Interaction with Emulation Station

[petrockblog]

Hi Aloshi,

I would like to hear your opinion about the interaction between Emulation Station and ES-config. Is ES-config supposed to be called from within ES?

[Aloshi]

ES and ES-config are meant to be able to stand by themselves, not requiring each other, but I do think I will add some way of launching ES-config from within EmulationStation if it is detected.

I see two good options for doing so:

• Accept a command-line argument such as --es-cfg-launch-cmd [command] that is invoked by system([command]) when "Configure Emulators" is selected in the menu (only shown when argument supplied).
• Add an ES-CONFIG-COMMAND= option to es_systems.cfg that works similarly.

I'd like to keep the ability to launch ES-config with command line arguments, so a plug-and-play distribution can choose where to put ES-config resources.

[petrockblog]

Do you feel that ES-config can already be used included into the RetroPie Project? I have the feeling that this would be a great feature for many people.

[Aloshi]

Right now, it's really missing:

• A way to "move" config files. Right now they're just basically hard-coded to be dropped in the working directory. I think the most flexible way to fix this is to add an "options" XML document you can pass in the path to through a command line argument.
• More fleshed-out input configuration scripts. I think RetroArch still needs the rest of the PS1 inputs, and maybe some hotkeys. I'm also missing scripts for some popular emulators - in particular, I'd like to add gpSP.
• Back up existing config files (e.g. rename them to ".bak"), don't just clobber them.
• Integration with ES (pretty simple).

I'm currently working on a project unrelated to the Pi, but I also need to track down a nasty crash bug that's been reported with ES when returning to games. I also have a sizable UI backend rewrite planned for ES. I haven't forgotten about ES-config, but these other things are kind of a priority right now. Sorry!

[petrockblog]

Thank you for you answer, I was just curious!

[petrockblog]

I added ES-Config to the RetroPie Script some time ago and also put it to the recent version of the SD-card image. From my point of view we could close this issue.