PiForce Tools... now with categories!

[sammargh]

ONE SD CARD TO RULE THEM ALL!®

I don't know if you're like me and leave everything on one sd card but man is it annoying to load up a game to find out it's vertical or you just nuked your free play settings going to/from Atomiswave and Naomi. I was really bored today so I rewrote the menu interface to piforcetools and the game list to introduce categories! To navigate categories you just use left/right on the lcd panel. Up/down/enter work just as they do in the previous versions.

To install you need to replace the two python files in /boot/piforcetools that are attached. Before doing this you need to do two changes to the piforcetools.py file:

LINE 13
categories = ["atomiswave", "atomiswave_special", "naomi", "naomi_vertical", "naomi_special", "naomi_gun", "naomi2", "chihiro", "triforce", "commands"] # Add or remove categories that are unused

LINE 37
# lcd.backlight(lcd.BLUE) # REMOVE COMMENT IF USING NEWER RGB LCD

So line 13 is the category array for the menu. Any category that has no games will cause piforce to crash so remove them.

For example I don't have chihiro, triforce, naomi2 or guns so line 13 becomes:

categories = ["atomiswave", "atomiswave_special", "naomi", "naomi_vertical", "naomi_special", "commands"] # Add or remove categories that are unused

Pretty simple. Line 37 needs uncommented if you have a newer RGB LCD panel for your net booter. I do not so it is commented out.

The categories are as follows:
atomiswave - standard horizontal atomiswave games
atomiswave_special - vertical/games with nonstandard controls
naomi - standard horizontal naomi games
naomi_vertical - vertical naomi games
naomi_special - naomi games with special controls i.e wheel, keyboard, maraccas, etc
naomi_gun - naomi gun games
naomi2 - naomi2 games
chihiro - chihiro games
triforce - triforce games
commands - ping/change ip of netbooter

You may need to edit the game list to match your roms or if you reference the list you can probably redo your existing list to match the categories. My game list might not be 100% accurate either as I was going off some assumptions when putting it together.

 

[werejag]

very nice. ill try this out

can we change the color of our lcds based on this? like naomi is blue background and chirhio is green and triforce is yellow

 

[sammargh]

If you have the newer rgb lcd you can set the color however full control isn’t setup in the code. Your options are Red, Yellow, Green, Teal, Blue, Violet and White per adafruit.

 

[sammargh]

Just a heads up but I glanced at the code again and I accidentally left a debug sleep(2) at line 216 which can be deleted to make startup faster. Oops.

and I forgot to add chihiro and triforce to the sending function. I can fix it tomorrow. Apologies!

 

[sammargh]

Ok this was updated again after the dumb problem earlier as of Feb 4. New features are as follows:

• menus now have full wraparound in both directions and the categories only show up on the lcd when switching between categories
• game categories had salaryman as a normal atomiswave game but it requires a touch screen so moved to atomiswave_special

I'll probably check the Naomi games later this week if I can but I don't have guns/analog so I can't promise the categories will be proper.

The only thing I can think of to improve would be adding in the card emulation stuff from the web iface fork for chihiro/triforce however I don't know if anyone cares about it and I have no way to test that it works.

If there's something you want implemented let me know, I can see what I can do.