[Wintermute0110]

Good points, Makes sense!

Maybe one day Kodi can get a file association editor

Do we really need a file association editor? When you add a source you should be able to select the type "Games" and not "Movies" or "Videos" or whatever. Hence, depending on the source contents Kodi should be able to know whether a ISO file is a movie or a game.

Another question is ... should it be good that in addition to "Games" also the platform should be specified as a source property? Or maybe a NFO file on each directory ROMs are located?

[Wintermute0110]

That's just a temporary measure until ROM parsing or game library is figured out. RP should be adapted to the de facto standards of the existing emulation community, not the other way around. That would require an extra step for a lot of users, especially trying to zip hundreds or thousands of ROMS. It would be like asking everyone who wants to watch videos to use mkv.

Also, some cores do not support zip files.

I have to disagree with this... the "de facto" standard in the community is to have all ROMs zipped with the maximum compression ratio. All ROM managers (CLRMamePro, ROM Vault, etc.) support and expect zipped ROMs. MAME devs strongly recommend to use zipped ROMs, especially with split sets.

It is true that some Retroarch cores do not support zipped ROMs. However, Retroarch unzip the ROMs on the fly.

By the way, any ROM manager can compress thousands of ROMs into ZIP automatically, just clicking on a setting in a checkbox.

Also, the community is moving from the several image format (ISO, CUE/BIN, GDI) to CHD (MAME format) after Retroarch cores started supporting the CHD format. CHD is already compressed and saves a lot of space especially compared to ISO.

[MrTarantula]

Ideally, Kodi should be able to play whatever is thrown at it, be it image, video, audio, or ROM. Zipping may be a best practice, but the reality is that many people have unzipped ROMs, or a mixture of zipped and unzipped. That's what makes it the de facto standard. If ROM managers support unzipped then RP should as well.

From what I understand Kodi will eventually be able to unzip on the fly, but there is still some work to be done with VFS implementation. There's also been a lot of discussion on Retroarch's GitHub about their own VFS for all cores. So it's progressing but will take a lot of effort.

As for compressing like a ROM manager, I would bet that eventually there will be an addon for that purpose. I may even give it a shot when I have some time to get familiar with python.

[Wintermute0110]

Ideally, Kodi should be able to play whatever is thrown at it, be it image, video, audio, or ROM. Zipping may be a best practice, but the reality is that many people have unzipped ROMs, or a mixture of zipped and unzipped. That's what makes it the de facto standard. If ROM managers support unzipped then RP should as well.

As you say. I invite you to go to Pleasuredome or ROMShepherd and I will give you 10 yen for every uncompressed ROM you find.

ROM managers do not support zipped ROMs per se, but rather because most emulators require them! I can point you to a thread in Banniser forum where MAME devs strongly encourage to used zipped ROMs only.

As for compressing like a ROM manager, I would bet that eventually there will be an addon for that purpose. I may even give it a shot when I have some time to get familiar with python.

Once Leia is out I will test RP thoroughly and implement ROM decompression on the fly, as IARL does now.

[thebundok]

I'm confused, and perhaps this thread can help. To my understanding, Retroplayer is now baked in to Kodi. I just installed Leia Beta 2 but I don't see the Game menu at all. I did see the GitHub thread which seems to have full Kodi Installers with Retroplayer... but does that mean that the Kodi builds are diverging? 1 with Retroplayer and another without? In the addons section of Kodi there are several game related addons (including bomberman and controller support) but no Retroplayer. What am I missing? Can you guys clear up my confusion?

[thebundok]

I'm confused, and perhaps this thread can help. To my understanding, Retroplayer is now baked in to Kodi. I just installed Leia Beta 2 but I don't see the Game menu at all. I did see the GitHub thread which seems to have full Kodi Installers with Retroplayer... but does that mean that the Kodi builds are diverging? 1 with Retroplayer and another without? In the addons section of Kodi there are several game related addons (including bomberman and controller support) but no Retroplayer. What am I missing? Can you guys clear up my confusion?

 Nevermind... finally found a thread which explained that you have to do the Konami code to enable it. Very cheeky... ha ha ha

[MrTarantula]

Retroplayer is baked into Kodi, but except for Bomberman, the game addons (emulator cores) are not. You need to enter a "cheat code" to enable the Games menu, unless you use Garbear's builds from the first page of this thread.

Some of the cores are pretty large, larger than Kodi itself. Including them would increase the inital Kodi install by a huge amount, so right now they are only packaged in Garbear's test builds.

Binary addons will (I hope) soon be able to be installed from repos like normal (python) addons. This will make it much easier to install the cores you want. But for now the easiest way to get started is using Garbear's builds.

[garbear]

New builds posted. Check the release notes: https://github.com/garbear/xbmc/releases

That's just a temporary measure until ROM parsing or game library is figured out

Seeing as how we're not going to have ROM parsing by release, what should be done for Leia?

Retroplayer is baked into Kodi

Beta 3 will have games enabled by default: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/14398

[garbear]

launching IARL scummvm games from the addon by choosing scummvm as the emulator crashes Kodi. This is probably an error in IARL since the game starts fine from the file manager after the download.

@enen92 is this still an issue?

[garbear]

2. When my bluetooth PS3 controller shuts itself off after not being used for a couple of minutes, when I wake it back up I can no longer control the game.  I am able to hit the PS3 button and bring up the in game dialog and exit.

@quig is this fixed in my newest test builds? https://github.com/garbear/xbmc/releases

[siliciferous]

So here's a weird one I've encountered since getting my RetroPlayer build up and running from scratch.

I've got everything setup and working, including SNES, Sega CD, Dreamcast and PS1 system BIOSs in the correct user profile Kodi add-ons directories (running on Leia Beta1 Kodi Retroplayer branch on a Windows x64 machine with an XInput controller.) Getting a Dreamcast game to launch is still mostly unsuccessful, but I'm on integrated graphics so I'm willing to chalk most of the problem up to that. Turns out that some - not all, but some - PS1 games emulated through Beetle PSX would inexplicably ignore all controller input. I enabled debug logging and could see logs of all of my buttonpresses, and while Einhander and Vagrant Story would work fine, I noticed Final Fantasy Tactics and Gex would not.

I finally narrowed down the problem to Beetle PSX's settings - I needed to enable the Analog Button Toggle in Beetle PSX Advanced Settings to get the latter two games to see my input. No idea if this is classified as a bug or not, but hopefully this helps someone else out.

[quig]

2. When my bluetooth PS3 controller shuts itself off after not being used for a couple of minutes, when I wake it back up I can no longer control the game.  I am able to hit the PS3 button and bring up the in game dialog and exit.

@quig is this fixed in my newest test builds? https://github.com/garbear/xbmc/releases 

 I don't see a RPi build.  Can you get Milhouse to include it in the next LibreElec build?

[Juppstein]

In case someone is not using the Garbear repo but the standard one for the current Ubuntu LTS, is there a post or tutorial that would explain which parts/sources/gits I have to get from which place on the interwebz? Because I am not really sure which components are needed at the moment and who has the right version of it. In case of documentation for the setup and installation, there is a bit of empty space in that regard at the moment. Which is unfortunate, because it prevents people from testing RP due to the high entry barrier of not knowing how to even set it up properly.

[MrTarantula]

New builds posted. Check the release notes: https://github.com/garbear/xbmc/releases

That's just a temporary measure until ROM parsing or game library is figured out

Seeing as how we're not going to have ROM parsing by release, what should be done for Leia?             

 Just whip up a library really quick. How hard can it be? (just kidding)

I like the idea of a "Play using" context menu item, but that's not intuitive. The only other option I can think of would be a prompt with a list of acceptable players/cores for the ext type. So selecting an ISO would bring up a dialog like 

Code:


------------------------------------------------------
|                                                    |
|                                                    |
|      This is an ISO file. Play as:                 |
|                                                    |
|                                                    |
|      1. Video (Videoplayer)                        |
|      2. PlayStation Game (PCSX ReARMed)            |
|      3. PlayStation Game (Beetle PSX)              |
|      4. Sega Saturn Game (Beetle Saturn)           |
|      ...                                           |
|                                                    |
|      X Save as default for this file               |
|                                                    |
------------------------------------------------------


Here the "Play as" default metadata would be stored next to the file (not ideal). But I understand this would probably qualify as a feature, so also not likely in v18.

[MrSeb]

Hello, how do we activate all shaders? I did a test on Snes and I only have 2 shaders available. Thx