Cardboard Mini NES + Nes mini and Famicom mini themes

momaw27

Wow!

I just LOVE this theme! It is everything I've been looking for...

A few things I've noticed:

for some reason the apostrophes are not showing up in the description area. Instead they are box outlines.
I'd love to see other systems in this style.

The way I'm planning on using this theme is for ultra retro systems on a pi zero. Systems I'd love to see:
Atari 2600
Atari 7800
GBC
GBA
SNES (weird sized box... not sure how it would look...)
Genesis
SMS
Gamegear

Again... AWESOME look and feel! Easily in my top 5 favorite themes!

Kischa

@momaw27 ad Neogeo to that list ;)

@ruckage what is the native resolution?

ruckage

@mattrixk said in Cardboard Mini NES:

@ruckage
Off-topic, but are you the same Ruckage from the old blog that made the NewGen Theme?

Yes, I'm the same Ruckage. I really should go back to NewGen and get it released as I'd put a lot of work into it, I was ill for most of last year so I just didn't feel like doing it.

@momaw27 said in Cardboard Mini NES:

Wow!

I just LOVE this theme! It is everything I've been looking for...

A few things I've noticed:

for some reason the apostrophes are not showing up in the description area. Instead they are box outlines.

I'd love to see other systems in this style.
.......

Yeah, I know about the apostrophe thing. It's because there are 2 different apostrophe symbols that can be used and only one of them is contained in the font (I think the non working apostrophe is a unicode character but the font only supports standard ascii). The standard apostrophe will display (the one that can be typed from your keyboard - it's near the enter key on the same key as the @ symbol on a UK keyboard). A simple fix is to open the gamelist in notepad++ and do a replace all of all the bad apostrophes with the working version. I did see if I could add in the extra apostrophe to the font but I wasn't sure how to do it - I may look again.

Regarding extra systems, since there seems to be a bit interest in this theme I'm happy to work on some more systems, I'll maybe get a few more done today.
You're right about snes though as the horizontal boxes may look odd (they will either have to be quite small or stretched) I think though you can get a set of custom snes box art which has been redesigned vertically so that may work better. The other alternative is to rotate the picture 90 degrees so they are on their side (I've done that for the Japanese nes games as those boxes are landscape also).

@Kischa said in Cardboard Mini NES:

@momaw27 ad Neogeo to that list ;)

@ruckage what is the native resolution?

The Native resolution is 1280x720 but I'm using it at 1080p and it looks fine (it scales well due to the large pixels).

Stuart2773

Here's some run-command splash screens i made based on the nes/famicom disk system boot,

full Tutorial here :-
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/4611/runcommand-system-splashscreens

ruckage

@Stuart2773 said in Cardboard Mini NES:

Here's some run-command splash screens i made based on the nes/famicom disk system boot,

Nice. I hope you don't mind but I made some changes to to them otherwise when scaled up on the pi they will look blurry as I believe bi-linear filtering is applied.

What I did first of all is alter your vertical resolution from 272 down to 270 (this is a multiple of 1080 so will scale up cleanly). Then scaled up the entire image to 1920x1080 using nearest neighbour scaling to get a clean pixel look.

Kischa

@Stuart2773 Nice ones!

Edit: Ah this was not a video splash my bad...well there still god!

Rion

@ruckage I would love to finally see the release of NewGen Theme and this theme as well.

Do you plan on adding video support to?

ruckage

@Rion said in Cardboard Mini NES:

@ruckage I would love to finally see the release of NewGen Theme and this theme as well.

Do you plan on adding video support to?

Not sure - Is that a modified version of ES? If so I'd need to know how to add the videos to it and ideally there would need to be a windows version of the modified ES as well as otherwise it makes it more difficult to test as you have to keep switching to the raspberry pi.

mattrixk

@ruckage I use this version of ES for Windows to test all my themes for Video Previews. You can also use UXS to scrape some videos for each rom. I have 5 games in 5 systems so it doesn't take long to scrape and it gives you enough to test with.

Rion

@ruckage It's officially supported if you update your RetroPie-Setup to the latest version.

The work was first started by @fieldofcows in this thread. Video Preview in EmulationStation

Here is also @Nismo 's Oldroom theme that's a great example of what you can do with it.

lilbud

@ruckage Glad to you see back with Retropie, I really looked forward to the Newgen theme. But I'm afraid someone beat you to the punch. @FlyingTomahawk took the dead Newgen theme and made the Futura Theme in your absence.

Stuart2773

@ruckage

cool, no i dont mind, i just used the templates provided in the original thread (unaware of the upscaling)

thanks for the update

stuart.

ruckage

@mattrixk said in Cardboard Mini NES:

@ruckage I use this version of ES for Windows to test all my themes for Video Previews. You can also use UXS to scrape some videos for each rom. I have 5 games in 5 systems so it doesn't take long to scrape and it gives you enough to test with.

Thanks, very helpful. What's UXS?

@Rion said in Cardboard Mini NES:

@ruckage It's officially supported if you update your RetroPie-Setup to the latest version.

The work was first started by @fieldofcows in this thread. Video Preview in EmulationStation

Here is also @Nismo 's Oldroom theme that's a great example of what you can do with it.

I'll look into it.

@lilbud said in Cardboard Mini NES:

@ruckage Glad to you see back with Retropie, I really looked forward to the Newgen theme. But I'm afraid someone beat you to the punch. @FlyingTomahawk took the dead Newgen theme and made the Futura Theme in your absence.

So someone has just copied it exactly - I don't even get a mention . :( I still feel it's my theme.
edit: I take it back, he does mention me in the readme. However I still feel my original version is worth releasing - if only for the wide colour choice I have available.

mattrixk

@ruckage UXS is the Universal XML Scraper. It scrapes the metadata from screenscraper.fr. One of the best things about it is you can create your own scrape profiles so you can scrape whatever images you want (box art, fan art, game logos, screenshots, etc) and mix them into a single image. There are also pre-made profiles that mix images for you, if you don't want to make your own.

eg:
UXS Mix Image

RetroPie Forum thread here.
UXS GitHub here.

ruckage

@mattrixk said in Cardboard Mini NES:

@ruckage UXS is the Universal XML Scraper. It scrapes the metadata from screenscraper.fr. One of the best things about it is you can create your own scrape profiles so you can scrape whatever images you want (box art, fan art, game logos, screenshots, etc) and mix them into a single image. There are also pre-made profiles that mix images for you, if you don't want to make your own.

eg:

RetroPie Forum thread here.
UXS GitHub here.

Thanks, looks a really useful tool. It's a shame ES doesn't have support for multiple screenshots etc. by default but at least there are always people to find workarounds.

mattrixk

@ruckage Yup. I'd love to have access to <screenshot>, <boxart>, <fanart>, <logo>, etc tags to use when making themes.

ruckage

@mattrixk said in Cardboard Mini NES:

@ruckage Yup. I'd love to have access to <screenshot>, <boxart>, <fanart>, <logo>, etc tags to use when making themes.

Yeah - I really thought that would have been added by now as it seems like it would be an easy addition compared to some of the other changes already made but perhaps I'm wrong. (I do appreciate it's volunteers making the changes and additions so I'm not critcizing.)

Rion

@ruckage

I actually made a post when I first registered on this new forum to any news update of your lmage Preview Project

Looks like Universal XML Scraper have alot of options when it comes to something similar what your where doing lmage Preview Project.

Sad to hear you was ill for most of last year.
I know exactly how it feels. Been under the knife now for the second time in 5 months but I'm soon back to work again.

I don't think @FlyingTomahawk ment any disrespect by doing a version based on your theme.

ruckage

@Rion said in Cardboard Mini NES:

@ruckage

I actually made a post when I first registered on this new forum to any news update of your lmage Preview Project

Looks like Universal XML Scraper have alot of options when it comes to something similar what your where doing lmage Preview Project.

Sad to hear you was ill for most of last year.
I know exactly how it feels. Been under the knife now for the second time in 5 months but I'm soon back to work again.

I don't think @FlyingTomahawk ment any disrespect by doing a version based on your theme.

UXS looks far more advanced than the program I wrote to make the previews (it certainly would have been almost impossible for anyone else to use as it required lots of user intervention to work so wasn't worth sharing).

Yeah it sucks being ill, I hope you feel better soon. I've had some health problems for quite a few years but it was under control until the past year or so when things got bad again. I'm feeling well at the moment though so I'm making the most of it (just as well really as the hospital sure knows how to keep me waiting).

No ill feelings toward @FlyingTomahawk, I was just initially miffed as It didn't seem that Newgen was acknowledged as the inspiration for his theme.

lilbud

@ruckage what caused you to be ill? if you don't mind me asking