Quality-of-Life improvements #337
Replies: 13 comments 65 replies
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Make it less annoying / dangerous to pop the microsd into a Windows PC** I find it annoying how windows tries to get me to reformat half my SD card every time I insert it into my computer.
The swap partition would have to be changed to a swap file, but that shouldn't be a big deal. Plan B: include Linux FS drivers on the fat32 partition I'm pretty sure I saw some system that had windows and mac drivers for BTRFS on the fat32 boot partition, and then the other partitions were all BTRFS. I kind of like that from a technical perspective, but I think it's probably more confusing than it's worth from a user-friendliness perspective. Plan C: Get windows to ignore the Linux partitions Apparently possible: #337 (reply in thread) |
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Which version? I just downloaded the current (2022-01-28) version of Raspberry Pi OS (as it's now known) and it has the same layout as previous version, a small FAT32 partition for /boot and an ext4 partition for the root filesystem. |
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Well, shit, now you've got me doubting myself... I could have sworn that early on you could just drag and drop the files onto a micro SD card and it would boot. But I can't seem to find any evidence of that... https://superuser.com/questions/782849/can-ubuntu-linux-be-installed-on-fat32-or-ntfs has a reply that says it used to work, but the feature was dropped years ago. There's another reply that says NTFS works on recent kernels but it sounds pretty experimental. |
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Yeah, I'm not sure how realistic that sounds. There would be a lot of technical challenges to overcome to run a Linux distro on something other than EXT. And it wouldn't really be worth the trouble, either, as EXT is a fully open and superior format for what Linux needs. NTFS support on Linux is still shaky at best, experimental: And I really can't imagine Debian running on a FAT32 partition. The limitations of the FAT32 format are just too restricting for what the system needs. The system would need to be rewritten in how it's structured, how it functions. The ability to set permissions on a FAT32 partition is extremely limited, for example. And lowercase and uppercase characters in filenames are treated the same (whereas Linux software use this distinction quite a lot, and the system depends on it in structure). It's not impossible that early, experimental versions of Raspbian may have been going for this approach -- I don't doubt what you remember, what you're saying -- since the OS for Raspberry Pi had to be really stripped down and assembled from parts (quite an overhaul) due to the specialist, extremely limited nature/power of the hardware. But I imagine that that became too tedious and impractical to maintain as the system grew in scope/size to include more features from Debian/Linux. |
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Yeah... I'm giving up on the "linux on fat32" idea. Including windows and mac drivers in the boot partition might still be worth while, though, although probably not as big of a deal if we keep the data partition as fat32. |
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This is interesting - apparently you can set up the partition so that Windows just leaves it alone, and Linux doesn't seem to mind:
I'm going to have to experiment with that. |
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Provide a way to hide or de-emphasize unplayable things By "unplayable things", I mean emulators that don't have anything in their ROMs folder and Ports that require additional files to be playable. I was thinking that perhaps the default could be to make the link semi-transparent and the sort order could be changed so that playable content comes before unplayable. And then we could make options to hide unplayable things completely or ignore the feature and just show all links the way we used to. |
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Items in the ROM list should also adopt this feature. Specifically for things like save files and BIOS dumps that need to reside in the ROMs folder (like with Neo Geo). (I currently use a "[Firmware]" naming convention to differentiate these files from ROMs/games, where aliases are supported.) |
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I think that's what the File Filter option does when you're editing a link. You can put a file extension like |
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Yes, I've been using the file filter. Nods. But what doesn't exist at the moment is a feature to mark certain files as non-playable. For example, how would you hide the BIOS "neogeo.zip" among other ".zip" ROMs? (And the emulator requires it to be in the ROMs folder.) |
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Oh, yeah, I see your point. |
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Save the time at shutdown, restore it at boot Currently the clock always defaults to the same time when the system boots up. (I think it's the time that GMenuNX was compiled.) I think we should instead write the "current" time to a file when we shut down. And then on the next boot, set the clock to whatever time is written in that file. It wouldn't be correct, but it would at least move forwards. This would be beneficial for games such as Pokemon that depend on the time, and there's apparently at least one emulator that can have trouble with savestates if the clock appears to have moved backwards. Relatedly, this could help move us towards a different goal I have of fully reproducible builds. If the compile time is part of the binary, then it becomes much harder to reproduce the same binary a second time. I think instead the initial file should be seeded with the time of the last git commit. Then building from the same git commit will always produce the same output (at least for this portion of the CFW.) |
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No, it's a pretty big deal (even now) for emulators/software that rely on the RTC feature that most computers have, and for file saving order/history. We currently are unable to query the system for latest modified files, for example, and have you tried playing any of the Pokemon games, for instance? Nearly every game in PokeMini relies on an RTC being present, and there are certain features in certain (Pokemon/Game Boy) games that are only accessible and only activate as RTC events. So quite a few games are not fully functional without an RTC (real-time progress of time). If we're going to add an 'active progress of time' feature to the system, we may as well do a proper work of it -- not something half-baked, but something that is actually reliaby usable on the system. Otherwise you end up with something that's an unstable feature, and only serves to hurt the integrity of the system, the user trust in it. I think what we have here, what @jSTE0 has developed, is great! 🎉 But I think we need to expand on it to make it more dependable/reliable. And one effective way to do that would be to save the current time to the "date_path" every time a user launched app quits in the system. Time won't pass as in the real world when the system is powered off, but it will pass and be kept track of reliably while the system is running, and/or is in standby mode. (I.e. It will have its own dependable timeline -- in the total time the system has spent powered on.) |
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Now that we're talking about this, isn't there a total system uptime built-in query in Linux, too? I seem to remember something like it. Or is that calculated from the time difference between the default system (build) time and the system clock's current time? |
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I can confirm that the simple shell script proposed earlier should work on the system from manually typing in the |
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@jSTE0, no GMenuNX fork ever handled the time persistency without HW clock correctly so it no wonder you couldn't find any implication of it in source. The old gmenunx (shipped one) was always overwriting The issue of loosing passage of time still remains if the app crashes, it might be done in intervals but only while |
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Display a "Please Turn Off Your Device" message on shutdown instead of turning the screen off I occasionally find my device dead because I did a software shutdown but forgot to flip the switch. I think this would help. |
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@andrigamerita have made progress in that regard. Surely you are aware of it, but I'm attaching source here as for anyone to wish work of it: however there seems to be problem with invoking that script from /etc/inittab upon shutdown. |
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Oh, awesome! I was not aware of that. |
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Do you have that working anywhere, @Apaczer ? It looks like it needs X and I don't think that will still be running at that point? |
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Favorites in the GmenuNX ROM browser I think we should provide some way to mark specific ROMs as favorites (maybe the Perhaps also provide a way to hide everything except favorites ( This would make larger ROM libraries easier to manager. Especially if the "favorites-only" mode loaded faster. |
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Maybe looking at simplemenu's scripting schematics would help? Favorites work pretty well here and have all the benefits you're describing above and ROMs' list loading time is much superior over Gmenu2x. Otherwise you can use it in MiyooCFW as alternative frontend. |
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It looks like https://github.com/Yoshi1313/esoteric-pixel-grey (which is another fork of Gmenu2X) has this and some other cool features. |
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https://github.com/Apaczer/gmenu2x/releases/tag/v20220806 adds a favorites section! (TY @Apaczer!) |
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@nfriedly I was thinking something like, for each emulator when selected, instead of just having a list. the list will have on top of it a "Favorite games" portion, then below it with a bit of space the entire list of games (both can be also labeled "Favorite Games" and "All Games" |
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FWIW, the basic workaround I did for this with the 1.3.3 firmware is to just put a few favorite games in the top-level folder, and then I have a subfolder named "all" that has the rest of my library in it. But, with the update from Apaczer, I think this is basically solved. |
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Allow That just annoys me. You have to either save or turn the device off, there's no "undo and exit". |
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I believe this is fixed in https://github.com/Apaczer/gmenu2x/releases/tag/v20220806 |
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Add an extra confirm dialog for link deletion in GmenuNX Many people always deleted their shortcut links and never figured out why... (sometimes a bad key press) |
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Yes! I forgot about that one. I was thinking maybe we should require pressing something like A + Y at the same time to delete things. |
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Yes! This is especially relevant to deleting categories in GMenuNX! You can currently delete an entire folder of launchers/links by accidentally hitting the wrong choice!! @_@ A proper confirmation dialog for launcher/link deletions is sorely needed. |
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I fixed that one, it was actually my first contribution. It just hasn't shipped yet. MiyooCFW/gmenu2x#5 |
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https://github.com/Apaczer/gmenu2x/releases/tag/v20220806 now requires pressing Y to delete a link/section. |
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Offer an official method for booting into something other than GmenuNX https://jahed.dev/2022/01/25/improving-powkiddy-v90-ux/ is pretty awesome and well done, but I think we can make it easier. I was thinking that perhaps we should have a MiyooCFW Settings app that can manage that and potentially other settings. It could run on the device or on a desktop (or both). If we went the desktop route, we could include Windows, Linux, and Mac binaries on one of the fat32 partitions. Other things it could control might be enabling or disabling the startup animation, and if it ran on the desktop, maybe it could assist with installing apps and system updates. |
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Read-only mode This would have a more limited selection of games and emulators due to not having swap, but you could turn the device off at any time without risking sd card corruption. It might especially make sense when set up to boot directly into a game. This is another one where having an external management app might help since you can't change settings on a read-only disk (although I suppose you could remount the disk as rw...) |
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Bundled Box Art This is inspired by https://discord.com/channels/202879976599453696/656847727468216320/923028561235935234 We could set up an automated process to take all of the images for supported systems from https://github.com/libretro-thumbnails/libretro-thumbnails, resize them to a max of 135px wide and 138px tall, and then just include them with in the image. We can probably set it up so that both RetroArch and GmenuNX share the same source images. It looks like there are a few shortcuts, e.g. https://github.com/libretro-thumbnails/DOOM/tree/edc370a7a92311e05c2852ee5bb60cd1b3cec2f9/Named_Boxarts - but presumably we could make GMenuNX handle that properly, if necessary. |
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Note to self: do not check out the parent repo with all of the submodules - that thing it 61GB! - instead check out the smaller repos for the systems we can actually support. The individual systems we can support are much more reasonable - 1.2G for NES, 199MB for Game Boy, etc. I did a quick test, resizing https://github.com/libretro-thumbnails/Nintendo_-_Nintendo_Entertainment_System/blob/f4415b21a256bcbe7b30a9d71a571d6ba4815c71/Named_Boxarts/1943%20-%20The%20Battle%20of%20Midway%20(USA).png with http://www.imageoptimizer.net/ and it went from 575kb to 20kb - so about 3.4% of the original image file size. Before and after (scroll down):
Using that as a guide, NES boxart should be ~40mb for the entire collection. I think we could live with that, especially given that NES is going to be one of the systems with more images. GBA is 557MB, GBC is only 167MB, so we can expect about 20MB and 6MB respectively for those two systems. Oh, and there are also title screens and in-game snapshots, so the final sizes will be a bit lower since we can exclude those. |
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It looks like we could cut the file size down by another ~50% without too big of an impact on image quality. |
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The loss in size is a good thing, but it doesn't justify very low sampling on that converted image. Here are some examples in GIMP which supports CLI batch workflow:
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Nice! Some of those definitely do look crisper. (Although, to be fair, they're all more than 3x larger than my sample.) I was really just trying to get a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the final file size to see if it would be feasible or not. I was thinking we'd use something like imagemagic or graphicsmagick to do the batch resizing, and then possibly a second pass through pngcrush to shrink it a bit further. But yeah, gimp works too. (Or maybe gimp + pngcrush.) I'd also want to take a look on an actual device screen and see what they look like there if we get serious about this. |
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1-I encourage the suggestion of persisting the date in a text file (like in the configuration file) and reading it every time the console is started. This doesn't fix the problem, but at least the chances of getting the same date on the console frozen on a weekday when igating the console probably won't happen. |
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Discussion moved from #365.
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@jSTE0 I believe that the button combination is enough for gmenu just create modify the following method adding new logic gmenu2x.cpp L1072, in this method there is already the key combination of calling the dialog by pressing the power button for a while, and modifying the volume, and screenshot, i think. The method that modifies the date already exists, I believe you can copy the logic gmenu2x.cpp L2103. I haven't tested what I said, I have no idea how to debug this. I just looked at the code. |
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@Wilter Thanks for looking. This will be on the list of things to address after CFW 2.0 ships. |
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Include |
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Turns out the shortcuts have been baked into kernel with latest changes. I've tried commenting out shutdown procedure from kill script within hotkey 9 in miyoo_kbd.c. Seems working fine with a few apps I tested and system revert to gmenu2x normally. EDIT: Not all apps exit as expected e.g. Picodrive ; RetroArch - hangs on black screen upon |
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as a part of MiyooCFW/kernel#22 PR: Changed a bit hotkeys to be using
This often resulted in unclean shutdows because of that and didn't differ much from switching off power. With simple SIGKILL to I've also experimented with other Considering above I added another kill hotkey for V90 variant under RESET+L1 and poweroff on RESET+R1 activated with |
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@TriForceX |
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These are a few ideas that have been kicking around in my head that I think would improve MiyooCFW, but I don't necessarily want to work on before we get a new release shipped.
Feel free to add your own.
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