better FE options? And has any one ported Attract mode or EMU stations to PiPlay?

http://attractmode.org

Right now I'm using the Diet-pi versions of retro pi and liking it. I have even used a build that used Attract mode some one has ported over to the Diet-pi versions of retro pi and it worked great.

I don't know how bare bones the PiPly versions of Raspbian is but the Diet-pi is slime and quick. Do you think PiPlay can handle a FE as rich as Attract mode?

Ideally I would like to have the speed of Diet-pi, the fetcher of PiPlay, and Attract mode as the FE.

ian57

As far as I know attract needs X11 to run... really a mess no ?

Locke

The build I used was quit quick. It was custom made by a BYOAC member using diet-pi, retro-pi, and Attract Mode. It's amazing what how much you can get out of a computer when you strip down to the only what you need to run what you want.

Locke

This video is from the attract mode website and shows it running on the R-Pi.
https://youtu.be/YQh1Xs8HhI0

ian57

Yes, amazing with rpi1 256Mo... You can confirm it uses X? I will give it a try with the diet-pi distro... I didn't know it before.

Locke

Go here ( http://forum.attractmode.org/index.php?topic=223.0) to read more and for a direct link to his build. The first link in the first post is the download. I'd post the direct link but don't want to steel the author thunder.

Locke

Does any one have any feed back on better FE's that are already ported to PiPlay?

Thanks

ian57

Thanks Locke, I started to build my own SD with diet-pi to test attract-mode. in the link http://forum.attractmode.org/index.php?topic=223.0 the guy uses my raspicade stuff for gpio ;), that's cool.

Locke

Thats cool that you wrote that.

Nitrogen_widget is a cool guy. He a member over at BYOAC and has done some cool custom striped down Linux's designed to get the most out of MAME on older PC's with as little work t set up as posable.

I wish PiPlay had better FE's. Between Nitrogen_widget build for arcade builds and the standard Diet-pi with retro Pi for consoles PiPlay just is not as appealing at the moment. I love the simple HTML bast rom uploader but the default FE is among the worst I have ever seen. :(

Is it be posable to port a better FE over or is there a good FE out there for PiPlay I'm missing? At this point I'm thinking if I had the skills/time it would be better to port the one web uploading over to the build I like.

ian57

I've installed a minimal xorg server on dietpi, without desktop, compiled attract-mode and ran it successfully. Actually it is quite speedy. I think it's the desktop which slow down the GUI on the pi, not the X server. Need to put some roms to see how run the carousel ;)

Nitrogen_Widget

Hey guys!
THANKS!

I've got more time & now getting back into my RPI stuff.
I'll have to look into killing the desktop.
I know you can do that on linux to get more speed but didn't think of it since attract mode ran so well on my RPI1 256.

However advmame does not do well on X since SDL1 isn't accelerated. Although if you set it to overlay mode it doesn't do any scaling and seems to run same as non-x advmame.

Howdy, Stranger!

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