MiSTer Extensions - Remote

[wizzo]

Are directories under "Menu" supposed to be scrollable (by touch)? Can't seem to get scrolling working on my iPad.

I also noticed that scrolling thru the folders in the "Menu" section doesn't seem to be working on my iPad. I think this might be broken in other areas like the ini settings, although I'm not sure how many sections had stuff further down below the bottom of the display. Other than that everything else seems to be working well as far as I can tell. Having access to scripts from the main screen is awesome, especially being able to star the ones that are used most frequently to put them at the top. Very nice touch!

It occurred to me that I also have an iPad and I could try this. I get the same behaviour. That's really strange. I have to say the performance is pretty poor too compared to my Android phone and even my old iPhone. No such issue on my iPhone either, I usually test with that. I couldn't find a quick fix for the behaviour so you'll have to leave it with me for now sorry, but I'll get to the bottom of it.

Holding down the arrow buttons works great and is very responsive. The page up/down buttons also work well too, although holding those down does not allow you to skip multiple pages. I'm assuming they aren't supposed to right?

Remote looks fantastic and fits very well on my larger iPad Pro. Everything is clear and easy to read. It can save a lot of time trying to navigate menus with the controller which is definitely a bonus.

Looks awesome! Some tweaks to make the responsive layout better suited to a tablet but overall seems alright. The page up and down buttons certainly could have the hold functionality added if you think it'd be good. I was about to make all the buttons work like this but I stopped and went oh this could be a bad idea for some of them.

I think I'm gonna take a little break for a while too. I hope everything works well enough as is. Still about a million things on the todo list for it.

[MiSTer Consoles]

I don’t necessarily think the page up/down buttons need that hold functionality unless others want it. Definitely take a break so you don’t get burned out. You have been pushing out these releases like a madman! The scrolling thing doesn’t seem like a big deal to me and the current state of Remote appears to be working great overall.

[wizzo]

The scrolling is fixed! I hope. You should get a hotfix update. Ok now I'm taking a break lol

[MiSTer Consoles]

The scrolling is fixed! I hope. You should get a hotfix update. Ok now I'm taking a break lol

Tested this morning and it's working great. The ini pages were definitely impacted by that issue and some settings were not available for us iPad users. Thanks for making the update. Appreciate you taking the time to fix that!

[heinzgruber]

hi,
i really like your tool. I tried to set some games as favorites with the shortcut function. but unfortunately it destroyed all my previous set Arcade shortcuts. When i selcet an entry and start it nothing happens. That was hours of work. All other shortcuts (SNES, NES ...) are still working. Any idea what is happening?

Thanks

edit:
Okay. i've opended the favorites script and now it's working like before!

is it possible to shortcut neo geo games?

[wizzo]

hi,
i really like your tool. I tried to set some games as favorites with the shortcut function. but unfortunately it destroyed all my previous set Arcade shortcuts. When i selcet an entry and start it nothing happens. That was hours of work. All other shortcuts (SNES, NES ...) are still working. Any idea what is happening?

Thanks

edit:
Okay. i've opended the favorites script and now it's working like before!

is it possible to shortcut neo geo games?

Hi. Sorry about the scare! What probably happened is that arcade shortcuts needs a special link alongside them called "cores" that points to all the arcade rbf files. I recently made a change that makes remote clean those links up if it thinks they aren't required, but I guess it misjudged that. The favorites script is much more liberal about creating them and doesn't attempt to clean up after.

Would you mind uploading a screenshot of the folder with the arcade shortcuts where it happened? I should be able to work out what went wrong and fix it.

Currently if you want neogeo support you need to use games that are in the .neo file format, not the more common folder format. I'll be adding support for that eventually but it probably won't happen for a while (it's a pretty significant change)

[heinzgruber]

Would you mind uploading a screenshot of the folder with the arcade shortcuts where it happened? I should be able to work out what went wrong and fix it.

here you go:

[fierman]

The latest update somehow broke the main control arrows (u/d/r/l) in my browser (firefox) on desktop. Still works fine in opera mobile. Wonder what could have caused that.

[TheSunnyMachine]

The search function won't generate a file with anything inside of it. It's literally 0kb in file size. I have tried deleting it multiple times.

I have deleted the larger collections of games, games with many folders, and even tried moving games into the main folder to test if anything shows up.

Something is causing the file to not populate with any information, and I am not sure how I can fix it. Just wanted to report the issue. Let me know if there is anything I can try, or that I can provide for troubleshooting.

[wizzo]

The latest update somehow broke the main control arrows (u/d/r/l) in my browser (firefox) on desktop. Still works fine in opera mobile. Wonder what could have caused that.

Thanks for mentioning it was on firefox desktop! I think I worked it out. I have to fix a couple other issues before I do a release so you can try it here:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/051gwpny ... ivxof&dl=0

I'm really not sure why it only cropped up this release. I'd have expected it to always be this way since I added button holding. Weird!

The search function won't generate a file with anything inside of it. It's literally 0kb in file size. I have tried deleting it multiple times.

I have deleted the larger collections of games, games with many folders, and even tried moving games into the main folder to test if anything shows up.

Something is causing the file to not populate with any information, and I am not sure how I can fix it. Just wanted to report the issue. Let me know if there is anything I can try, or that I can provide for troubleshooting.

Can you please upload your log file for me or paste it here. Do a generate index first in the search page. Then go to Settings > Remote > Download log button. That should show me where it's looking thanks! Where do you store your games normally?

[fierman]

The latest update somehow broke the main control arrows (u/d/r/l) in my browser (firefox) on desktop. Still works fine in opera mobile. Wonder what could have caused that.

Thanks for mentioning it was on firefox desktop! I think I worked it out. I have to fix a couple other issues before I do a release so you can try it here:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/051gwpny ... ivxof&dl=0

Thank you. Desktop controls work fine in this release!

[djsquare]

This is a great addition and very useful. I do have a question though that I noticed looking through the menu. How is it possible that all MiSTers have the same MAC address? That seems really strange as MAC address are supposed to be unique per device. I have three MiSTers on the same VLAN. Can anyone else elaborate on this?

[wizzo]

This is a great addition and very useful. I do have a question though that I noticed looking through the menu. How is it possible that all MiSTers have the same MAC address? That seems really strange as MAC address are supposed to be unique per device. I have three MiSTers on the same VLAN. Can anyone else elaborate on this?

My understanding is that the ethernet on the de10 nano does not have a hardware MAC address at all. So by default the mister image will set it to 02:03:04:05:06, but you can also configure it yourself through a setting that Remote exposes.

Hopefully this will be a thing of the past anyway. Recently I got a change into Mr fusion that will auto generate one during first boot.

I can't explain why your setup is fine! If you use wifi this won't apply. Or maybe your router is doing some clever stuff to handle it. For most people though it will just mean none of the MiSTers will connect

[djsquare]

This is a great addition and very useful. I do have a question though that I noticed looking through the menu. How is it possible that all MiSTers have the same MAC address? That seems really strange as MAC address are supposed to be unique per device. I have three MiSTers on the same VLAN. Can anyone else elaborate on this?

My understanding is that the ethernet on the de10 nano does not have a hardware MAC address at all. So by default the mister image will set it to 02:03:04:05:06, but you can also configure it yourself through a setting that Remote exposes.

Hopefully this will be a thing of the past anyway. Recently I got a change into Mr fusion that will auto generate one during first boot.

I can't explain why your setup is fine! If you use wifi this won't apply. Or maybe your router is doing some clever stuff to handle it. For most people though it will just mean none of the MiSTers will connect

I guess I'm just not understanding. The DE10-nano should have a unique MAC address since it uses a physical Ethernet port. All my MiSTers are hardwired in but when I try to look up the the vendor for the MAC address I can't find anything so that tells me that they're all spoofed. All 3 of these MiSTers have queue MAC address

MiSTer A: a6:71:92:16:38:27
MiSTer B: ca:ae:e6:2a:e9:0d
MiSTer C: 02:03:04:05:06:07 <-lol wtf

so yeah these are for sure not real MAC address since the MAC Prefix are all over the place. Oh well, as long as we have layer 2 connectivity I suppose it really doesn't matter.

[vorvek]

Is there any way to expose/change what folders the script uses to search for games? Most of my games are in a NAS mounted through CIFS, I can't find a way to index those.

[wizzo]

I guess I'm just not understanding. The DE10-nano should have a unique MAC address since it uses a physical Ethernet port. All my MiSTers are hardwired in but when I try to look up the the vendor for the MAC address I can't find anything so that tells me that they're all spoofed. All 3 of these MiSTers have queue MAC address

Didn't make sense to me at first either but yeah that's just how it is right now! Dunno if there's an alternative.

Is there any way to expose/change what folders the script uses to search for games? Most of my games are in a NAS mounted through CIFS, I can't find a way to index those.

It should index "/media/fat/cifs" and "/media/fat/cifs/games" as they're the standard folders. Are you using a different folder for the mount? I can always add a setting in remote's ini file to add search locations.

[vorvek]

Is there any way to expose/change what folders the script uses to search for games? Most of my games are in a NAS mounted through CIFS, I can't find a way to index those.

It should index "/media/fat/cifs" and "/media/fat/cifs/games" as they're the standard folders. Are you using a different folder for the mount? I can always add a setting in remote's ini file to add search locations.

Yeah. I set it up long ago, more or less when cifs support came out, so I'm not sure if there was a standard back then, but I can change it anyway. I'm currently using /media/fat/games/_CIFS so that it appears at the top of the list when I move back one level from the default system folder. Also, in my NAS I don't use the default MiSTer naming conventions for the folders (ie, instead of having a folder called "NES", I have one called "Nintendo - NES & Famicom"), will that matter?

[wizzo]

Yeah. I set it up long ago, more or less when cifs support came out, so I'm not sure if there was a standard back then, but I can change it anyway. I'm currently using /media/fat/games/_CIFS so that it appears at the top of the list when I move back one level from the default system folder. Also, in my NAS I don't use the default MiSTer naming conventions for the folders (ie, instead of having a folder called "NES", I have one called "Nintendo - NES & Famicom"), will that matter?

Ahh yeah that will be a big problem I'm afraid. I can't perfectly figure out what files are for what system without knowing for sure the user's intent, so that's why I use strict directory names for the systems. By the way, I believe if "cifs" is the only games folder you use, mister will actually select it for you by default and do what you want with the underscore.

There's a few ways to work around this:

• I'd suggest trying out symlinks first to the official names. I'm pretty sure remote will still accept a symlink and scan them. But please try it on one games folder first and test before you go to the trouble of making 50 symlinks.

• I can add a section to the remote.ini file where you can specify the alternative games folder location and system folder names. Then you don't have to change your share setup at all. I'll try fit it in the next release but I can't give you an exact timeline on it.

• Just rename all your stuff to match the official naming scheme.

It's your preference. I'm totally happy to add something to support custom folders. But basically with the current version this will never scan your games sorry!

[TheSunnyMachine]

Can you please upload your log file for me or paste it here. Do a generate index first in the search page. Then go to Settings > Remote > Download log button. That should show me where it's looking thanks! Where do you store your games normally?

Looks like there's a couple errors in the log:

1969/12/31 16:00:11 ERROR failed to start mdns service, retrying: could not determine host IP addresses
1969/12/31 16:00:17 INFO registered mdns service with hostname: MiSTer
2023/07/28 17:29:15 INFO started network discovery service
2023/07/28 17:30:05 ERROR search games: reading index: stat /media/fat/search.db: no such file or directory
2023/07/28 17:30:05 INFO received message: getIndexStatus
2023/07/28 17:30:06 ERROR search games: reading index: stat /media/fat/search.db: no such file or directory
2023/07/28 17:30:09 ERROR search games: reading index: stat /media/fat/search.db: no such file or directory

I ran the generate index function fresh with no file on the mister. The file does get created, but it's empty and has 0kb file size. I am also noticing that the remote.ini file for remote isn't being created in the scripts folder. Maybe something to do with the mDNS error.

No ini file.png (3.54 KiB) Viewed 11674 times

Either way it seems to not be able to see the search.db file, even though it is there.

Mister Files.png (31.74 KiB) Viewed 11674 times

I wonder why it's having trouble reading/writing the file.

Edit:
I updated the script from the github, just in case something was weird with my setup... I re-ran the search index and downloaded the log again.. This time no errors, but search still doesn't find games and the file is still 0kb

Remote Log 3 - After update.txt

(11.48 KiB) Downloaded 267 times

Gonna keep trying things, like uninstalling and reinstalling the script.

[vorvek]

There's a few ways to work around this:

• I'd suggest trying out symlinks first to the official names. I'm pretty sure remote will still accept a symlink and scan them. But please try it on one games folder first and test before you go to the trouble of making 50 symlinks.

• I can add a section to the remote.ini file where you can specify the alternative games folder location and system folder names. Then you don't have to change your share setup at all. I'll try fit it in the next release but I can't give you an exact timeline on it.

• Just rename all your stuff to match the official naming scheme.

It's your preference. I'm totally happy to add something to support custom folders. But basically with the current version this will never scan your games sorry!

Thank you. I'll try with symlinks this weekend and come back with my results!

[wizzo]

Thank you. I'll try with symlinks this weekend and come back with my results!

Sounds good! Fingers crossed.

I wonder why it's having trouble reading/writing the file.

Thank you, that's great. But I don't see anything particularly weird going on here

You can ignore the mdns error. That just means remote started up a little before your network was fully connected.

My hunch is that the index is generating correctly, but something is going wrong on the last step when it tries to copy it to the SD card. When you have some time, could you please try this new version? It won't fix the problem, but it has much more substantial logging and error checking. Just copy the unzipped file to the scripts folder, power cycle your mister (or press the restart remote service button from Settings > Remote page), try generate index again and download the log again. Just need the log. Thank you!

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/o1u06pt5 ... mne11&dl=0

[TheSunnyMachine]

Thank you, that's great. But I don't see anything particularly weird going on here

You can ignore the mdns error. That just means remote started up a little before your network was fully connected.

My hunch is that the index is generating correctly, but something is going wrong on the last step when it tries to copy it to the SD card. When you have some time, could you please try this new version? It won't fix the problem, but it has much more substantial logging and error checking. Just copy the unzipped file to the scripts folder, power cycle your mister (or press the restart remote service button from Settings > Remote page), try generate index again and download the log again. Just need the log. Thank you!

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/o1u06pt5 ... mne11&dl=0

2023/07/28 18:53:24 INFO index: found 0 files for all systems

Here's an example of one of my games directory:

media/fat/games/NES

NES Games Folder.png (23.94 KiB) Viewed 11634 times

The weird thing is sometimes the indexing takes a min or two, and other times it just flies through super fast. It often gets stuck on a Console for a min or two as well. Then it will suddenly finish.

[wizzo]

The weird thing is sometimes the indexing takes a min or two, and other times it just flies through super fast. It often gets stuck on a Console for a min or two as well. Then it will suddenly finish.

Can you do one more time please, that narrowed it down a bit:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qf5uvzez ... 25u1m&dl=0

Sorry for the mess around, I appreciate you taking the time to test it out.

I don't think this is the reason but if you want to be sure, you can see exactly what files get indexed here:

https://github.com/wizzomafizzo/mrext/b ... ems.md#nes

Subfolders don't matter, it will scan however deep it needs. I just find it very unlikely that every single one of your games folders are not in the right format. There's something else going on!

[TheSunnyMachine]

The weird thing is sometimes the indexing takes a min or two, and other times it just flies through super fast. It often gets stuck on a Console for a min or two as well. Then it will suddenly finish.

Can you do one more time please, that narrowed it down a bit:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qf5uvzez ... 25u1m&dl=0

Sorry for the mess around, I appreciate you taking the time to test it out.

I don't think this is the reason but if you want to be sure, you can see exactly what files get indexed here:

https://github.com/wizzomafizzo/mrext/b ... ems.md#nes

Subfolders don't matter, it will scan however deep it needs. I just find it very unlikely that every single one of your games folders are not in the right format. There's something else going on!

Looks like it might have something to do with my ao486 directory.

2023/07/28 19:55:37 ERROR index: getting all files: lstat /media/usb0/games/ao486: no such file or directory

Alpha 2 - remote.log

(9.39 KiB) Downloaded 280 times

I had an issue last year where the directory wouldn't load correctly in ao486. I renamed the directory on my USB drive to AO486 from ao486 and that solved the issue for some reason.

I just renamed the directory back to lowercase, ao486, regenerated the index... and guess what... Search is working again. And it seems the core is also reading my hard drive folder just fine as well.

SO... there's a case sensitive thing going on. This time when I went generated the index it also said it was creating the database, which was a new message.

Here's the log after I changed the folder case:

Alpha 2 WORKING log - remote.log

(18.41 KiB) Downloaded 277 times

[wizzo]

Looks like it might have something to do with my ao486 directory.

2023/07/28 19:55:37 ERROR index: getting all files: lstat /media/usb0/games/ao486: no such file or directory
Alpha 2 - remote.log

I had an issue last year where the directory wouldn't load correctly in ao486. I renamed the directory on my USB drive to AO486 from ao486 and that solved the issue for some reason.

I just renamed the directory back to lowercase, ao486, regenerated the index... and guess what... Search is working again. And it seems the core is also reading my hard drive folder just fine as well.

SO... there's a case sensitive thing going on. This time when I went generated the index it also said it was creating the database, which was a new message.

Here's the log after I changed the folder case: Alpha 2 WORKING log - remote.log

Great!! Ok that makes sense now. I'm glad the workaround is not too much trouble. I'm surprised to hear the case is affecting this, because I recall a long time ago testing this out and it should work no matter what the case is.

Anyway, I am going to investigate that and fix the case sensitivity handling so if you want you could rename it back. I'll have it in the next full release. I'll also make it so that a single failing system scan shouldn't make everything fail. That's pretty silly.

In the meantime it's no issue to continue using the alpha2 build, it will automatically update when I've released a new one on update_all

[vorvek]

Symlinks seemed to do the trick. Initially they didn't, but I found out that Synology disables them by default for shared folders. Once I enabled them for SMB in my NAS everything worked as expected.

[wizzo]

Symlinks seemed to do the trick. Initially they didn't, but I found out that Synology disables them by default for shared folders. Once I enabled them for SMB in my NAS everything worked as expected.

Nice! Thanks for testing that. I'm going to add some remote.ini options next release to customise all the scan paths too. Honestly that'll be as much effort as creating symlinks but at least the option is there if you like a clean folder

[breiztiger]

hi

do you think it's possible to have delete fonction in wallpaper like in screenshot ?

thanks in advance

[MiSTer Consoles]

The Remote app has become a very powerful tool for editing ini files, creating shortcuts, etc. Is it possible that down the road it could have full file management functionality in order to replace having to SSH or FTP from a PC into your MiSTer in order to move files around, edit certain files like script ini files, delete files (as breiztiger has suggested), etc?

[wizzo]

do you think it's possible to have delete fonction in wallpaper like in screenshot ?

Sure. I can probably fit a wallpaper delete button in the next release same as screenshots. I had bulk deletion planned eventually but that'll have to wait.

The Remote app has become a very powerful tool for editing ini files, creating shortcuts, etc. Is it possible that down the road it could have full file management functionality in order to replace having to SSH or FTP from a PC into your MiSTer in order to move files around, edit certain files like script ini files, delete files (as breiztiger has suggested), etc?

Sort of, but not quite like having a generic file browser and text editor. I want to avoid this if possible because I think there's a better solution. I'd also like to avoid adding arbitrary code execution to the API remote publishes.

I want to take each feature as it comes and implement it separately. So for example:

• Instead of a generic file browser/uploader, I want to proper games browser with the ability to upload game files.

• I don't want to be able upload script files, but how about a UI to manage repos downloader uses (like update_all does but more generic).

• Instead of renaming _samba.sh in a file browser, there should be checkbox in the settings page to turn on samba.

And so on like that. It's never going to cover 100% of cases, but I think it would come pretty close.