My Remastered NES Covers
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@darknior Hey bud,
You still working on NES covers, or are you pretty much done. I was wondering if you ever got around to zipping them up somewhere. Now that I'm done with testing on XBox and the Pi Zero I will have some free time to integrate your awesome work into the set in between other things before I start making the HD video previews. :)
Hey man. You're NES generic boxes were awesome! I was wondering if you had any time in the future to put together a few FDS generics for the set? Thanks!!!!
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@used2berx Yes i will come back on NES ;)
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@darknior You don't happen to know a good program for quickly cropping images do you? I'd like to resize all of my largest boxarts to be the same dimensions, or a multiple of the same dimension. I don't want to do this by resizing them because even with the filters today there can be some loss of quaility doing that. I want to crop edges (kind of like using a template as a cookie cutter on all of them).
I'm going to be resizing these down for the Pi 3, the XBox and the Pi Zero. It will work a lot better if they were all the same size/ratio in the first place so minimal quality loss will occur.
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@used2berx Sorry i only know XnviewMP to make mass resize.
I do all my self by hand on photoshop because each cover is different ...Life is game, just play it !
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@darknior Yeah..... that's what I was thinking I'd have to do. Maybe Gilles knows of something.
Really not looking forward to have to manually edit all of the carts and boxes before I can do resizes. At 2,018 games we're talking resizing 4,036 images by hand.
I'm also going to have to do a LOT of math to make sure I'm keeping the ratios good.
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@darknior Hey bud,
I don't know if you've ever used the free image program paint.net, but it's what I've been using. Whatever they don't have natively that I've needed, I've been able to find great plugins made by the community to get the job done.
About making aspect ratio crops of all of the photos, I think I might have found the answer I was looking for. :)
Check out this video:
It's still going to take me ages to go through 4,000+ images by hand, but I think this will remove any potential errors from the equation and I won't actually have to do the obscene amount of math I thought I might have to do. :)
I'll let you know how it works for me when I dive into it. I think this will be the next huge part of my project.
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@darknior Oh... hey.
Would you mind zipping up the images you've made so I can integrate them into the set darknior? I'd like to do that first before I begin the project. :)
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@used2berx Maybe it can help you, i don't like this soft, too less powerful than Photoshop.
Now i have finished Atari 800 i will come back to NES for sure.
I only must finish some borders before, for my emulators set like i want them and not like i found them around the web.I must upload my NES stuff on MEGA to share it with other users .... i will do it, please stand a little.
I also work a lot on Webtropie, now it is near perfect and ready to use, it will help me a lot to work quickly on my gamelist ;)
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@darknior Thanks man. I am patiently awaiting your work. I will try to find something else to work on before you get them to me. I suppose I could start on the cart images first, since that will be 2,000+ images to work on that won't need to be redone after I get your package :)
Photoshop was always too complex for me, and I never appreciated the price tag. I like Paint.NET because it's a lot easier for a novice to pick up, it's free, and it has a large community of fans that continue to make plugins to do things that it can't do out of the box. I think that programs like this are going to start forcing Adobe to drastically lower its pricing model in the future.
This is the first I've heard of Webtropie. Is there a user manual for it, or at least something that explains what it does? I don't think I'd actually use it myself because the script that @meleu has been writing and I've been making requests for is almost perfect at this point, but there may be some things in there that are valuable as far as stuff we haven't even thought of yet.
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@used2berx said in My Remastered NES Covers:
This is the first I've heard of Webtropie. Is there a user manual for it, or at least something that explains what it does? I don't think I'd actually use it myself because the script that @meleu has been writing and I've been making requests for is almost perfect at this point, but there may be some things in there that are valuable as far as stuff we haven't even thought of yet.
Yes there is her on the wiki : https://github.com/gazpan/WebtroPie/wiki
We work a lot to make it perfect to use.
The version 1.0 will come nearly ....Future version will had many excellent feature to work on collections, grab media on internet with a scrapper, etc ...
All will be possible with this web interface to work on our RETROPIE stuff :)I know you work on this @meleu script ... and remember i ask you to give me the EmuXtra SYNOPSIS files converted to ES gamelist.xml when you will make them for AMIGA, X68000, etc ... it can help me to save time on these systems ...
Life is game, just play it !
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@darknior Cool. I will check it out. I'm personally not interested in the scraping since I take the time to get the absolute best images and all of the synopsis info by hand myself to ensure it's correct. Scrapers are cool because it automates the process, but a lot of that information ends up being wrong unfortunately. For instance, of the 2000+ games I have, I personally tested how many players each game is, and whether they're co-op, vs., alternating or a combination of gametypes. This is why the project takes me so long, because I am not relying on any automated processes for collecting any data. It is all being filtered by me personally on an individual level for every aspect. :)
I'll give you whatever I get on Amiga and X68000 when I get to it. But unfortunately I think you might have to wait until about the year 2030 before I get to those systems. ;)
I still have Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, Lynx, Super Nintendo, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, PSX, Sega Master System, Genesis, 32X, Sega CD, TurboGrafx 16/CD and probably quite a few others before I'd ever get to them.
Who knows? Maybe after I release the Rx2.0 NES set I can get some crowd funding going on that would allow me to work on this full time. For now, I had to get a job because I ran out of money and I'm spending a majority of my waking hours doing grunt work for peanuts. :( Oh well. Me and everybody else, right?
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@darknior Will a difference of several pixels on a 600x665 image make a visible difference to the user on an HDTV darknior?
I'm asking because with the cart images I will be unable to make perfect ratios with the images I have without adding either a black line of several pixels to some images (in JPG) or adding an invisible border of a few pixels (in PDF).
I don't think this should really be a problem with the more important box art images since I should be able to just cut out the perfect ratios by removing a few lines of pixels on any given image, but with the carts this won't be possible without somewhat mangling the actual cart shape, which I know for a fact without even checking would be somewhat noticable.
If I have to add pixels to the carts in this way, I should be only adding them to the right side and/or the bottom of the image, right?
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@used2berx said in My Remastered NES Covers:
I personally tested how many players each game is, and whether they're co-op, vs., alternating or a combination of gametypes. This is why the project takes me so long, because I am not relying on any automated processes for collecting any data. It is all being filtered by me personally on an individual level for every aspect. :)
I know we do exactly same .... like i write you so bad we do the same work two time :(
I'll give you whatever I get on Amiga and X68000 when I get to it. But unfortunately I think you might have to wait until about the year 2030 before I get to those systems. ;)
Arg so bad, i only want a file convertion from EmuXtra to ES file. nothing more if your script ca do it. I don't want you work on it.
I still have Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, ... PSX, ... Sega CD, TurboGrafx 16 ... and probably quite a few others before I'd ever get to them.
I'm interested by these 6 systems XML if you have made some of them.
Who knows? Maybe after I release the Rx2.0 NES set I can get some crowd funding going on that would allow me to work on this full time. For now, I had to get a job because I ran out of money and I'm spending a majority of my waking hours doing grunt work for peanuts. :( Oh well. Me and everybody else, right?
I know, it take me all my free time too :(
I have think to crowd funding but it is not a legal project ... complicated to ask money for it.
Like you write with some money we can work on it 24/24 hours :)Will a difference of several pixels on a 600x665 image make a visible difference to the user on an HDTV darknior?
If you want add pixel, use PNG and transparent pixel, no black line because on some skin it will be crappy :(
Image stretching is not really fine coded on ES, and if it stretch an image, the image will be less beautiful :(
It's why i make now all my covers with 720 pixel height ...
Here is my old beta RVGM skin (i must many much update lol) ... but it is like i want, with a big beautiful front cover, a large video to discover the game, all the game informations and the game logo to make informations more beautiful :)
Here i screenshot it in 720p and i write all the media size.In 720p :
- Cover height : 530
- Video width : 406
- Logo width : 256
In 1080p : (x1.5)
- Cover height : 795
- Video width : 608
- Logo width : 384
Mine :
- Cover height : 720
- Video width : 640 (x480)
- Logo width : 400
Like you see my stuff is always bigger than my skin use in 1080p. Only the cover is a little stretch in 1080p but i don't see it on my TV. And it let my ES smooth ... if images are larger i will have slowdown :(
It's why i have choose them and will not change anything. When i play games i play them with scanline or RTC filter to make them more beautiful. HD on games is not important for me. and on ES it is not really different to use 720 or 1080p ... Maybe i can read better some little text on covers but nothing more.
And i have try my ES and skin on a 4K TV ... it change nothing, i don't see any difference. But ES is a little slow, and it add to the emulators a big input lag ! I know it will work fine with the PI4 in 2019 but it will change nothing ...
It's why for me have/working on bigger media is a waste of time.
My retro museum will always work on 720 or 1080p it's enough :) -
@darknior Unfortunately, I think you're going to have to run the script on them yourself man. Unless you have all of the files in the exactly correct places that they need to be, they won't work for you. When Gilles asked me about this script I put a very detailed set of instructions on the other site for him. You'd have to make sure all of your media was in the right spots, as well as all of the synopsis files. I don't believe that the script would currently work on Amiga or X68000 because I think that @meleu would have to add those in. I only gave him synopsis files for the systems I'm currently planning on covering, and those are way down on the list.
You would be able to make them for the 6 systems you said you'd be interested in though.
I will not be releasing any roms, but if you look at my spreadsheet I have been building I have TOSEC, No-Intro and GoodNES 3.23b all in there, so it should be easy for somebody to create most of the games by themselves. I don't see any reason why crowd funding can't be an option for this work if roms aren't included since all of this other stuff is readily available on perfectly legal sites like gamefaqs and mobygames.
I'm currently re-doing all of the carts in PNG format, and I'm removing any of the image that isn't of the cart itself so they look freaking awesome on the RetroPie skins. It took me about 5-6 hours to get around 100 of them done, so I'm going to be working on this part for a while. Hopefully you can get the NES covers done by then and I can start working on them. :)
Let me know if you want to try using the script and check out the instructions for them. If you have any questions let me know.
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@used2berx said in My Remastered NES Covers:
Let me know if you want to try using the script and check out the instructions for them. If you have any questions let me know.
I'm working on so may PI project at same time ... i will not try your script for now, maybe later.
I'm only interested by TEXT informations, no Rom no Media ... i will use these information s to help complete my own XML.
It's why you can give me your files converted from EmuXtra. the name of rom is not important, i will only use them to make search by game name if i can't find information over the net.Thanks for all your informations :)
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@darknior I don't think our script is what you need then. You might want to look into Skyscraper that muldjord is working on. I can't remember if he ever added the ability to use our synopsis or not, but he was willing to do it.
The script that meleu's been tweaking does it all. There's no way to just convert the synopsis.txt files to xml files with it. Even if there were, I don't know how this would save you any time.
I'm afraid that you're going to end up spending tons of time making xml files that you don't need to. It really doesn't take that long to follow the instructions and set up your media correctly. You can then run the script and let the pi make every gamelist.xml for every system that it currently handles. It would take about 16 hours on a Pi Zero and would probably be much quicker on a Pi 3.
Not bad, considering if I were to do it all by hand it would probably take me 2 or 3 thousand hours to write them.
It's up to you though. :)
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