MetaPixel - A New Emulationstation Theme

mattrixk

That's some great work @SnipedintheHead. Well done.

I like your idea of using the arcade folder to house your 3 and 4 player games. I may have to look into that.

SnipedintheHead

@mattrixk said in MetaPixel - A New Emulationstation Theme:

That's some great work @SnipedintheHead. Well done.

I like your idea of using the arcade folder to house your 3 and 4 player games. I may have to look into that.

Thanks! Came out of necessity, I didn't have the ability to mark favorites at the time and a number of games worked across various platforms.

mattrixk

@SnipedintheHead said in MetaPixel - A New Emulationstation Theme:

I didn't have the ability to mark favorites at the time

I use @Zigurana's Child-Friendly ES. It lets you select favourites, but also lets you set it to kid's mode which hides a bunch of the setup stuff so you can leave it with young 'uns (or drunk friends) and they are less likely to break everything. It's still experimental and can get a little buggy at times, but it hasn't really effected me too much.

What I'd love most is a Tag and Search system, so you could create tags like '2_player_brawler' and add a bunch of games from different systems, then you could search by tags, or by metadata (like genre, number of players etc) and it would just display all the games in a big list regardless of system. One can dream.

In the meantime, I saw someone mentioned putting your games into folders within the system, so you could split your games up by genre or any other way you prefer, within the single system itself.

Hmm... I wonder if I could split my roms up so they look like this:

roms
- megadrive
  - 1 Player
    - Action
    - Brawler
    - Racing
    - Shmup
  - 2 Player
    - Action
    - Brawler
    - Racing
    - Shmup
- snes
  - 1 Player
    - Action
    - Brawler
    - Racing
    - Shmup
  - 2 Player
    - Action
    - Brawler
    - Racing
    - Shmup

This may take some time, but it's worth looking into.

SnipedintheHead

@mattrixk said in MetaPixel - A New Emulationstation Theme:

I use @Zigurana's Child-Friendly ES.

I just switched over, tonight actually. I have no programming skills, so if it bugs out too much, I'm in trouble, but so far it's been great.

mattrixk

@SnipedintheHead If you backed up beforehand you can always just go back to how it was. I have almost a dozen SD card image backups on my PC, one for each major thing I've attempted. Thankfully I haven't had to use any of them so far.

SnipedintheHead

@mattrixk said in MetaPixel - A New Emulationstation Theme:

@SnipedintheHead If you backed up beforehand you can always just go back to how it was. I have almost a dozen SD card image backups on my PC, one for each major thing I've attempted. Thankfully I haven't had to use any of them so far.

I backed up, but not sure how well it took. I have all my roms on a Harddrive, so I don't have to worry about them disappearing, and I routinely back up the scraped files to make sure I have them. They're really the only things I'm worried about losing.

mattrixk

@SnipedintheHead That's fair enough. I keep my roms on my NAS so it doesn't matter where the Pi is plugged in. I have a Kodi/RetroPie dual boot and I've spent a lot of time getting it just how I like it, so I'd be crushed if it broke and I had to start from scratch. Just thinking about the amount of time I put into some things like getting my PS3 controllers to work with the onboard bluetooth and recompiling the ScummVM player to change the button layout on said PS3 controllers is making me shudder. I don't want to go through any of that again.

That's a good idea backing up the gamelist and game image data separately though. I think I'm going to start doing that. Cheers.

Ekstreme

Pretty nice update on Pixel. can you please add NGP and NGPC when you get the chance

mattrixk

@Ekstreme said in MetaPixel - A New Emulationstation Theme:

Pretty nice update on Pixel. can you please add NGP and NGPC when you get the chance

Thanks mate. I can add them to the To Do list, but I make no promises on a timetable, I'm pretty busy at the moment with work and other things.

One question though... What are NGP and NGPC? Also, I got all the logos and console images from the original Pixel theme, so if @Rookervik has already made them for his theme then no worries, but if not, then you may be waiting for a while as I'm not really too adept at design.

Ekstreme

NeoGeo Pocket and NeoGeo Pocket Color AKA the GameBoy Killer :) . They are both in the original theme. I'm actually lucky enough to own a NGPC with about 15 games, I love it.
I think PC was also missing. I don't really use it so didn't take a lot of notice

mattrixk

@Ekstreme ahh, no worries then. I've never played them, so do you have any preferences for what games to put in the screenshots? If not then I'm just going to google "Neo geo pocket game screenshot" and find something that looks interesting.

Ekstreme

It's NeoGeo, so always Metal Slug :)

Rookervik

Need Fatal Fury pocket, Metal Slug, and shanghai mini. But you have to make your own console graphics. You can't use mine. :P jk

mattrixk

Just a heads up, MetaPixel now works with the Child-Friendly icons for anyone using the Child-Friendly ES Mod by @Zigurana. I plan on updating my Spare and Io themes in the coming days to make them use the icons too.

gomisensei

if you make a copy of the mame dir, only name it "arcade" then it will treat the arcade system as mame, which is fine with me. Also looking for an atari2600 and a Daphne folder... will probably make my own just reusing some images from another theme for now

mattrixk

@gomisensei: You can get the pixel artwork for those systems from the Pixel theme by @Rookervik.

gomisensei

@mattrixk said in MetaPixel - A New Emulationstation Theme:

@gomisensei: You can get the pixel artwork for those systems from the Pixel theme by @Rookervik.

yep, that's what I did, plus made some custom screenshots, and a description blurb from wikipedia. Working great, except for occasional white blocks over the bottom in systems, which seem to go away and reappear randomly.

mattrixk

@gomisensei said in MetaPixel - A New Emulationstation Theme:

Working great, except for occasional white blocks over the bottom in systems, which seem to go away and reappear randomly.

Hmm... can you maybe do a screenshot to show me what you mean? Even just a photo of your tv/monitor would help.

gomisensei

@mattrixk said in MetaPixel - A New Emulationstation Theme:

@gomisensei said in MetaPixel - A New Emulationstation Theme:

Working great, except for occasional white blocks over the bottom in systems, which seem to go away and reappear randomly.

Hmm... can you maybe do a screenshot to show me what you mean? Even just a photo of your tv/monitor would help.

https://goo.gl/photos/HM6dvNptYehb9m7j6

now sure how to embed these, i get undefined tags when i try picture or link...

mattrixk

@gomisensei

A few things here:

Your image isn't working because that link goes to the page holding the image, rather than the image itself. The link the actual image is long (https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/HOhOLYd7x02ZsmVNoiJmTFFA4PKFRf8LD1JkkJt-7n19rfTXbFmWnKqy0qRmebELGbmtJRKFeInr90noE2ZJWSa3jgRXJkvUGlysoDITuIYu-hlatTYuBAEXmWXhWpn9BdF9mu0oKTQCKfgCa5acHXoIj2SJtTeC-H_3HKhHfu4E5pCVv8fbZzvzfkX7JdDUXGDI0N4DRR19oDYVaMmxMC013bBpxfMolnxFDdDC7uPkTDnVjMETT79MvYFQ6RWXxicBDzb6x80OoI9s06E4AYniMHAaVqhrBwhSBUPks_mNsLUMVT0CaIMTpNaI_H6BHfuyWrz4VaEghBx6ypSYbCA3fH5rjmSL9XDehXXBL2YyqdgCUMzk9rXZEK2hh8jeI_sYgHuI1A8lQdoK0Lo_h9OJrTgRUDpgLYxEM-w8vsLRofh-ryGe2LLbDSYhsUNazad_NYlrzJbPfNkK07zjafmVbKPVuF1oqHkfe90riZmfAGKKNKl3TynWiX9JMt7rlfa0aVreJ5Q9RGN9RBTnO34YtAjvCFVtaxa8f1k1SmZTGRS3OXdgQdu0mlWLDycqoN0unUy_RFcP9KcAn7NJrVzMHIGM54SyXEIfP4a3LdX5007_=w569-h322-no)
So if you wrap that in () brackets with the ![] at the front is should show up like this:
I'm pretty sure that multicoloured square in the top right of your screen means that you have an insufficient power supply, you might want to look into that.
now, about the white box itself, I've had similar things happen while making themes, but nothing this extreme. It can come from an element from one system being positioned so it runs over into another system. There are no large white boxes in the MetaPixel theme, so I'm not sure where it could come from. I have some questions that might narrow it down:
- Does it only happen on n64?
- Does it happen every time you go to n64 (and others, if it happens on others)?
- Does it only happen when you go to n64 from the System View, or only when you go left/right from another system, or both, or is it completely random?
- Does it only happen on Detailed View (with scraped game data), or does it also happen on Basic View (no game data)?
- Are there any systems it doesn't ever happen on?
- How many systems are you using?
- If you are on a system that has the white box (like the screenshot), does the box remain when you go left/right to another system and then back again?
- What about if you back up to system view, change system (say from n64 to nes), then back to system view and back into the original system (from nes back to n64)?
- Are you using any ES mods, like GridView or Child-Friendly?