Grid View EmulationStation Mod Ideas

firewater

@jacobfk20 Oh no, quite the contrary your response is very encouraging on the future of a non-pi build! Not to mention, the very friendly guide that @Zigurana has linked. Think I will give this a go myself and see how it goes. Hoping the *nix stuff just doesn't work instead of crashing the whole thing down...

And about the image scaling - the fork I had (maybe vanilla too) was downloading smaller images than full resolution due to a width="400" setting. This, plus the nearest neighbour you mention, gave awful results. I disabled this setting and now the images look nice. Antialiasing would be better, but they look presentable as is.

One more thing I gotta ask - the fork I have has a "<string name="ConfigDirectory" value="C:/Users/firewater/.emulationstation" />" line on es_settings.cfg. I assumed changing this value would work, but it doesn't seem to pick up the directory if it's in any other place... I know I can run portable mode on Windows, but I wanna change OS in the future and that wouldn't work there. Am I doing something wrong? And, does your fork support this setting?

jacobfk20

@Zigurana I knew someone had to have taken the time to write up a guide. It looks like monday I'll give it a go and hopefully have windows support finally added. Thank you for linking me to it. I'm sure theme makers will appreciate it too :)

@firewater As I said above-- I'll be attempting to compile my fork on windows on Monday. If you still try before I do tell me about it, fail or not. My fork does not have the setting you're talking about. Which fork are you using? ES usually just looks for the config in HOME_PATH/.emulationstation So if for example you switch to linux it will look in /home/firewater/.emulationstation

firewater

@jacobfk20 I thought I was gonna have lots of free time, but things changed so I will not be able to try to compile anyday soon, so I rest my hopes on you. Thank you very much for doing this, whether you succeed or not. I will await eagerly, and hopefully get to play around with the grid theme someday soon...

This is the fork I'm using. And I hate the default location because I like having that folder clean without apps, or at most have them in the Windows AppData folder. Even if it's hidden, knowing that it's there bothers me haha

Capeman

I just found this post and was fascinated at the progress everyone was making with this awesome fork of ES. Is this something that is going to be integrated into the main RetroPie image in the future? I don't generally use forks of software until they're officially released. Wish I was a coder so I could help, but unfortunately I'm just one of the many hopefuls waiting for more skilled people do their magic, haha.

radius

Re: Grid View EmulationStation Mod Ideas

Hi,
I've been trying to figure out how to correctly use grid and tile sizes with no great success ^^, I'll be using square artboxes from now on so it'll be easier to maintain except I'll need to customize nearly all the covers, but it looks better in my opinion :)

dudleydes

@radius The issue regarding maintaining aspect ratio of box art was fixed some time ago. I have portrait box art for NES and Megadrive and landscape box art for SNES. Make sure you are using the latest binary which is available earlier on this thread.

The aspect ratio of box art for a system is determined by the image dimensions of the first game. All other box art will appear in the same ratio. In your example, if the box art for Contra is square, then the box art for all other games will also be square irrespective of the actual image aspect ratio.

AndersHP

@Capeman said in Grid View EmulationStation Mod Ideas:

I just found this post and was fascinated at the progress everyone was making with this awesome fork of ES. Is this something that is going to be integrated into the main RetroPie image in the future? I don't generally use forks of software until they're officially released. Wish I was a coder so I could help, but unfortunately I'm just one of the many hopefuls waiting for more skilled people do their magic, haha.

I second this. Really loving the work here, fingers crossed it will be implemented into the RetroPie UI at some point! Looking very good!

radius

@dudleydes Thanks I'll check if I'm using latest source or not :)

roquen

Check out https://squaredretrogameart.tumblr.com/ for a growing compilation of square box artwork; and feel free to submit your own work as well, the more the merrier :)

paffley

Hi, is this still under development?

EctoOne

@paffley there is some activity happening regarding grid view according to the github discussions, but I can't tell how close it is for release. Simply because I rarely check out github and when I do, I mostly do a quick scan.

mattrixk

@paffley: As for GridView itself, I don't know, but @jacobfk20 was the one that originally created the GirdView mod, and they haven't been active on this forum in over 5 months.

Zigurana

Current status:
@Koerty has taken up where @jacobfk20 has left, and matured the grid view functionality considerably. The code is under review, with only minor issues to iron out, and there is an in-depth technical discussion underway on the syntax to be used in the themes to drive this new functionality. All this takes place on the Github Repo.

paffley

Thanks @EctoOne @mattrixk @Zigurana ......can you put a link to the git repo please? Thanks guys :)

HurricaneFan

@paffley https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup

herb_fargus

@hurricanefan he's talking about this repo.

https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation

paffley

Thanks guys :)

darknior

@zigurana said in Grid View EmulationStation Mod Ideas:

Current status:
@Koerty has taken up where @jacobfk20 has left, and matured the grid view functionality considerably. The code is under review, with only minor issues to iron out, and there is an in-depth technical discussion underway on the syntax to be used in the themes to drive this new functionality. All this takes place on the Github Repo.

I read on Git that coders are always working on this great feature :)
One year of hard work ...
Do you know we will have a release this year 2017 to try it ?
Thanks

paffley

has anybody ever experimented with using the gridview with one row? bit like the nes/snes mini game boxart carousel?

Just curious...

dudleydes

@paffley I am using an ES binary built from the Gridview PR repo and a theme with one row of box art.

Not sure what you would like to know but I'm going to pre-empt anyway. When the selector reaches the end of the row on the right, it moves to the beginning of the next row on the left. The selector doesn't scroll continuously left or right as it does on the SNES mini. It's more of a zigzag pattern.

I'm sure such a feature could be implemented but development for Gridview for ES has halted yet again so it's unlikely to be soon.

If you are looking for a theme with one row of box art that can be scrolled continuously left or right, you may wish to look at Pegasus and its Flixnet theme. Unfortunately, unless you're familiar with QML, there is quite a learning curve in creating themes.