launchkit
launchkit is an alternative to RetroPie’s built-in launchimage feature. It’s intended to be, more or less, a drop-in replacement. It enables the following:
- Shows the launch image on the screen until the emulator takes over rendering
- Adjusts launch images to the available screen size in order to avoid image skew
The impact of this is twofold:
- The amount of time it takes to launch an emulator is reduced since the runcommand script isn’t sleeping while the launch image is dislaying
- The same launch image can be used across different display sizes
How it works
When using launchkit, launch images must be suffixed with launching-extended.{png,jpg}
instead of launching.{png,jpg}. This is required in order to prevent RetroPie from using
its own internal logic.
launchkit will look in the following locations for a launch image (in order of priority):
- /opt/retropie/configs/{system}/images/{rom_name}-launching-extended.{png,jpg}
- /opt/retropie/configs/{system}/launching-extended.{png,jpg}
- /opt/retropie/configs/all/launching-extended.{png,jpg}
If an image is found:
- The TTY is switched to graphics mode so that an image can be displayed
- The screen’s dimensions are calculated in order to center the launch image
- The image is rendered to the screen using
ffmpeg(which immediately exits) - A background monitoring thread is started
The monitoring thread is used to check when either the runcommand dialog is displayed or the emulator has exited. This ensures that we clear the screen when other things may be getting displayed on the screen. Assuming this doesn’t happen, then the image will be automatically cleared when the emulator starts rendering.
Install
To install launchkit via retrokit:
# Support multiple integrated runcommand hooks
bin/setup.sh install retropie-runcommand
# Install launchkit
bin/setup.sh install launchkit
Usage
# Show a launch image for the given system / rom
launchkit/launchkit.sh show <system> <emulator> <path-to-rom>
# Clear any currently drawn launch image (this can be safely done multiple times)
launchkit/launchkit.sh clear