Carbon Theme Suggestions
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@Rookervik said in Carbon Theme Suggestions:
And for background images, Carbon is designed for the RaspberryPi. "Simple" theme was not. It was designed for PCs with graphics cards and over a gigabyte of RAM. If you have custom wallpapers for every system, after 10 systems ES crashes with white screen. Trust me, I made wallpapers for most of the systems... then ran into the memory issue: http://ryokai.deviantart.com/gallery/55770575/Console-Wallpapers
I have 40 systems displayed with your carbon theme. I have 11 custom themes with several using a different logo inside and out. One of the themes has the background to retro city rampage and it logo used in it i have managed to push the theme to the limits. I am almost tempted to remove the controllers so i can push the limits on themes customized on the inside
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If you remove the controllers and use images around 320x200, you can actually have a wallpaper for each system! A screenshot of a game for each system is definitely do-able.
It's when you get to 720p wallpapers that the system takes a hit. "Simple" theme uses 720p wallpapers, and at about system 10, you get white screen because ES is out of VRAM. White Screen was a major, major problem for RetroPie a couple years ago. Herbfargus and I worked on Carbon just for that reason.
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@Rookervik so most of my pics are small 8x8 or 1x112 and a few as big as the header and footer used in the simple theme. here are a few examples of how i am doing them
this one took renaming the playchoice 10 nes roms as well
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@edmaul69 They look good, but I am still quite skeptical that your bottom bar images are as small as you say. They look like they are at least 76x512, then stretched to span the screen. And you have quite a few of them. The wood grains. Even if your image is 1x112, when the texture is read into Video RAM, it takes a "canvas" the size of 128x128 (the closest power of 2 from 112). And bottom images as large as they look, would expand to 512x512. So I can see where your memory issues come in. And a custom font for each system. Each weighing in probably over 1 megabyte.
Your logos at the top are very very large as well. If that's a 1080p screen, your intellivision logo (even as an svg) is taking the VRAM of a 1024x1024 image. That's massive for the Raspberry Pi's limited RAM.
I found out the hard way that even a 1kb svg, stretched to fullscreen, will white-screen a 128 MB RAM split Pi. (>_<)
So shrinking your logos down some will help with RAM, as would smaller bottom bars. Try to stay below 128x128 and find something that will tile smoothly.
And sweet jesus, turn down the green on the gameboy! It wasn't hypercolor! Hahahah!
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I only have 3 others that have a brushed or woodgrain. The playchoice 10 one i already have a cutdown bottom that brings that is 1x whatever that brings the bar completely across the bottom to save space. All the rest only use a 1x224 and 8x8. Super nintendo only use 1 8x8. Whats crazy though is i had 29 of them like this with a 640x 300 picture on the outside as well running on my pi 2. I think if i get rid of the controllers i can get get a lot more than 11 of my custom ones. I am going to convert over to your new theme though. I really like that one. And the green from the gameboy is from a screenshot i took from the gameboy emulator. It used to be the b&w gameboy pocket version but i decided recently i wanted the green version the original gb used since the rest of the theme was from an original. With the fonts and all i want to see how far i can go without controllers anywhere.
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So i deleted the controllers and i am at 19 modded themes. I have 20 more that i have to redo for carbon so i will see how it goes. All the ones i have left only have 8x8 and possibly 1x334
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@nemo93 said in Carbon Theme Suggestions:
As I don't want to be too much party breaker, is there any chance to separate out the "new" Carbon with the previous "old" Carbon version at least?
I too am disappointed with the new Carbon. I really like the old Carbon with gamelist on the right, and tons of metadata. An option to install old Carbon would be highly appreciated.
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Hehe, wah-wah. :-P As soon as Herbfargus is back we will get original Carbon back up for downloads. He finished up college and is in the process of moving for work. I'll see if I can package it as a zip for anyone savvy enough to install it that way.
Download: Legacy Carbon Theme
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@Rookervik Congrats to him finishing college
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@Rookervik Thank you very much for the zip. And my apologies for sounding ungrateful, or as if I was crying over the changes. I highly prefer the old theme on my 65" TV, however I think the changes to carbon actually look better on smaller screens. I built a mini arcade with a 9" display and the new Carbon looks great on there, so I believe I will actually use both themes across all of my devices. That said, the 65" display is more important to me than the others and I really like old Carbon there. Thanks again!
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I love the cover art available when scraping. I think a screenshot or if possible a sample video/demo of the game in action like HyperSpin does.
Currently one annoyance, the last game of any list is cut off about half way. That's it, Carbon is pretty good!
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@GreenHawk84 GAH that's really important. I thought that was cleaned up. I will check it and see if I can fix it. Depends on your screen resolution and aspect ratio. But most people use 16:9 so I want all the games to be visible on that one. Thank you for mentioning this.
Update: Mm, they are all displaying correctly on my screen. Can you tell me what screen resolution you are using? Particularly the aspect ratio?
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@Rookervik, I have NES, SNES, and Genesis scraped. Those display the text names of games perfect. Arcade and Neo Geo are not scraped and the very last title is cut in half. 16:9 monitor, 1920x1080.
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@GreenHawk84 Hmm, increased the size of the gamelist by 0.01% and it is showing all of the last title in both 720p and 1080p.
I designed the theme in 720p and it worked there. 1080p it cut off the bottom. So now it's showing, but it will still depend on your resolution and aspect ratio.There are no tags to theme the gamelist and make sure all the text is showing. (-_-)
I'll wait a bit before I upload this fix. Make sure there's nothing else to change and then post it.
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Ok, updated Carbon with the "basic" gamelist fix. You should be able to see all of the gamelist now.
Note: this will still depend on your screen resolution and aspect ratio. It works on 16:9 so for sure. Sadly, this is an ES theming problem.
Carbon v2.0.2: Download
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Quick question... My games show on the right, artwork on the left. I am setting up a pi for my friend exactly like mine. His is the opposite way around. We're both using 3.8.1. Both using carbon... Is it an automatic download or something and has this new pi downloaded the updated carbon?
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@sc0tt88 That I don't know. I think the theme is available to download at the moment. But won't be default until RetroPie 4.0. -I think-
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the metadata labels (released, genre, developer, players) and values are overlapping, dunno if it's due to resolution (1280x1024) or aspect ratio (4:3)..
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@dLux Yeah that's a 4:3 ratio issue. I'll see if I can push them out a little further so they don't overlap, but still look good in widescreen.
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There is a lot of space around the boxes on my system (and in the pic above) - is that intentional to reduce gpu memory usage or to do with the aspect ratio, or just a preference ?
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