Kodi Community Forum

I am curious if Advanced Emulator Launcher is able to launch a PDF viewer (manuals) similar to the HyperLauncher Plugin. To show along with all the other artwork

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid...erlauncher

(2019-01-08, 18:01)mechevarria Wrote: [ -> ]I am curious if Advanced Emulator Launcher is able to launch a PDF viewer (manuals) similar to the HyperLauncher Plugin. To show along with all the other artwork

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid...erlauncher

At the moment no. However, Advanced MAME Launcher includes a PDF reader that is able to read PDF files composed of scanned images. I will port the feature from AML to AEL ASAP.

(2019-01-07, 20:12)Bedwyr Wrote: [ -> ]What method would I use to execute a W10 command to launch the Settings app? Do I need to create an executable from a batch file to make this work? (background: I can get a submenu setting in Kodi to launch Settings but unfortunately Kodi is greedy about focusing and dumps Settings to the background.)

No idea. Do you know how to open that window from the console (command line)? Once you tell me that I can help with the AEL configuration.

(2019-01-08, 23:35)Wintermute0110 Wrote: [ -> ]

(2019-01-07, 20:12)Bedwyr Wrote: [ -> ]What method would I use to execute a W10 command to launch the Settings app? Do I need to create an executable from a batch file to make this work? (background: I can get a submenu setting in Kodi to launch Settings but unfortunately Kodi is greedy about focusing and dumps Settings to the background.)

No idea. Do you know how to open that window from the console (command line)? Once you tell me that I can help with the AEL configuration.  

 From the run window it's "ms-settings:". From cmd it's "start ms-settings:". When invoked directly as a Kodi command, the app becomes a pop-under.

My guess is that because Settings operates as a Windows 10 app, it's treated exactly as News, Money, or Weather store apps. I recall vaguely I had to do some batch file trickery to invoke those apps and then turn the batch file into an exe so AEL could find it (I think it was the Netflix app).

I'm trying to get retroplayer and AEL up and running to play some NES/SNES. Tried this on a fresh install of Leia RC4 on a windows PC, with the latest dev version of AEL (0.10.0 by the looks of the changelog, commit 1743b239db529ff72a4a6af5b5448c7d29789ac3).

I added a new category ("Emulators").
Entered that category.
Added a new launcher as a ROM Launcher (Kodi Retroplayer).
Brought up the context menu to scan for roms, but got a dialog saying "Unknown command SCAN_ROMS"... can't find anything in the threads about this.

Am I doing something wrong, or is 0.10.0 really buggy atm? Getting lots of errors and what not, as you can see in the log.
If it is not usable: is that information anywhere? No mention of it in the install instructions. Might be good to put it there to save some bug reports.

Will try the stable version for now.

Here's a log: https://paste.kodi.tv/pepawaquxu.kodi

And here's a screenrecord of me trying:


Also opened an issue for this, just in case.

And, keep up the awesome work, AEL is super!

I tried 0.9.7, seems to be working for my needs. I guess the above bugs are because it's being worked on.

I have one question though: when launching a rom it asks for the core. Is there a way around that? I would like to use the same core each time.
On first launch I installed one, and there is only one installed now, yet it asks each time.. seems like a weird way of doing things, so guess it's not by design.

Or do I have to ask this to the retroplayer devs (garbear)? Perhaps it's fixed in a later rev than the official RC4..

(2019-01-11, 18:30)filigran Wrote: [ -> ]I tried 0.9.7, seems to be working for my needs. I guess the above bugs are because it's being worked on.

I have one question though: when launching a rom it asks for the core. Is there a way around that? I would like to use the same core each time.
On first launch I installed one, and there is only one installed now, yet it asks each time.. seems like a weird way of doing things, so guess it's not by design.

Or do I have to ask this to the retroplayer devs (garbear)? Perhaps it's fixed in a later rev than the official RC4..

For now 0.9.7 is the best stable version. 0.10.0 still needs some work, but it will contain many improvements. Have to look into it but I think we can perhaps fix the core issue from the AEL side.
Best to wait for 0.10.0 release.

Hello everyone!
Can someone help me?

I can not find an answer to a simple question:
What is the path to Retroarch on non-root devices?

would it be something of the genre?
"/ storage / emulated / 0 / android / data / blablablabla"

or something else?

I know it's only on root devices that you can navigate directories with the AEL, but what if I just type the path?

something like this: (retroarch path) -L /path/to/libretro/core.so

I'm using an Android Tv 8 (nougat) in a Xiaomi Mi Box.

Thanks in advance.

Cheers

(2019-01-10, 12:27)filigran Wrote: [ -> ]I'm trying to get retroplayer and AEL up and running to play some NES/SNES. Tried this on a fresh install of Leia RC4 on a windows PC, with the latest dev version of AEL (0.10.0 by the looks of the changelog, commit 1743b239db529ff72a4a6af5b5448c7d29789ac3).

I added a new category ("Emulators").
Entered that category.
Added a new launcher as a ROM Launcher (Kodi Retroplayer).
Brought up the context menu to scan for roms, but got a dialog saying "Unknown command SCAN_ROMS"... can't find anything in the threads about this.

Am I doing something wrong, or is 0.10.0 really buggy atm? Getting lots of errors and what not, as you can see in the log.
If it is not usable: is that information anywhere? No mention of it in the install instructions. Might be good to put it there to save some bug reports.

Will try the stable version for now.

Here's a log: https://paste.kodi.tv/pepawaquxu.kodi

And here's a screenrecord of me trying:


Also opened an issue for this, just in case.

And, keep up the awesome work, AEL is super!

I answered to your issue in Github. AEL is under a massive retrofitting and is highly unstable at the moment.

This Xmas I didn't have time for coding but I hope that now that I'm back home I will have some spare time to continue with AEL. Now the only thing that works well is the context menu "Edit Category" and "Edit Launcher". It uses a new recursive logic (thanks to Chrisism) and allows to edit as many things as you want without having to open the context menu again and again. To the best of my knowledge AEL is the first Kodi addon with this feature. On the outside AEL 0.10.0 will look pretty much as 0.9.7 but on the inside almost all of the AEL code has been rewritten.

Please wait until I publish a beta of 0.10.0 with some release notes.

(2019-01-16, 15:01)sagrath Wrote: [ -> ]Hello everyone!
Can someone help me?

I can not find an answer to a simple question:
What is the path to Retroarch on non-root devices?

would it be something of the genre?
"/ storage / emulated / 0 / android / data / blablablabla"

or something else?

I know it's only on root devices that you can navigate directories with the AEL, but what if I just type the path?

something like this: (retroarch path) -L /path/to/libretro/core.so

I'm using an Android Tv 8 (nougat) in a Xiaomi Mi Box.

Thanks in advance.

Cheers

No idea about the info you are looking for, I don't have an Android machine to test.

If Kodi has filesystem permission in Android in theory should be able to read your storage partition, right? Maybe you should open a bug report to Kodi core asking for Kodi to request filesystem access permission. Any Android expert can give us some inputs about this

(2019-01-17, 10:22)Wintermute0110 Wrote: [ -> ]If Kodi has filesystem permission in Android in theory should be able to read your storage partition, right?

Yes, in theory. But this is a limitation of the android itself, which does not allow access to a certain part of the file system. And as Retroarch is installed just in this blind area, only if the device had root so I could access that area.

if someone who already uses the Advanced Emulator Launcher in android with retroarch could send me the xml of some launcher I could already solve this situation. Cheers

(2019-01-17, 12:12)sagrath Wrote: [ -> ]

(2019-01-17, 10:22)Wintermute0110 Wrote: [ -> ]If Kodi has filesystem permission in Android in theory should be able to read your storage partition, right?

Yes, in theory. But this is a limitation of the android itself, which does not allow access to a certain part of the file system. And as Retroarch is installed just in this blind area, only if the device had root so I could access that area.

if someone who already uses the Advanced Emulator Launcher in android with retroarch could send me the xml of some launcher I could already solve this situation. Cheers  

 Here we go. So since we were busy building in Retroarch support directly I encountered some of these issues too with Android. I myself run it on a NVidia Shield and I noticed that there are some differences between Android boxes/versions, so it might be different for your case.
First you can check the AEL assets library on Github, https://github.com/Wintermute0110/AEL-as...%20Android. You can find some launcher configurations for Android there.
I have the following paths for you to try out:

• /storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.retroarch/
  
• /data/data/com.retroarch/
  
• /storage/sdcard0/Android/data/com.retroarch/
  
• /data/user/0/com.retroarch/
  

(2019-01-18, 12:54)chrisism Wrote: [ -> ]I have the following paths for you to try out:

Yes, i've check this xml's before, but i'm confused with the path "<application>/system/bin/am</application>"  and the lot of arguments.

But I will try theses paths.

One last question:

There's no need to put the retroarch executable in the end of the path like windows?

Exemple: 
In windows is "C:\Retroarch\retroach.exe"

In android is only:
"/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.retroarch/"  or
"/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.retroarch/blablabla.??"

(sorry, but i'm a very new in android)

Hey there, NVIDIA Shield user here too. I've managed to do this without root. You should use something similar to this in the launcher config:

<application>/system/bin/am</application>
<args>start --user 0 -a android.intent.action.MAIN -c android.intent.category.LAUNCHER -e ROM "%rom%" -e LIBRETRO /data/data/com.retroarch/cores/picodrive_libretro_android.so -e CONFIGFILE sdcard/Android/data/com.retroarch/files/retroarch.cfg -e IME com.android.inputmethod.latin/.LatinIME -n com.retroarch/.browser.retroactivity.RetroActivityFuture</args>

What you're doing with the command and arguments is simulating what a home launcher would do:
/system/bin/am is the activity manager from Android which is pretty much the thing that actually does the starting of the program.
The arguments itself is a mix of a few things: It gives over the start command and starts the activity through the LAUNCHER intent. The LAUNCHER intent is what makes the app know what to do when you're starting from your home screen on your phone/tablet/Mi.
There are two reasons for why we're doing this:
1. The installed APK of an app actually gets extracted on installation and the executable dex is moved to dalvik-cache (see [url="https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/5147/the-installation-steps-of-android-package"]this tiny explanation[/url]) which is the thing that Android knows what com.retroarch is.
2. Apps has to be used as generally Android apps can have different activites for when it's booted for specific situations (standard is DEFAULT and LAUNCHER) so we have to specify this.

This is pretty much the reason why with the combination of /system/bin/am and the arguments you're able to boot up apps without root.

You can mix and match this up with anything (best way would be to google). For example for Yabause I'm ujsing this:
<application>/system/bin/am</application>
<args>start --user 0 -n org.uoyabause.uranus/org.uoyabause.android.Yabause -a android.intent.action.MAIN -c android.intent.category.LAUNCHER -e org.uoyabause.android.FileNameEx "$rom$"</args>

Now for the permission question:
The app has to ask for permissions at start first. That's indicated by the pop up asking "Allow xxxx to access photos, media, and fies on your device?". If you say yes then:
- The app has full read permissions on the whole drive.
- The app has limited write permissions on the external drive. This is for example /data/com.retroarch
I've been able to get AEL to access a ROM folder on my drive and let RetroArch load the ROMs just fine. It's always important that if there's anything that needs to be rewritable, like a config file, you have to use the designated /data/ folder.

(2019-01-18, 19:03)TheTimeWalker Wrote: [ -> ]You can mix and match this up with anything (best way would be to google). For example for Yabause I'm ujsing this:

Ok, let's clarify:

Follow the exemple of Yabause, I just need to replace some text:

  <platform>Nintendo SNES</platform>
  <categoryID>root_category</categoryID>
  <application>/system/bin/am</application> <-- Keep this with this path
  <args>start --user 0 -n com.retroarch -a android.intent.action.MAIN -c android.intent.category.LAUNCHER -e com.retroarch.FileNameEx "$rom$"</args> 
  <rompath>/my/rom/path/</rompath>
  <romext>smc</romext>