(1.2.0) "Add ROMs via USB stick" reworking

[jefflunt]

Originally from Brandt Daniels:

Enhancement:

The text says 'Add ROMs via USB stick' on the top in red. I think the text should be centered vertically and be better descriptive of how to add roms. Also something other than a USB stick could be used such as a hard drive. I would suggest the text be something like 'Please insert USB device containing ROM images'

[jefflunt]

I think you have a good point here.

The display of the red text (as it's currently implemented) is, admittedly, a bit of a hack. It's actually entered as the name of the system in config/es_systems.cfg, and the system header has been re-enabled in config/es_theme.xml (or more specifically, the option to disable the display of the system header has been removed, thereby showing the text).

The usability argument here is that, even after ROMs are added, you can still add even more ROMs via USB stick since the copy-roms.sh script does a copy and not a replace.

I like the idea of displaying the text vertically centered when the list is empty. The reason it's not better laid out right now, honestly, is because I haven't spent hardly any time on the rendering code. To get glint-es to where it is right now I've primarily been refactoring existing code, adding very little of my own, as I re-familiarize myself with C++. I think these kinds of enhancements are actually great suggestions.

[brandtdaniels]

Alright, I later realized that the text is suppose to stay there after ROMs are loaded. The only thing that changes is "the list is empty" text.

My suggestion is on first boot with no roms have the text centered and after roms are loaded the text disappears. We could possibly add it to the menu when you hit the start button. The start button now only currently shows an Exit option but we could add a Help option.

As far as copy-roms.sh goes, when I originally wrote it, I had it remove everything from the target directory first. We don't want to be accumulating ROMs on our system ;) I feel the user should only get what he has his own copy of on the USB drive.

[jefflunt]

We might actually be able to deal with the de-duplication problem by checking the shasum of a ROM about to be copied, and only copy it if it's new, thereby avoiding the problem of identical ROM files with a different file name.

I like the idea of being able to add to your collection without having to reload the entire ROM list. Though I suppose it takes relatively little time so it may be a non-issue.

The only other issues I see with removing the contents of the /home/pi/roms folder are:

• This folder, I believe, also holds game states. So it's important to only remove the ROMs and not the *.state files
• What about batter saves (e.g. Zelda) - where do those end up, and are they in fact stored not in the .nes file itself?

[jefflunt]

I also think it would be helpful, in the future, to add a menu option that allows you to selectively delete or rename games in your list. Renaming hundreds of files, of course, is a non-starter, but if someone gets a new ROM they want to add and it's not named the same way as all their other ROMs, at least they could rename it in the GUI as one possible option.

I also think it could be cool to add something like an "auto name" feature that would lookup shasum values for known ROMs and associated file names, and automatically rename the files in your collection to easy-to-read file names. A file containing the shasum => ROM name association could be part of the glint-nes release package to make things easy.

This is, of course, sort of a separate issue from what what this case is about, but could be very helpful in terms of ROM management, which I feel like we're going to be asked to help with, especially given the fact that the auto-copy stuff is already in place.

[jefflunt]

Hell, I'm just going to open an issue for those two things. See #6 and #7