Emulation Station: Theming individual folders of ROMs?

ShawnS

I'm pretty sure it's not possible from everything I've dug into but I'm still new with this and wanted to be certain:

Can you apply a theme to an individual folder of roms? Say I've got 'roms/genesis/' and I have a separate folder for USA, Japan, Europe. I'd like to have a unique theme layout for each territory and their uniquely sized box art.

I know I can add separate consoles but I was hoping to keep the ES main screen as concise as possible. Thanks everybody!

mattrixk

I'm not sure. Let me ask some questions so I have my head wrapped around what you want:

Let's say you are using the Carbon theme,
On System View you enter the Genesis console.
Within Genesis, instead of having a list of games, you have 3 folders: USA, Japan, Europe.
Within each of these folders is a list of games.

Am I on track so far?

You want each of these sub folders to have a different layout,
So maybe the USA games have a portrait shape to their box art, so the layout you want has a space for a big portrait image,
but maybe the Japan games have a landscape box art shape (like SNES games), making the portrait layout not look as good, so you want a different layout for that.

Is that about right, or have I misunderstood?

The next part of what I say is going from the assumption that I'm on the right track:

I know it is possible to give individual layouts to the different systems. The Eudora theme is a good example of this, with multiple layout views and colour schemes:

Eudora Theme

However, you want to have multiple layouts per system, and I'm just not sure if that can be done. I have an idea of how it might work, but I won't have a chance to test that theory for a few days.

I do have some questions for you that could help me out:

How have you made the folders? Did you just go to roms/genesis and add a folder called 'usa' so it looks like roms/genesis/usa, and then put your roms files in that folder?
Have you made any changes to your gamelists/genesis/gamelist.xml file to add images or metadata for the folders you created?

I'll hopefully have an answer for you some time in the next few days. With any luck it will be the answer you want.

ShawnS

@mattrixk Yup, you got it exactly right! I have the roms in folders like 'roms/genesis/usa'. I haven't touched the gamelist.xml though except using the scraper. I am not familiar with how it's built so I don't know what else I could add or change that would impact the layout/display of the theme.

Considering that the scraper doesn't care if your roms are in folders I assumed there was no way to theme just one folder but if you've got a hunch I'm more than happy to try out your suggestions! Thanks for the reply.

mattrixk

@ShawnS: unfortunately my idea didn't work out. I thought maybe I could add a folder to the theme that has the same name as the folder in the rom and then give it it's own theme.xml. No go. It seems like it's something EmulationStation just isn't set up to do. Sorry.

Oh well, it was worth a shot anyway. Maybe someone else has another idea.

Also, I thought there was a way to get images and descriptions for gamelist folders, but I haven't been able to get it to work.

ShawnS

@mattrixk that's what I figured but thank you so much for trying it out. It's not a huge deal for me or my theme but it'd be nice for the way I wanted to set things up. Thanks again!

mattrixk

@ShawnS: No worries. It would have been cool if it were possible.