This is a browser-based emulator front-end which adapts to the controllers attached to the system.
For the vast majority of retro gaming a Pi with RetroArch is more than sufficient. However, there are a few corner cases it doesn't handle well:
- RetroPie officially supports a small assortment of controllers and using more niche layouts can be awkward to map.
- RetroPie has poor support for some of the more eclectic consoles (e.g., Atari Jaguar).
- It's a little awkward getting RetroPie smoothly set up on devices other than the wonderful Raspbery Pi (disclaimer: IMHO).
These are all quite sensible design choices for the cases RetroPie fits in. I want a system which can handle the Atari Jaguar and its odd controller. I also want a system my very young son can play with who enjoys a different game library than I do, so I don't want him to have to deal with navigating around my library. To solve this problem Gecko will present one UI skin and game library when one of my controllers is connected and a different skin and library when his controller is attached.
Initially, Gecko will support the following three personalities:
- Atari Jaguar: when a Jaguar controller is connected it will show only Jaguar titles.
- Sega: when a clone Saturn controller is connected it will display a Sega-style theme and library.
- Boy: when my son's mini XBox style controller is connected it will display his favourite games.
Gecko will run a NodeJS service in the background which will handle controller detection and library management. On boot the system will automatically launch a Chromium browser instance in kiosk mode which will request a HTML/JS UI from the Gecko service. Gecko will provide API calls for providing information about current personality and libraries as well as calls to launch specific emulators.
Because of the way the UI will take on different personalities I originally intended to call it Chameleon, but that name has some very negative connotations in the retro gaming community ...