Tutorial - How to make a theme for Emulationstation and RetroPie

[herb_fargus]

@mattrixk aww I didn't know other people used my portable es builds! I sorta did an update but retroarch got too fancy for my old computer and brokeded so I need to fix that before I can test it thoroughly enough to upload new binaries.

[mattrixk]

@herb_fargus said in Tutorial - How to make a theme for Emulationstation and RetroPie:

I didn't know other people used my portable es builds

Yahuh. When I first started I learned from Rookervik that you could load ES on a Windows computer, so I did some googling. I found the GitHub for ES, but it talked about having to compile it and a bunch of other stuff I didn't understand, so I looked for some videos of how to do it and came across one of yours. That video had a link to another video for a portable version where everything was done for me. The clouds parted and bright sunshine fell upon me as the angels sang... or something.

Anyway, thank you so much for it. It's made things so easy.

I actually don't need any of the RetroArch stuff, as I use fake roms created from renamed .txt files, so I can't play them anyway. I'm going to see if ES will still work propery if I remove the 'Systems' folder entirely. It's nearly 900mb of useless data (useless for my purposes anyway), so getting rid of it would be quite helpful.

[tekn0]

This is a really great tutorial. Thank you for taking the time to make this.

[mattrixk]

@tekn0 No worries. I'm glad people have found it useful. I wanted to do something to contribute to this community/project, so I was happy when I found something I could add.

[winnetouch]

Hy. I tried using your tutorial but I get stuck at the very begining. I create all the folders copy all the images to them and then try to set the background color of the system view. I tried typing the code myself and to directly copy your code. But no matter what I do the theme color won't change. It stays white. I'm using the pi 0/1 build and I'm building it directly over FTP on my PI. Still... This should work. I've even tried using solid black background and it still doesn't work :/.

[mattrixk]

@winnetouch Without seeing the code there isn't much I can do to help. Can you paste the code into a pastebin dump and give us the link?

[winnetouch]

@mattrixk I realized what the problem was. I already had roms loaded in to my pi and had to create a folder and theme.xml for every single existing system that displayed, including the retropie folder. Without that the whole theme doesn't work.

Now I'm facing another problem. In the detailed view I don't want certain metadate like to display. I want only the image, game list and game description to display. I tried making the text transparent with this:

<text name="md_lbl_rating, md_lbl_releasedate, md_lbl_developer, md_lbl_publisher, md_lbl_genre, md_lbl_players, md_lbl_lastplayed, md_lbl_playcount">
<color>00000000</color>
<forceUppercase>1</forceUppercase>
<fontPath>./_inc/fonts/Roboto-Medium.ttf</fontPath>
<fontSize>0.04</fontSize>
<size>0.24 0.01</size>
</text>

<text name="md_developer, md_publisher, md_genre, md_players, md_playcount">
<color>00000000</color>
<forceUppercase>0</forceUppercase>
<fontPath>./_inc/fonts/Roboto-Light.ttf</fontPath>
<fontSize>0.04</fontSize>
<size>0.23 0.02</size>
</text>
<datetime name="md_releasedate, md_lastplayed">
<color>00000000</color>
<forceUppercase>0</forceUppercase>
<fontPath>./_inc/fonts/Roboto-Light.ttf</fontPath>
<fontSize>0.04</fontSize>
<size>0.23 0.02</size>
</datetime>

But no matter what I type the text isn't transparent :P

[mattrixk]

@winnetouch I don't think you can do transparency on text (but don't quote me on that). What you can do is set

<pos>1 1</pos>
<origin>0 0</origin>

and that basically tells the top left of the text to be positioned 100% from the top and 100% from the left, effectively hiding the text under the view-able area.

I think there are other ways to do it, but is all I can think of at the moment. I hope it helps.

[winnetouch]

Thank you. That was my plan B if transparency wasn't an option :P.

[winnetouch]

@mattrixk said in Tutorial - How to make a theme for Emulationstation and RetroPie:

@winnetouch I don't think you can do transparency on text (but don't quote me on that). What you can do is set

<pos>1 1</pos>
<origin>0 0</origin>

and that basically tells the top left of the text to be positioned 100% from the top and 100% from the left, effectively hiding the text under the view-able area.

I think there are other ways to do it, but is all I can think of at the moment. I hope it helps.

Wel... Tried it... Doesn't work. Or maybe i put the code in the wrong place but adding that to any of the <text></text> lines crashes the template.

[mattrixk]

@winnetouch Sorry, my bad. I just had a look at the ES Themes.md documentation for the <text> element. The <pos> will work, but <text> doesn't accept the <origin> element. That is what is breaking your theme.

(it's been a while since I've gone through the docs)

[bumber]

Hey. I'm going through the tutorial right now, but I'm stuck at the beginning. No matter what I do, the background color refuses to change.
I tried what @winnetouch did and made sure I had the theme.xml in each system folder, but still nothing.
Here's what my code looks like: http://pastebin.com/DA52rHRH

EDIT: If it's any help, I'm using the portable ES build on Windows. I'm running it from a USB stick.

[bumber]

@bumber I figured it out. There was a single extra slash in the closing tag for the theme.xml in each folder... Man, I'm bad at paying attention to details like that.

[mattrixk]

@bumber I'm glad you figured it out. I'll quite often miss a semi-colon or something and wonder why my code won't work. Sorry I didn't help earlier. I read your post as I was about to leave work. I had a quick glance over your code but nothing jumped out at me. I was going to have a proper look when I had the chance, but it appears you've beaten me to it. Good job.

[TCMOrangeJoe]

@mattrixk
Hey there, i'm trying to create a rick and morty based theme for a console that i'm building. I'm usually pretty goo at coding when it comes to following simple instructions like this, but i seem to be having some trouble.
I've followed the tut all the way to the part where it's time to start adding pictures and color, so right now it's at the point where everything is in plain font and white background. I've started the coding, but when i checked if it was working, nothing was loading. the theme name changed and i can switch back and forth from it to other themes, but it won't let me call any images. I'm doing this on the raspberry pi 3 b, so i changed the filepaths accordingly. nothing seems to work for me. Is there something really simple that I'm possibly missing?

[Zigurana]

@TCMOrangeJoe At some point your theme fails to be loaded correctly, most probably the XML parsing is failing at some typo or other error. when you run emulationstation with the '--debug' flag, do you get any additional logging? That might point you into the direction where things are going awry.

[TCMOrangeJoe]

@Zigurana i'm really sorry, i'm not sure if i'm doing that correctly. i quit es, then typed emulationstation --debug. when i quit es again and look through the log that is now visible on screen i can't find anything that has to do with the theme not loading, just the systems that i don't have games for.

[Zigurana]

@TCMOrangeJoe it's at the beginning, so it might just have scrolled passed the buffer-lenght? If you do this on the RPi, there should also be a logfile written to disk somewhere, maybe home/.emulationstation/debug.log? (this from memory so probably wrong)

[herb_fargus]

Use an XML validator to check your XML code

[mattrixk]

@TCMOrangeJoe You could put the code in a pastebin for us to have a look at, we might be able to spot the problem.