RetroPie-WebPanel
A Simple PHP Control Panel for RetroPie
Warning
This relies heavily on shell_exec() commands, and is for that reason insecure. This web panel should never be public-internet-facing.
Photo
Features
A plain web panel (/panel.php) which:
- displays "Now Playing" and "Last Played" games
- has a "volume control" slider, which displays the current volume level (on the HDMI device) and allows you to adjust volume remotely
- has a "search" feature, to search for ROMs on the system & launch them remotely from this web panel (i.e., start the game up from your phone)
- has a field for text-to-speech (really just for fun, serves no purpose)
- has a "soft reset" button to exit any currently playing games and load the main emulationstation menu
Requirements
- Nginx or Apache, with PHP >= 7.2
- espeak (For text-to-speech)
- aplay (For text-to-speech)
- amixer (For volume control)
As is indicated in /etc/sudoers, www-data must be given permissions to execute commands as the pi user without password verification, in order to perform soft resets or to launch games. As is indicated in /etc/group, www-data has also been added to the "audio" group for TTS, though that command could also be run as a sudo -u pi if you like.
Background
I had to replace my laptop screen and didn't want to throw away the old one which still mainly worked (I absolutely hate waste), so I bought a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W, threw RetroPie on it and made it (with the laptop display) into a video-game-playing end-table for my family (I don't even play video games). I made this web control panel to make the system easier for them to use, so that they can partially control it from their phones etc.