Notes/Requests after playing for a couple of days

[trk204]

First off, absolutely love the app! In fact didn't get much accomplished this weekend haha. But here are some quick notes I was taking down when playing around with it. Hardware is a s905x based android box with wired xbox360 controller.

- would love the ability to change the start+select hotkey to bring up the ingame menu. Seems most of the time it sends a start signal down the controller aswell as the start+select captured to get to the menu. More then once when saving a state I've ended up hitting start on an option I didn't want to. Personally would rather use r3+l3 (double thumbstick press), remapping of save/load state hotkeys would help too.

- ability to remap buttons per system or per game

- When searching in the default layout and using the xbox 360 controller to navigate to android on screen keyboard, pressing A will select the letter and automatically hit enter aswell. Resulting in the ability to only search for one letter. also had a mouse connected up and was able to use the on screen keyboard with the mouse fine, just always was only able to select one character with the joystick.

- stumbled onto the tv layout option, better advertisement of this or perhaps some kind of autodetect (LOVE IT THOUGH)

- in tv layout, when selecting the system and it comes up to the search box, let button X be a backspace button for the text box rather then browsing down to the del button on the search bar, might aswell make Y the space button. This search menu uses it's on keyboard on screen so wasn't effected by the issue above wrt the controller.

- Some sort of library audit ability. Curious to see what roms I have that retrox isn't recognizing. I'm not sure if there are any, just wondering how the name autodetection engine is or isn't recognizing files.

- Some sort of sub categories for systems would be great. For example on SNES, could have a USA, JAPAN, EUROPE, TRANSLATED sub sections. Possibly even genres. But definitely user creatable/edittable sections. Might clean up some of the bazillions of games when adding whole romsets.

- I'm not sure if it's just me, but the controller setup and button assignment screen is confusing. I think I have it all mapped out correctly and haven't noticed any issues. It just felt like i was hammering buttons until it worked

- I've seen it referenced in some help files of the ability to override config files on a per game basis, just wondering if there is a advanced user/under the hood docs for people to mess around with default settings. I do like that it's all mostly stupid easy for people to use, just would like the ability to tweak it a bit here and there down the road

I'm sure I'll have more after I uhmmm "test" some more

Thanks again for the great app!

[fcatrin]

Nice summary!
Some of these features have been requested in the past and I have them in my TO-DO list, I'll add the others. The main problem is that I'm the only developer right now, so priorities must be set.

- would love the ability to change the start+select hotkey to bring up the ingame menu. Seems most of the time it sends a start signal down the controller aswell as the start+select captured to get to the menu. More then once when saving a state I've ended up hitting start on an option I didn't want to. Personally would rather use r3+l3 (double thumbstick press), remapping of save/load state hotkeys would help too.

The problem is to distinguish between a keypress and a shortcut press. It's already done in all the emulators except RetroArch, because it uses the same RetroArch code to catch the shortcut which start sending the keypress the emulator (key down). In the other emulators I only send the keypress to the game if it was not a shortcut (on key up).

May be implementing this same logic will solve the problem, it's a short path compared to add alternative mappings. Also, from my experience, as you add more options to the users the harder the support, because some people just mess up their systems and then forget what they did, and you have to ask a lot of question to know what they changed and doesn't work for them.

- ability to remap buttons per system or per game

It'll be available once the mapping for computer systems is released. Only for certain systems for the reasons stated above, they should be: MAME, N64 and computer systems. All the other systems should keep their original design.

- When searching in the default layout and using the xbox 360 controller to navigate to android on screen keyboard, pressing A will select the letter and automatically hit enter aswell. Resulting in the ability to only search for one letter. also had a mouse connected up and was able to use the on screen keyboard with the mouse fine, just always was only able to select one character with the joystick.

This seems to be a problem with the chinese clone boxes that use a mobile Android version. The default is to start the search when the user press the OK/ENTER button, but guess what... those chinese boxes send an ENTER key after each Letter. Given that I enabled the end of input after the OK/ENTER is pressed may be I should enable that only on official Android TV devices like the Nvidia, Amazon and Xiaomi ones.

- stumbled onto the tv layout option, better advertisement of this or perhaps some kind of autodetect (LOVE IT THOUGH)

Currently it is autodetected for known devices: The Android TV ones, the Minix and Mojo devices (I think). Sadly Android doesn't provide enough information to know what kind of device is being used, and the common TV resolution of 1280x720 is already being reported by a lot of phone devices, so there is no reliable way to detect if your device is a TV connected one.

- in tv layout, when selecting the system and it comes up to the search box, let button X be a backspace button for the text box rather then browsing down to the del button on the search bar, might aswell make Y the space button. This search menu uses it's on keyboard on screen so wasn't effected by the issue above wrt the controller.

Good idea!

- Some sort of library audit ability. Curious to see what roms I have that retrox isn't recognizing. I'm not sure if there are any, just wondering how the name autodetection engine is or isn't recognizing files.

All games are recognized through their file extensions. Check http://retrox.tv/games
Now, for artwork, the scanner removes all non alpha and numeric characters, it also remove anything between brackets. So:

Code: Select all

Donkey Kong
Donkey-Kong
Donkey Kong [!]
Donkey Kong (JAP) [b]

The artwork for all those is searched as donkeykong in our database.

Currently we are having problems with this kind of naming inconsistencies:

Code: Select all

Aladdin
The Aladdin
Aladdin, The
Disney's Aladdin

Their artwork is searched as:

aladdin
thealaddin
aladdinthe
disneysaladdin

Only the first one will be found.

For MAME games we currently have all the existing covers, they are around 4000, of a total of 9000 working games. We recently added a logic to use the covers of the original games on the bootleg o regional versions as well, so most games should be covered. The games that are not covered is because they never had artwork, so in that case we use a generic cover.

- Some sort of sub categories for systems would be great. For example on SNES, could have a USA, JAPAN, EUROPE, TRANSLATED sub sections. Possibly even genres. But definitely user creatable/edittable sections. Might clean up some of the bazillions of games when adding whole romsets.

Current idea is to have the extra version handled separately so we could do this and also group games. For example showing only the game 1942 and inside the game details show the available versions.

- I'm not sure if it's just me, but the controller setup and button assignment screen is confusing. I think I have it all mapped out correctly and haven't noticed any issues. It just felt like i was hammering buttons until it worked

May be the onscreen instructions are not enough. Ideas for improving this are welcomed

- I've seen it referenced in some help files of the ability to override config files on a per game basis, just wondering if there is a advanced user/under the hood docs for people to mess around with default settings. I do like that it's all mostly stupid easy for people to use, just would like the ability to tweak it a bit here and there down the road

Everything is under a) Configure this game option in the game details screen and b) http://retrox.tv/docs
If you think that we should expose addtional options in a), let us know

I'm sure I'll have more after I uhmmm "test" some more
Thanks again for the great app!

This is great input, please do so!

[steviebwoy]

Quick suggestion- I think it would be nice to have a screenshot button. When you take a screenshot of a game, it becomes that game's artwork in the menu. What do you reckon?

[fcatrin]

It is already there. In most emulators pressing L3 + R3 will take a screenshot. It will be saved in the retrox.data folder.

Yes, it would be great that RetroX could let you select an screenshot from that folder, but we are not quite there yet.

[trk204]

- Some sort of sub categories for systems would be great. For example on SNES, could have a USA, JAPAN, EUROPE, TRANSLATED sub sections. Possibly even genres. But definitely user creatable/edittable sections. Might clean up some of the bazillions of games when adding whole romsets.

Current idea is to have the extra version handled separately so we could do this and also group games. For example showing only the game 1942 and inside the game details show the available versions.

i do like the ability to nest clones/available versions. Would definitely clean up the display.

But what I was envisioning was more subsections to the individual emulators. This could be implemented in a couple of ways, by default any subdirectories under the root rom directory for the system could be their own sections.
ie

Code: Select all

retrox/snes/USA/Zelda_USA.smc
retrox/snes/JAPAN/Zelda_JAPAN.smc


So now if your viewing all roms in your library, you'd see both Zeldas. Select USA category and only the USA version etc. I like dumping the whole romsets and very rarely use the japanese roms, so could use the ability to hide them most of the time. Seeing as how all the subdirs for the root rom directory are scanned already, this could be something a user could enable but have off by default.

Could also be handy for defining groups of mame games, 4 player games, side scrollers etc. Possibly create a category.conf in the root dir with some kind of simple structure to add your own custom categories, regex's for filenames. I'm sure we could get some great community collaboration curating different sections for mame especially and other systems too.

I know myself i tend to use romsets from the common collections, good* no-intro. I would imagine a good number are aswell. Do you know how the name detection system deals with the naming format in those collections? If you need a hand creating name maps i'd be glad to lend a hand.

[steviebwoy]

I must add that being able to categorise games would be great - I'd love to be able to filter all games that are "2 player co-op", or "2 player versus" for example.

[fcatrin]

Adding metadata is proposed to be a community managed info, like the ratings (not working 100% right now).

I would like the app to be able to submit such data.

We can continue this topic here:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17

[dubsmachine]

I would like all the options before loading a game to be available via the in game menu e.g screen options.
I like to try crt mode and scanline options etc but don't want to reload the game every time.

Also support for cheat menu's would be nice...sometimes you just want to be gold Sonic or turn on some crazy functions

[fcatrin]

Selecting shaders in-game would be great!

We need a list

[steviebwoy]

Cheat menus would be good - being able to unlock paintball mode and all the characters for Goldeneye 64 would be spectacular!