Plain theme without images?

xwons

Does anyone know of a theme for emulationstation that does not use any kind of boxart, marquee, video preview, etc?

Due to a failure of my local hard drive, now my rom collection, alongside all the boxart and video previews, is stored in a remote NAS. Because of that, loading and scrolling through a list of games is very slow, since it usually takes a few seconds to move from game to game.

So, temporally I thought the best option was to disable all kind of images in emulationstation, so I just get the name of the rom and that's it.

Is there any theme, or any option to do that I have in mind? Thanks in advance.

mitu

@xwons Have you tried switching the ES Gamelist View Style to 'Basic' ? It should contain minimal information and no artwork. For instance Carbon (the default) or CRT themes show only the list of games.

xwons

Yes, that!

I can't believe it was so simple. Thanks a lot!

Clyde

@xwons Another option may be to put just the artwork and videos (a&v) on the new (now smaller, I guess?) local drive / sd card, and just have the roms on the NAS. You'd have to either change all of the a&v paths in the gamelist.xml or mount the local a&v directories onto their empty counterparts in the roms folders.

If this is a valid option depends on the size of the current local drive. If you want to try it, I'd try to help you in any way I can, since I know something about mounting directories onto directories in Linux.

If you'd rather prefer the plain theme approach, no problem.

xwons

Thanks @Clyde . Right now I only have a 16GB sdcard, so I am not sure if all the artwork would even fit in there. I too thought about editing the gamelist.xml files, but I have a bunch of systems, with lots of roms in each, so I thought it would be too much work, at least for a temporary solution.

I think I'll use the basic mode for now, at least until I buy another hard drive. Thanks though :)

Clyde

@xwons Like I said, it should be also possible to mount local artwork director(y/ies) in the remote roms directory (which is mounted in the local filesystem itself, right?). This would be completely transparent to ES, but use the old paths in the gamelist.

But that's only how this old Linux tinkerer would try to do it. If the theme works for you, have fun. :)

xwons

How would you do that exactly? Currently artwork is distributed alongside several folders (boxart, cartart, flyer, marquee, snap, wheel...) inside each system folder.

Do you mean moving these folders to my SDcard, and then symlink each directory individually from the remote location to the path at the sdcard?

Clyde

@xwons Yes, symlinks would also work. I tend to forget them because I prefer mount --bind (or mound -o bind) to mount directories. See here about that. Both methods have some benefits and downsides, but in your case, those should be negligible.

xwons

Oh, well, yes symlinks or bind mount. In this case it wouldn't make much of a difference.

What I mean is, is there an easier way than creating a symlink to each artwork folder (boxart, cartart, snap, marque...), for each system? That is easily more than 60 links.

Clyde

You could write a script that links all or specific directories in one or multiple directories. Here are some pieces of this puzzle:

Make multiple symbolic links for multiple directories
Loop through only directories in bash
Create symbolic links to all files (class of files) in a directory
Test if $WORD is in set (to only link certain directories)
Create symbolic link to a directory excluding certain files (second answer)
Get basename of filename or directory name

Actually, you got me hooked on this problem and I after approx. an hour, I came up with this (I'm not very skilled in scripting, so I had to read and test more than others). Everything after # in a line is a comment.

for system in /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/*/ ; do
  sysname=$(basename "$system")               # cut the path from the name
  mkdir -p "/home/pi/test/romlinks/$sysname"  # create system dir in target dir
  for artwork in ${system}*/ ; do
    artname=$(basename "$artwork")            # cut the path from the name
    if [[ "$artname" =~ media|images ]]; then # chosen artwork dirs separated by "|"
      ln -s "$artwork" "/home/pi/test/romlinks/${sysname}/"
    fi
  done
done

This test script will go through /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/ and symlink all media and images directories in every system directory to a test directory /home/pi/test/romlinks while maintaining the same directory structure. It should be relatively easy to modify it to copy/move the artwork directories to a local location first, and then create symlinks in their original locations to the new ones. But alas, I don't have more time for this now, so either you do it yourself or I will in the next couple of days.

**But before you try anything, be sure to make Backups of your data!**

xwons

Wow.

For some reason mail notifications ended up in the spam folder and I forgot about this thread for a while.

Thanks for the script! Now the problem is that my artwork takes up even more room than the roms themselves... u_u'

Clyde

And I didn't get around to make the aforementioned changes for your setup either, because I'm on vacation for a movie festival where I watch 2-3 movies every day over the whole week. :)

About the artwork's space: Yeah, I figured as much. But none said that retrogaming is a piece of cake (and if they said that, they lied). I'll keep this on my to-do list and look forward for any updates on your side.