Modifying Android overlays

RetroArch Android devices
#1

why is there no ability to make new posts anymore?

how do i access my data/user/0 folder to pull overlays i want to edit to use on my phone?

i have a phone with custom built in “shoulder” buttons BUT, because the way the drivers operate, i can have only 1 profile for all of the retroarch app. which means, i have to adjust the overlays snes, psx, psp, and any other system that may have shoulder buttons, to make the shoulder button appear in the same place on my screen across all systems…

i read i have to “root” my device to have access to data/user/o or whatever? i am not going to do that. why are these files locked away in such a place on my phone? why does this app have to have so many folders scattered all over the place?

if anyone can assist me in having custom edited overlays for these systems, i would be greatly appreciative.

the placement of the shoulder buttons on screen is not important, so long as they are in the same place for each core/system.

please and thank you.

Common-Overlays Repo
#2

Also, very off topic, but since i can not create any…

why is it so time consuming and convoluted to load content on this emulator?

how do i edit / change what i see in my load content screen?

i do not need to see things i have no access to, like my data/user/0/… since i can not load or save anything there anywhere…

OR

4x /storage/emulated/0/…

please and thank you.

#3

this forum fails to have an edit button as well?

i feel i need to be a tiny bit more specific with my request so any effort put forth is not wasted, snes and psp have only 1 set of shoulder buttons… PS1, 2 ,3 , xbox, etc etc have 2 sets.

may i ask for the PS1 L1, R1 to match the positioning of the snes and psp shoulder buttons?

please and thank you.

#4

We put the default overlay location to a root-owned location so people can’t screw it up and lock themselves out of input. The solution is to find/make a new location in a RetroArch-writeable location (the RetroArch directory in your user storage is a good place), then go to settings > directory and change your ‘overlays’ location to that new spot, then go to the online updater and ‘update overlays’ to populate the new location.

Once that’s done, you can edit them as you see fit. This document has all of the info on how the overlay configuration files are formatted: https://docs.libretro.com/development/retroarch/input/overlay/. In addition to editing them with a text editor, there is an overlay editor you can use in Windows to edit them, if you prefer. It’s available for download through RetroArch’s online updater > content downloader > utilities or http://buildbot.libretro.com/assets/cores/Utilities/OverlayEditor.zip

Those locations in the ‘load content’ screen are hardcoded shortcuts to locations where things are often stored. You can’t edit them, but you can ignore them if you don’t need them. In settings > directory, you can change your ‘file browser’ location to wherever you like, and that’s where the ‘start directory’ on that screen takes you. OTOH, you could scan for content (that is, it will compare your games in the selected directory with our databases and list any matches) using the ‘import content’ menu item to add games to playlists and associate cores with those playlists. Note: if your games don’t match our databases of known-good dumps (based on No-Intro and Redump hashes) you can still add them to playlists using the ‘manual scan’ option.

As for the missing new post / edit buttons, these are anti-spam measures and are the default and recommended settings for this forum software. It’s not something we devised, but it is very effective at controlling spam.

#5

Very understandable on the spam bots and such,

1 question on what you said.

Once I populate my files in a location I can actually access and draw them to my PC, is it as simple as just swapping the visual icons? / button areas to accomplish what I want, or will there be programming code (I know NOTHING about) required to get the app to recognize the touch screen locations of the buttons?

I already had the overlay GUI you noted above, I got stuck when I couldn’t access any of the overlays or find them online anywhere (on google).

About the load content, that is a bummer this is not something that can be edited, using the start directory function or w/e still makes it at least a 2 step process (assuming all roms for every core are stored in the same spot with no organization…). It would be cool to be able to change these hard coded locations to custom shortcuts, something like being able to assign a quick press to the rom location for each core I use, instead of start directory/roms/(core/system name)/game rom/etc etc, it would be something like single press …/…/…/roms/snes/all my roms/immediately pick the game I want.

Maybe it is just me, but I feel like it is pointless to have hard coded data/user/0 locations at all when 99% of people can not even access it to store anything there.

#6

You can get the overlays online from https://github.com/libretro/common-overlays

Editing them can be done with a text editor. It’s not really “code” per se, but it is a bunch of words and numbers formatted in a specific way that the program read to know where to put things. You’ll just need to modify the button coordinate locations (probably in a text editor) to put the buttons in the same place on all of them. If one of them has the buttons in the right spot, you can just copy/paste that location coordinate into the others.

I was under the impression that /data/user/0 locations are user-accessible, but you’re the second person that’s said otherwise. It’s possible that it was at some point but is no longer, since Android’s filesystem access has gotten more restricted over time. Unfortunately, it’s very hard for us to do… pretty much anything in Android because we don’t use (m)any of the typical Java API stuff that regular apps are built on. We do everything as a native activity, which Google does not provide tools for.

#7

I could have over exaggerated a tiny bit by saying 99% of people? BUT, i for sure do not have access to this folder location outside of your app (when connected to a computer or using android file manager/view), and having read that I need to root my device in order to have access to this area, I kind of assumed anyone else would as well.

Maybe i misunderstood something when reading this article about someone who rooted the phone I have…? https://www.reddit.com/r/ROGphone2/comments/f4jmys/i_rooted_my_asus_rog_phone_2/.

Anyway, I kind of broke my screen yesterday and now the phone is inoperable, by the time I can get it fixed, the Asus ROG phone Kunuami something or another gamepad will have arrived and will make all this effort and attempt unnecessary…

Thank You for all your direction, I will still try it to learn how do things on non gamepad devices like my S9.

#8

No worries. All’s well that ends well :slight_smile:

So, re: rooting, it seems to be a fairly recent change (Android 11, perhaps?). I’m going to look into nuking a bunch of those shortcuts since they’re essentially useless now (or at least put them behind a check for Android versions prior to 11), and we’ll have to figure out another user-writeable location for the config file. Google’s really screwing us these days.