PlayLog is an application to track and store stats of what games and cores you play on your MiSTer.
NOTE: Still a work in progress. Core functionality works well but reporting is very basic. If you're into this idea, you can start using it right now to track stats until more interesting reports are created. You won't lose any of your stats with future updates.
Enable the recents option in your MiSTer.ini file and reboot your MiSTer.
Download PlayLog and copy it to the Scripts folder on your MiSTer's SD card.
Optionally, add the following to the downloader.ini file on your MiSTer, to receive updates with the update script:
[mrext/playlog]
db_url = https://github.com/wizzomafizzo/mrext/raw/main/releases/playlog/playlog.json
WARNING: As a power loss protection feature, by default, PlayLog will write a small amount of data to the SD card every 5 minutes while you're playing a game. This shouldn't be a problem with modern SD cards, but you can configure this value to be longer or disable it entirely. See further down for instructions.
- Run
playlogfrom the MiSTerScriptsmenu - Select Yes when asked to add PlayLog to the MiSTer boot script (only happens once)
From this point, PlayLog will always run on boot and silently track game playing stats in the background. At any point you can run playlog again and see a summary report of the stats.
PlayLog can be configured by creating a playlog.ini file in the /media/fat/Scripts folder where you put playlog.sh. For example:
[playlog]
save_every = 5
| Key | Default |
|---|---|
save_every |
5 |
This setting changes how often PlayLog will save time data to disk while in a core.
Change 5 to whatever number of minutes you want PlayLog to wait between saves. For example: 1 for every minute, 60 for every hour and so on. Set it to 0 to disable this feature entirely and only update stats during core change. Smaller values means less time "lost" after power loss.
PlayLog always saves the current stats when you exit to the MiSTer menu or launch a new game/core.
A common requirement for scripts is to detect the currently running game which is somewhat complex to do reliably on MiSTer. PlayLog can do this for you, and offers a couple of ways to integrate your own scripts with it.
PlayLog creates a file called /tmp/ACTIVEGAME when it is running. All different ways of detecting a game change are funneled through to this file, which PlayLog itself uses to trigger updates. You can safely monitor this file for changes to see what the path to the current game is.
At this stage, MiSTer does not offer a way to detect the currently playing game if it has been launched directly through the /dev/MiSTer_cmd interface. If you have a script which does this, and you'd like to integrate it with PlayLog, you can simply check if /tmp/ACTIVEGAME exists at the time of game launch and then write the game's path to this file if it does. An absolute path is preferred, but PlayLog will do its best to resolve relative paths since they're very common in MiSTer.
An example of doing this with Bash: [[ -e /tmp/ACTIVEGAME ]] && echo "/path/to/game" > /tmp/ACTIVEGAME
PlayLog offers 4 hooks which can launch a custom script or application:
on_core_start: when a core is first startedon_core_stop: when that core is stoppedon_game_start: when a game is first startedon_game_stop: when that game is stopped
These can be configured in the playlog.ini file by setting the same key name as above and a path to an executable file. For example: on_game_start = /media/fat/Scripts/my_script.sh
When the hook's condition is met, PlayLog will run the given executable with either a core's internal name or a game's absolute path as its first argument.
Be aware that stop hooks will be unreliable when an end user shuts down their MiSTer via power switch.