Boxart & Screenshot display - same time

[lilbud]

@paffley There are 2 paths you can choose

1. https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/5291/soft-universal-xml-scraper-v2-easy-scrape-with-high-quality-picture/231

2. Manually combine the images in Photoshop/Paint/whatever you use.

[dudleydes]

@paffley A third option may be ImageMagick which is a command-line image manipulation tool that's being used in the project to create runcommand images for any theme. Being a command line tool, it's possible to manipulate multiple images.

I have used it in this fashion to crop boxart as well as to reduce the image size and file size of boxart in order to lower the vram used by the gridview mod for EmulationStation.

ImageMagick can be installed on your pi using sudo apt-get install imagemagick but I used it on my Linux desktop for the extra processing power. Downloads for different OSs are available here.

I was thinking of combining titles and snapshots for arcade games but I didn't end up doing this. Here are some links I found useful:

https://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/montage/
https://www.imagemagick.org/script/montage.php
https://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/layers/#composition

ImageMagick will overwrite images without warning so it's a good idea to run it on copies of your original images.

[paffley]

Thanks lilbud and dudleydes! Super, I'll look into these options and let you know. :)

[HurricaneFan]

I believe your theme can use 2 different images. You could use md_image for the boxart and md_marquee as the screenshot.

md_image
md_marquee

[paffley]

@HurricaneFan hi thanks for that! What directory do the images go in to read as md_marquee please?

[HurricaneFan]

@paffley You can put them anywhere you want. Just reference the path in your gamelist.xml file. I store mine in a folder called marquees inside the rom directory. You can name your folder whatever you want.

Example:

<marquee>./marquees/Aerial Assault (World).png</marquee>

[paffley]

@HurricaneFan Thanks! I'll do that! Thank you! :)

[paffley]

Hi again,

I believe I have things setup correctly but cannot get my marquee image to display for some reason, not sure what I've missed.

I have my marquee images stored in the rom folder in /marquees
I have edited my gamelist xml and added the marquee tag with directory to the image
I have added the md_marquee code to my main theme xml

p.s it wont let me add code to this post to show what I have - comes up with a spam warning on the forum

[mattrixk]

@paffley I think you need some videos before a System will recognise the marquee element.

[paffley]

@mattrixk

ahh got you, thank you! :)

[paffley]

@mattrixk does it recognise flv files as video?

Update: yep it does :)

[KyoXBR]

So... i found this topic searching for the same question paffley did... and while the solution for him was to use the "marquee" category, I wanted instead to keep marquees showing, and displaying screenshot and boxart on my theme's video view for the games that doesn't have video. So, I was in need of a third set of displaying artwork... and after searching a lot, I found it on the development fork of EmulationStation!

For those that, as me, ended up here, here it goes the "workaround":

• you have to install "emulationstation-dev" instead of the default "emulationstation" for it;
• then you need to change the resource (probably a repeated "image" field on the same position and size of the "video" field) on your theme to the "thumbnail" tag (i used ComicBook theme for this example, on the video view);
• lastly, after scraping (i used skyscraper), on gamelist.xml, change your boxart XML tag to "image" and your screenshot XML tag to "thumbnail" (i did a replacing macro on notepad++).

Tested here and works flawlessly! You don't have to switch exactly the same XML tags, it's only an example of how I did mine.