| src/aswm | ||
| test | ||
| CMakeLists.txt | ||
| README.md | ||
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🕹️ Arcade Station Window Manager
ASWM is an Arcade Station Window Manager, optimised to control Linux application windows (including games and game launchers) with your favorite gamepad. It is designed to be minimalist, robust, flexible, and compatible with old hardware and existing arcade environments such as Emulationstation. It is based on the good old X Window System and not written in Rust.
Why this project?
The main motivation for this project is that I have fun coding it and reading legacy X.org specifications, for reasons I do not understand myself. If you want rational arguments anyway, they are provided below, but you can directly go to Features if you are not interested in technical details.
If you are building your custom arcade system, you probably heard about projects such as Emulationstation (legacy), EmulationStation Desktop Edition (modern and active fork), Retroarch, Batocera, Retropie or even Recalbox. Emulationstation and its derivative are customisable gamepad compatible graphic frontends that help you organise and launch games. Retroarch is a unified and generic library to run many retro gaming systems emulators. It is particularly adapted to be used as a backend for Emulationstation, even if it provides its own gamepad compatible UI to launch games. Emulationstation is however not limited to Retroarch, and can actually be used to launch any software. Projects like Retropie, Batocera or Recalbox (and probably many others) basically adapt and bundle altogether those software as Linux distributions more or less specialised to specific hardware.
Despite the awesomeness of all those projects, they are all focus on retro systems, and quickly become limiting if you want to run applications that do not fit the Emulationstation + Retroarch scheme.
The most known issue is probably to integrate a decent
Steam launcher to Emulationstation, as
the Steam client tends to spawn many windows that can mess up the interface
(on the other end, Retroarch only spawn a single fullscreen window for each
game). Game launchers such as Steam can also require some user login, that
can be impossible to provide with only a gamepad as input. The excellent Steam
Bigpicture mode (steam -bigpicture
on Linux) already solves many problems, for example providing a virtual keyboard
to log in and a gamepad compatible UI to launch games. But you might still have
issues to automatically take back input focus on the Emulationstation
interface when you realise that Mega Man X Legacy Collection wasn't worth $20
and want to seamlessly go back to the SNES edition of Mega Man X without even
rebooting your system.
Moreover, some games might not even be available from any game launcher and do not necessarily fit the "single fullscreen window" principle. For example, you might face issues to launch patchers of Touhou 16 without a mouse and keyboard.
It is also not possible to simultaneously run several applications from Emulationstation if you do not have any possibility to navigate currently opened windows. So if I want to integrate a Spotify or Bandcamp client to my arcade system to listen the awesome MyNewSoundtrack's Spark Mandrill remix while making my way to an epic fight against Vile to attempt to save Zero, I'm stuck. And if I want to keep a FreeTube application opened to watch Something About Mega Man X for the hundredth time between two levels, I can't either.
In short, the potential of a custom Linux based arcade system goes far beyond what the Emulationstation + Retroarch combo can currently do, and I'm not completly satisfied with existing project.
Why a Window Manager?
A Window Manager is an optional software that organise windows on your screen. If you only have a single fullscreen window, you don't need a window manager: that's why Emulationstation based arcade system traditionnaly don't need a window manager. On your daily system, the window manager allows you to display multiple windows and navigate, resize and move them.
The purpose of ASWM is not to reimplement a yet another flavor of Emulationstation, but to provide a generic solution compatible with existing projects. As an intermediary software between hardware and your applications, a custom window manager is thus a smart way to extend features of existing Emulationstation based arcade systems (and others) without altering them.
As an example, running Emulationstation under ASWM won't make any visible change to the user, as the window manager will simply display the single fullscreen window as requested. The window manager can however provide new features to navigate windows with a gamepad to improve compatibility with applications other than Retroarch.
Moreover, a gamepad compatible window manager allows to easily build custom arcade systems that are not necessarily based on Emulationstation, due to the flexibility of the game launcher concept.
Features (⚠️ work in progress)
ASWM handles several tasks in your custom arcade system:
- display and navigate game and game launcher windows in the most intuitive way using a gamepad
- perform virtual mouse and keyboard inputs using a gamepad
Window management
The daily usage of a custom arcade system must be as simple as booting the system, select a game, launch a game, play. The fact that you might need to manage several windows (for example to log in to the game launcher, or because several windows about news or the download of updates are displayed) compromise this objective. But we cannot make much expectations about how each game launcher will spawn windows in which order, nor hard code specific rules such as "if the launcher is Steam, display this window here and hide this other one" (at least not at the ASWM core level, but this is acceptable as user configuration: see Custom layouts).
In order to build a flexible window manager, ASWM is based on the abstract concept of game launcher. A game launcher is an application that is used to launch other game launchers or games. A game can actually be any kind of application. A game launcher can be Emulationstation, the native UI provided by Retroarch, the Steam client, or even a terminal emulator where you type the name of a game to launch it.
When a game or game launcher is closed, it is expected to automatically get back to the game launcher that launched it.
Structure
ASWM organize windows using the following structure:
- A desktop is a fullscreen window that can contain other windows. Desktops are organized in sequence subject to left/right navigation.
- Each desktop contains:
- a tiled background where resizeable windows are organised to try to fit all the space available on the screen. This is typically where windows associated to a game launcher are displayed (e.g. the main Steam client window + the Steam news window).
- on top of the tiled background, a stack of windows centered on the screen. All the stack is always above tiled windows, and only the top level stack window can be fully visible on the screen. Stacked windows are allowed to be fullscreen. They are typically not resizeable game windows launched from the game launcher in the background.
- a fixed taskbar, common for all desktops, can optionally be displayed as part of the tiled background, to display information about applications, system status, and navigation reminders.
ASWM will try to guess where it is more appropriate to place each window to obtain the most intuitive and pleasant arcade user interface. However, as it is generic and cannot make strong assumptions about how each application is behaved, hints and rules can be provided to implement custom layouts that are sure to fit your specific needs. See Custom layouts for configuration instructions.
Controls
Commands are provided in terms of RetroPad inputs.
| Command | Action |
|---|---|
| TODO |
Virtual mouse and keyboard inputs
TODO
Installation
TODO
Configuration
TODO
Custom layouts
TODO