Pi 4/400 autologin menu script

[theflyingape]

FWIIW, I’ve made a hackable autologin menu script off the console for Pi 400 running Bullseye. Of course, toggling between Desktop & console allows running RetroArch from either mode too. It includes idle play between demo clips and running the first 30-seconds of tagged content favorites (arcade & consoles only). It takes event input from the Pi 400 keyboard but also an attached joystick.

Since RetroArch has limited media playing on Pi, I’ve been using mplayer -vo fbdev2 -fs -xy 2 -zoom, but now mpv (--no-video for music only) with these settings ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf:

audio-stream-silence=yes
audio-wait-open=1
cache=yes
#fps=24
hwdev=v4l2m2m
#vo=gpu

The audio waits here after opening for 1sec here because I don’t want my external sound system to miss capturing the beginning of the HDMI audio stream passing thru.

Another neat framebuffer tool to show an image is fbi. I use it in /etc/rc.local to show an image on another virtual console, before my autologin menu script switches over to primary console sudo chvt 1:

SPLASH="`ls /home/pi/Pictures/Splash/* | shuf | head 1`"
fbi --noverbose -a -vt 2 "${SPLASH}" &> /dev/null

[theflyingape]

FWIIW, I found a nice ffmpeg v5 compilation guide that provided the best option for me to use for video playback with ffplay. Oddly, retroarch with the ffmpeg compile-time option did not improve any, only audio works fine not video.

My menu attract mode added in the console autologin script now toggles between playing Arcade Intros, CoinOps Legends videos, and also my favorites playlist parsed to play RetroArch content for 31-seconds with that retro “technicolor” shader.

[theflyingape]

I wanted to have a PDF manual viewing option out of the Linux console and I found that using fbi with a filename wildcard and autozoom to startup was friendly enough.

So I added the hotkey Pi logo key to invoke a simple search through my Favorites (I keep the all other titles in bulk on my Google Drive where they can be found and downloaded into Favorites later), then invoke pdftoppm to convert the selected PDF into multi-page image files for fbi to view.

… and created a HELP pdf too – its first 2 pages shown here:

[theflyingape]

Video: My Pi 4/400 retrogaming console The SD card image can be found off my vanity site:

Robert Hurst - Retrocomputing

[Duimon]

I believe that falls under the category of posting a link to roms.