Dynamic Marquee for pi4 - working

pdapice

After spending a lot of time trying to get a dual screen/dynamic marquee set up on the x86 architecture (failed)
and setting up an x86 to raspberry pi dual computer / dual screen setup (mostly successful)
i was finally able to get my hands on a pi4 and getting the dynamic marquee to work was actually fairly easy so i thought i would share my method here in case anyone else was interested.

my criteria for doing this was to get it to work with a standard install without having to add any special additional software or recompile batocera, etc. luckily batocera comes with everything needed to make this work

This setup assumes that you have only a pi4, with batocera installed. you will connect both monitors to the same pi4 (which has dual HDMI outputs)

please keep in mind that i am not a programmer so my scripts are probably sloppy and can use some improvement, but that is why i am posting it here in the hopes that others find it and improve on it
there are 3 scripts that are used to make this work

marquee.sh - this is created and placed in the root of the userdata folder and is called by all of the scripts below based on which event is happening.
system.sh - this is called from the emulationstation system-selected folder and is used to change the marquee to match whatever system you are hovering over
game.sh - this is called from the emulationstation game-selected folder and will match the marquee to whichever game you are hovering over
script.sh - this is called from batocera on game start and will trigger a game start/end event to handle what displays on the marquee (video, high res image, low res image, or wheel image)

please note that the marquee image files and videos i either found online or found in a romset that i downloaded for a hyperspin install which had a bunch of artwork already installed. I am fairly sure that batocera themes already have much of this artwork somewhere on my SD card, but i couldn’t find where it was so i decided to use my own art files which may be of higher quality.

this is the directory structure i used for the artwork which i decided to create in a “Marquee” folder inside of my roms directory as it suited my personal purposes:

these are all relative to the roms folder:
Marquee contains the default lower resolution marquee
hires contains higher resolution marquee files if available
systems contains images for each console/system if available
wheel contains basic images for games - pulled from the hyperspin wheel artwork that i had
videos contains several hundred custom videos i found online

so for the artwork, it would be

/userdata/roms/Marquee/
/userdata/roms/Marquee/hires
/userdata/roms/Marquee/systems
/userdata/roms/Marquee/wheel
/userdata/roms/Marquee/videos

additionally, (for the hyperspin files that i had) each system inside of the roms folder would have wheel/marquee artwork in an “images” folder
for example:

/userdata/roms/mame/images/
/userdata/roms/3do/images/

etc

here is the breakdown of how the scripts work:
all scripts use fbv, a frambuffer viewer already included in batocera to display the image to the frambuffer and ffmpeg to play videos directly to the framebuffer (if applicable)

on system selected (when hovering over each system), the emulationstation “system-selected” script checks the “systems” folder for the corresponding system name image file and uses FBV to display it full screen on the marquee
on game selected (when hovering over each game in the menu) the emulationstation “game-selected” script checks for marquee folder and looks for a higher resolution image in the hires folder and uses fbv to display the image on the marquee. if the hires image is not found, it then checks the root of the marquee folder for the standard lower resolution image and if that is not found it defaults to a generic “mame.png” marquee that i put in the folder as a default. (please keep in mind that this is all mame specific, but there is some code to handle other systems that i will explain later)
3) on game start (when a game is selected and launched to play) the batocera script runs and passes the game name to the “marquee” script which first checks the video folder for any videos that match and uses ffmpeg to play the video. after the video plays (or if no video is found) it searches through the folders looking for the matching marquee and displays it.

all of this worked fine for mame, but all of the other systems don’t have marquee files as they were console games. in this case i was able to pull a “marquee” artwork from each systems images folder (again this was a hyperspin romset to it is likely that this artwork stems from there). these images are not much more than a fancy “wheel” text, but it serves the purpose and looks pretty cool.
I will post a video once i get everything installed properly in my cabinet, and i can post a link to a download of all the images if someone can recommend a good place to upload them to that is free and reliable.

here are the scripts as i have them written so far
game.sh (located in /userdata/system/configs/emulationstation/scripts/game-selected/

#!/bin/bash
System=$1 #system name
Romname=${2%.*} #romname
rom=${Romname##*/}
/userdata/marquee.sh Gameselected $System "$rom"

system.sh (located in /userdata/system/configs/emulationstation/scripts/system-selected/)

#!/bin/bash
System=$1 #System name
/userdata/marquee.sh Systemselected $System &

marquee.sh (located in /userdata/)

#!/bin/bash

case $1 in
Start)
Romname=$3
Gamepath=$2
marqueeimage=$Gamepath/images/$Romname-marquee.png
if [ -f "/userdata/roms/Marquee/videos/$Romname.mp4" ]
then
ffmpeg -i /userdata/roms/Marquee/videos/$Romname.mp4 -vf scale=1280:720 -sws_flags bilinear -pix_fmt rgb565le -f fbdev /dev/fb0

fi

if [ -f "/userdata/roms/Marquee/hires/$Romname.jpg" ]
then
fbv /userdata/roms/Marquee/hires/$Romname.jpg -fer
elif [ -f "$marqueeimage" ]
then
fbv $marqueeimage -fer
else
fbv /userdata/roms/mame/images/mame.png -fer
fi

;;
Gameselected)
System=$2 #system name
Romname=$3 #romname

if [ -f "/userdata/roms/Marquee/$Romname.png" ]
then
fbv /userdata/roms/Marquee/$Romname.png -fer
elif [ -f "/userdata/roms/$System/images/$Romname-marquee.png" ]
then
fbv "/userdata/roms/$System/images/$Romname-marquee.png" -fer
else
fbv /userdata/roms/Marquee/mame.png -fer
fi

;;

Systemselected)
imagepath="/userdata/roms/sysimages/$2"
if [ -f "$imagepath.png" ]
then
fbv "$imagepath.png" -fer
else
fbv /userdata/roms/mame/images/mame.png -fer
fi

;;

esac

script.sh (located in /userdata/system/scripts/)

#!/bin/bash

case $1 in
gameStart)

gamepath=${5%/*}
romname=${5##*/}
/userdata/marquee.sh Start $gamepath ${romname%.*} &
;;

gameStop)
killall ffmpeg
;;
esac

Atari

This is pretty cool! I’m going to add this as a script example to the wiki if you don’t mind, along with a link to this post.

pdapice

i don’t mind at all! i am hoping that it will spark some interest in it!

I will post a video shortly showing it in action.

pdapice

Link to youtube video
Marquee Video

i have the sound disconnected while i am troubleshooting some minor slowdown issues, but this shows the systems marquee, the game-selected marquee (in high res) and the intro video.
I am having a weird issue ever since i moved the pi into my cabinet, but i think it is wifi related (my roms and artwork are on a network share). i will troubleshoot some more, but otherwise everything works as it should.

Atari

Wonderful. The only thing I’m curious about is how you set up the Pi to accept these images. From the looks of the scripts, you’re calling the framebuffer directly. How does that translate to sending a signal to the Pi from the standard x86_64 computer?

pdapice

Atari

firstly, i wanted to ask if you can update the wiki entry for this. I have rewritten the scripts to be neater, more efficient and easier to read. i have also arranged them so that they can be a bit more extensible for sending the info to a pi/x86 combo

to answer your question about using a pi:

for an x86 pi combination, the x86 computer will plug into the main monitor and work as normal. all of the commands are sent to the pi over a network (using the NC command) and then received by the pi

the pi is then plugged into the secondary monitor and when the commands are received, it uses a similar method to display the images or video in a framebuffer.
the artwork will need to be loaded onto the pi, or accessible from a network share. i was using a network share, with all of the artwork (and roms) in a “roms directory” that would be mapped in batocera to /userdata/roms

by doing it this way, you could have the artwork and roms as an internet share, or as local files on the SD card and the script would not know the difference. however for the x86/pi combo, you would need to have the artwork copied to the pi beforehand. I suppose that the artwork could be transferred as needed from the x86 computer using scp to the pi in real time, but i haven’t tried that and think it might be slower than i would be happy with.
i had originally used ssh to connect the 2 computers but found NC to be a bit easier to setup and a little more responsive than ssh, but in theory the SSH/SCP method could work. i think for performance sake, it is best to have the artwork copied to the pi though.

in a few weeks when i get caught up on other things i will add a x86/pi script as well so people using other setups can benefit from this as well

Atari

pdapice I see, that’s a very novel approach. I quite like it! If you want to update the wiki, I feel it would be best for you to do it yourself. Ask on the Discord server and an account will be set up for you.

Since this is a bit beyond the scope of just “putting the script files in the correct location” it would probably be better if these scripts just had their own page in general. It would help with the instructions being clearer and allow for far better formatting than what you can do in this forum. DM me if you’d like some help with that.

But of course, that’s just extra credit, only if you want to. I’ll get around to updating the scripts when I get back home.

pdapice

maybe i will do that once i have the pi scripts all setup too. I can do a proper tutorial. for now i am a little short on time so it may be a few weeks before i can put some more effort into it unfortunately

Atari

pdapice I’ve made a page dedicated to marquees which now includes your scripts. When you have the time, please update the instructions to be more clear. Here are the following points that confused me at least:

What software did you install onto the Raspberry Pi 4? Was it another copy of Batocera?
How does the Pi act as the direct framebuffer for Batocera on the PC? Does it itself use any scripts, or are the scripts solely on the PC?
You mentioned you got the artwork from Hyperspin, but could you show an example of the folder tree used?

Thank you for putting time into putting this all together.

lbrpdx

That is really cool!

pdapice

Atari

I will update them now. for reference though, this post is related to the pi4 only and i will soon make a separate post regarding using a pi3/4/zero as the separate marquee controller for other platforms.
for now, this script is designed to work on a pi4 that has batocera installed, and it is an all in one solution, meaning that you only need the pi4 and no other computer. it uses both the HDMI outputs of the pi4

the OTHER way i was planning which is a pending post is to send the information from pretty much any batocera install on any hardware to a pi (3,4,zero…and maybe even a pi2) to display the graphics on the marquee

Atari

pdapice Oh, I see! I got confused about that, especially since at the top of the post you said
“setting up an x86 to raspberry pi dual computer / dual screen setup (mostly successful)”, but that was you talking about a different project, not this one. I’ll go and clarify this on the wiki for now.

Looking forward to your future post!

Pjinbolton

Hi pdapice,

Just wanted to send a quick thank you for your efforts and suggestions in setting up the working marquee in Batocera v33 on a RPi4.

I have used the scripts you provided (tweaked to suit my directory structure) and the results are great.

I have uploaded a short video to YouTube showing my modded Arcade1Up. I have credited your work in the comments section of the video (I hope this is OK?)

Many thanks again

Pjinbolton

Hi again,

Since upgrading to v34, the method you describe above has stopped working on my setup…

Do you know why it no longer works, or what might have changed in v34 (I’ve also tried v35 beta) which prevents this from working?

My second screen now just says No Input and goes to sleep mode. It’s like the framebuffer isn’t being used any more as I used to get whatever was being sent to FBV displayed briefly on both monitors while the game loaded, until the emulation took over the main monitor. Now I never see the image selected for display on either screen.

I hope this makes sense and look forward to any suggestions yu may have to get the marquee working again.

Thanks

PhoeniXnr1

A little addition I made to the marquee.sh script. If you are using video files for your dynamic marquee, you should add a loop to it, because it will stop after 1 run. Simply add -stream_loop -1 to the ffmpeg command for it to run indefinitely :

ffmpeg -stream_loop -1

almulder

PhoeniXnr1

how did you make this work, I am on v33 and added all 4 files added the marquee files and cant get anything to show up on second monitor (pi4) is there a file I need to edit to make sure batocera uses the scripts?

Also no games launch now if the scrips are used.

smcgann99

I also tried this on v35 but nothing shows on 2nd monitor ?

pdapice

sorry been away for a while. I will check what version i am on and see if i can upgrade to v35 and see if it still works for me. it might be a while though, but i will see what i can find out!

pdapice

I did an inplace upgrade to v35 and my second monitor also is now not working. looking at the changelog of v34 (which i had skipped) and i see that it has: RPi4 now runs under xorg window server

i had issues with this in the X86 build which is why i switched to the PI version of batocera. I will maybe retrace some of my steps and see if i can get it to work but i am not hopeful. this is sad because i really like Batocera but this might be the silver bullet for me

smcgann99

pdapice

If you can figure out how to use 2nd HDMI in v35 that would be great ;-)