Cardboard Mini NES + Nes mini and Famicom mini themes

[Kischa]

Wow me like alot!!!

Would it be rude to make a request for snes, neogeo and maby psp? 😊

[Stuart2773]

Hi Ruckage,

Hope you don't mind but i made a version for the Japanese Famicom Mini using your template & the original Famicom Mini Menu.

Feel free to tweak & add it into your next release :)

Stuart.

[ruckage]

@Stuart2773 said in Cardboard Mini NES:

Hi Ruckage,

Hope you don't mind but i made a version for the Japanese Famicom Mini using your template & the original Famicom Mini Menu.

Feel free to tweak & add it into your next release :)

Stuart.

Looks really nice. I wonder if it would be better as an alternative for the whole theme though - so there would be two themes, a nesmini theme and a fammini theme?

Edit: By the way, working on adding SNES, GBA, Megadrive/Genesis and Neo Geo at the moment. I also need to edit pc engine/TG16 as I forgot to adjust the boxart dimensions in the XML.

[Stuart2773]

i have the NES Mini / Famicom Mini attract sequence loop mp3 if your interested incorporating that into the theme?

[jawenforcement]

@Stuart2773 Would love that. I was going to hack it into mine if it couldn't be part of the theme.

[ruckage]

@Stuart2773 said in Cardboard Mini NES:

i have the NES Mini / Famicom Mini attract sequence loop mp3 if your interested incorporating that into the theme?

Yeah, I have that MP3 actually playing on mine (great tune). You can't add it to a theme though, you have to setup an mp3 player and add a few lines to some scripts to make it play on startup and stop when games start etc.

I found the tutorial for doing that on here somewhere - I'll see if I can find it and post a link.

[ruckage]

Here's the tutorial for adding background music. Follow from the post made by Synack as it's easier than the method originally posted (the link should be roughly the right place in the thread).

Add Background music to retropie

By the way I actually found a famitracker version of that music (I can't remember who wrote it now) so you can export it to any length you like.

[ruckage]

@Stuart2773
Your famicom mini post has really gotten me thinking and I really like the idea of a famicom mini version of the theme.
What I think I'm going to do is restructure the theme so that the header/footer area and system view logos are all separate elements, that way you could switch between the 'famicom mini' and 'nes mini' theme via a simple tweak in the main xml file.

Will have to see how it looks though as the beauty of the nesmini theme is it's grey so works well with virtually all colours.

[Stuart2773]

@ruckage

sounds like a good idea, BTW, i just found that "famitracker version" ;)

you may have to resize the theme window for boxart as the famicom used different game packaging:-

[momaw27]

Great stuff guys!

Really looking forward to all you have in store for us!

[ruckage]

Okay, thanks to @Stuart2773 I haven't added any systems today as I got side tracked with a famicom mini theme ;). As I thought mixing colours was a problem so I think a separate theme using only the famicom mini menu colour scheme will work better.

I liked @Stuart2773 menu design but I had a go myself and moved some things about, made everything a bit rounder to match the real famicom mini menu and think I have a good enough concept now.

So basically, as you can see from this 7800 example, all the system header logos will be the solid gold color and the relevant manufacturer will be displayed to the right. The rest of the background will remain the same for all systems (apart from different shaped frames for the box art on some systems).

I can use the work I have done so far on the nesmini theme to make this so once up and running I will then add any new systems to them in tandem.

Let me know what you think. Also, do you think I should start a new thread for these themes as it's not really the original topic I posted? (or is it possible to edit the topic title?)

edit: damn - just realized I forgot to add the black shadows on that concept art - it gives you an idea anyway.
edit: I've updated the image with the black shadows.

[Stuart2773]

@ruckage

Ok, i may a few changes (mainly for my own personal preference) just to give it more of the original feel,

*added original NES/Famicom navigation buttons
*added the updated boxart & info box (rounded edges) to the NES Mini by @ruckage
*changed the bottom left option buttons to red (NES Mini)
*changed the blue background slightly to make the drop shadow on the boxes more visible.

Stuart.

[ruckage]

@Stuart2773
Hi Stuart.

Feel free to modify the theme how you like for your personal use however the rounded corners/drop-shadows are only actually on the Famicom mini menu (though I personally like the round corners and shadows as well). Also as much as I like the icons I didn't add them as they serve no function within ES so are superfluous and possibly confusing to a casual user (plus placing them at the top as you have on the nesmini theme would cause some problems as some of the system logos would cover that area.).

Personally I'm not sure about the help icons in red - I did try that myself when designing but it doesn't look right to me somehow - they work well against the dark blue which is where they appear on the real menu but not so well on the light grey.

Anyway, a lot of this is personal preference so modify it how you like it :)

[ruckage]

I've been busy all evening and now feeling very tired but I have a Famicom-mini theme ready to try.

Ironically it doesn't support Famicom yet as I've just built it to the stage where it matches the Nes-mini theme but I should be adding Famicom, Snes, GBA and Megadrive/Genesis over the weekend. This version also has sound effects for the scroll list and game launch using wav's that reddit user soulctcher dumped from a real nes classic. Sadly ES doesn't seem to support playing sounds for any other events or I would add more.

You can download it here: Famicom-mini ES theme

Thanks to @Stuart2773 for the inspiration to make this

Edit: I've just noticed that retropie is showing lots of errors on exit due to a small mistake I made. I've already fixed it but won't upload a new version until I've added the new systems as it still works despite the error (just a missing image).

[momaw27]

Great work!

Is it me, though, or are the background boxes for the tg16 boxart too small?

I've tried downloading three different versions and they all seem to be longer than the box background border is...

Do I just have the wrong set of boxart?

Thanks!

[ruckage]

@momaw27 said in Cardboard Mini NES + Nes mini and Famicom mini themes:

Great work!

Is it me, though, or are the background boxes for the tg16 boxart too small?

I've tried downloading three different versions and they all seem to be longer than the box background border is...

Do I just have the wrong set of boxart?

Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback.

It's probably a mistake on my part, I think I've forgotten to adjust the image size in the tg16 xml file. (i'm fairly certain I didn't change it on the nes-mini theme either). I'll make sure I fix it for the next updates.

[momaw27]

Thank you!!

[celly]

Thank you ruckage! I can't wait to try this out on my rpiz.

[ruckage]

I'm going to do some more work on both themes today, I noticed a few minor scaling artifacts with the Famicom-mini theme on the raspberry pi so I'm currently converting everything to vector to hopefully stop the issue.

[ruckage]

Well, vectorizing everything got rid of the scaling artifact I was seeing at 1080p but introduced some different artifacts, and worse of all made the ES startup time painfully slow so back to the drawing board. I think I'll go back to PNG images and try pre-scaling everything to 1080p and see if that produces better results (ideally in both 720p and 1080p).

Out of interest are most people using retropie on a 1080p display? I assume they are.