Where to Put Plugins (Pixelcade)

Questions and tweaks for Attract-Mode on ARpiCADE.

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coney
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Where to Put Plugins (Pixelcade)

Post by coney » Tue Oct 12, 2021 5:09 am

Hey there,

I recently bought a Pixelcade LCD marquee for my cab--they're great, but only when I received it did I realize it's apparently only supported for RetroPie at the moment.

Is there any way to change the image file for ArPIcade on a Windows system? I just want to add the Pixelcade plugin if possible, but not sure if that'll work out.

Thanks!

dee2eR
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Re: Where to Put Plugins (Pixelcade)

Post by dee2eR » Wed Oct 13, 2021 2:14 am

It should be possible, but I don't have the hardware to investigate.

What program is the plugin for?

coney
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Re: Where to Put Plugins (Pixelcade)

Post by coney » Wed Oct 13, 2021 4:31 pm

It's for Attract Mode. The script is here, under "Attract-Mode":

https://pixelcade.org/pi-install/

The problem seems to be that ArPIcade doesn't have Stretch, Buster, or Ubuntu, so it can't install--if there was a way for me to just inject the files myself that would be fine, but I don't really have the means to adjust the Pi image in terms of modifying the folder structure.

I'm hoping there's a way to just modify the shell.sh script to work in an ArPIcade environment, then just install it that way, but I'll have to find someone who knows Linux/Pi well enough to make those changes, I'm totally new to this stuff.

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Re: Where to Put Plugins (Pixelcade)

Post by dee2eR » Thu Oct 14, 2021 1:28 am

Stretch, Buster and even Ubuntu are just versions of Debian. ARpiCADE is also Debian based, you should be able to make it all work.

You won't be able to access the Attract-Mode folders on the second partition from WIndows without thrid party software. If you try third party software back up first as it can cause issues, based on the reports I have had.

I have had the request to move the Attract-Mode plugins to the boot partition so the plug-ins can be accessed from Windows without issues, in the future this may be easier....

Don't try running scripts made for RetroPie or other OSs as they're very likely to do something unexpected oin ARpiCADE. All you should really need to do is add the Attract-Mode plugin found here: https://github.com/tnhabib/pixelcade-attract-mode and possibly install curl (I can't remember offhand if it will already be installed on ARpiCADE).

The Attract-Mode plugins folder is: /home/pi/.attract/plugins/ -- if you can't write directly to that folder you could write the plugin to /boot on your PC and then copy it to the second partition on the running Pi.

coney
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Re: Where to Put Plugins (Pixelcade)

Post by coney » Fri Oct 15, 2021 4:11 pm

Just wanna say huge thanks for still looking at this and responding here--I really appreciate you offering support on this stuff, as a total novice to anything related to Pi or Linux on my end.

I've got mostly everything up now, I think! The plugin is in there, programs installed--now all I need is to find a way to get the .jar to run at startup on ArPIcade every time I boot. Having difficulty figuring it out since I'm still a novice, but should be good after that.

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Re: Where to Put Plugins (Pixelcade)

Post by dee2eR » Sat Oct 16, 2021 1:41 am

easiest way is probably to add it to /boot/run.sh

I'm guessing before the line that launches Attract-Mode should be where you'd want it.

coney
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Re: Where to Put Plugins (Pixelcade)

Post by coney » Sat Oct 16, 2021 6:41 am

I'm actually talking with the creator of the marquee now, do you know if it's a simple process to switch from Attract-Mode to RetroPie as a frontend for ArPIcade?

I know there's a lot of stuff involving CRT resolution handling and whatnot so if not that's fine, but if so that would make things easier across the board since I think this system was specifically set up for RetroPie.

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Re: Where to Put Plugins (Pixelcade)

Post by dee2eR » Sun Oct 17, 2021 12:56 am

RetroPie isn't a frontend. RetroPie is a collection of software, similar to ARpiCADE is a collection of various pieces of software. Technically both are based on Raspbian, which is another name given to a collection of software rather than one program... they're all basically Debian Linux when you boil it down enough...

The default frontend on RetroPie is Emulation Station. There is no convenient way to change to Emulation Station on ARpiCADE (no idea if it's still the case but Emulation Station couldn't handle non interlaced low res last I checked, admittedly that was years ago...).

From what I have seen the plugin was for Attract-Mode anyway.... what's the issue you're running into?

I had a look at the marquees but they're too expensive for me to justify getting one to check out. I'm sure we can work through whatever issue though - anything RetroPie can do can be replicated...

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