MiSTer FPGA Forum

Would it be possible some day to have screenshots or picture of the gamebox on the side of the name of each game?

Possible? Yes.

Desirable? Depends on who you ask. It will consume some resources and it seems pretty unnecessary.

The ARM side of the DE-10 nano is slow so it will probably make browsing the file list somewhere between noticeable slower to really slow.

grizzly wrote: ↑Tue Apr 20, 2021 5:26 am The ARM side of the DE-10 nano is slow so it will probably make browsing the file list somewhere between noticeable slower to really slow.

Much slower than e.g. emulationstation? I thought about running lxde on such device tiny screenshots shouldnt be a problem.. Or switching of the wallpaper in the main background are quite fast. But probably you are right. In any case the main menu have to overhauled completely in that way to show pictures or even gifs

grizzly wrote: ↑Tue Apr 20, 2021 5:26 am The ARM side of the DE-10 nano is slow so it will probably make browsing the file list somewhere between noticeable slower to really slow.

Depends how it's implemented. It would have to be a fully asynchronous process. When you go over an item, it begins the loading & displaying process while still listening to inputs. If a key is pressed to move to another item, it cancels the process and moves to the next item. The image loading & displaying process should not be blocking in any way.

sid wrote: ↑Tue Apr 20, 2021 12:57 pm

grizzly wrote: ↑Tue Apr 20, 2021 5:26 am The ARM side of the DE-10 nano is slow so it will probably make browsing the file list somewhere between noticeable slower to really slow.

Much slower than e.g. emulationstation? I thought about running lxde on such device tiny screenshots shouldnt be a problem.. Or switching of the wallpaper in the main background are quite fast. But probably you are right. In any case the main menu have to overhauled completely in that way to show pictures or even gifs

Emulationstation is not an ARM processor. You thought about running lxde, but have you? There is a desktop you can play with for the MiSTer --> https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_Mi ... ktop-Linux - You can see for yourself how slow it is. It is much slower than a raspberry pi 3 even, which those visually lag when you have thumbnails on in lakka/retropie, and they have a GPU (the de10-nano's ARM does not have a GPU).

It definitely could be done, just at what cost? That's the main question.

Even when I was using Retropie, which has this ability, I always had a laptop on the side with something like Gamebase running. There is just so much other media and info aside from screenshots/covers, and I much prefer MiSTer's current snappiness and simplicity, so even if there was some sort of frontend I doubt I'd use it at all.

akeley wrote: ↑Tue Apr 20, 2021 3:12 pm Even when I was using Retropie, which has this ability, I always had a laptop on the side with something like Gamebase running. There is just so much other media and info aside from screenshots/covers, and I much prefer MiSTer's current snappiness and simplicity, so even if there was some sort of frontend I doubt I'd use it at all.

Yes propably that would be a better way to select the favourites games with launchbox using emumovies (for example) and and move them to the mister sd card

I understand the appeal but I would be way more interested in a "last 20 or 30 games started" list to have quick access to my most used games or maybe just a bookmark system would be pretty cool per core and per game inside the core, or per game directly if possible.

@Neocaron There is already a recents list in each core but it's disabled by default.

This is just not practical. There are tens of thousands of different games across systems, and it would be really hard to have images for all in a standard format that could be used across MiSTer.

BYOAC forums assembled the all killer no filler list, best arcade games. I converted it to a tag list for attractmode front end. There is no reason to have thousands of games to choose from on the end device. Same applies to the MiSTer.

It's not hard to have images in a standard format. Title screen or in game screenshot would be appropriate. Could easily make a script to convert to same size and format.

Newsdee wrote: ↑Wed Apr 21, 2021 6:05 pm This is just not practical. There are tens of thousands of different games across systems, and it would be really hard to have images for all in a standard format that could be used across MiSTer.

These are not the reasons this is impractical by the way. Libretro already can be used theoretically as the repository to pull the images from, and they are already in a standard format:

https://github.com/libretro-thumbnails/ ... thumbnails

But I think there are other reasons this is undesirable or impractical. We already have the update script pull in the huge cheats files that mass unzip over a long period of time.