EmulationStation Toolkit - Theme Making Helper

mattrixk

Sorry @robertybob, but it's just too time consuming, and I have a lot of other things on my plate. It's also quite mind-numbing and repetitive. Even if you only have 5 fake roms per System, there are about 80 Systems that RetroPie supports. They aren't hard to do, just follow these steps (using NES as an example):

Google "nes games"
find one you like the look of (Aladdin for this example).
create a new text document.
open text document and add some content (it can just be a couple of random characters, just so long as the file is larger than 0b. Github won't accept it if it think's it's an empty file).
save file as aladdin.nes

Now do that 400-odd more times.

This doesn't even take into account scraping the media (images and videos) for each rom. After scraping them I had to run each image through an image compressor to get the file sizes down, and run the videos through Handbrake for the same purpose. Granted you probably won't need to do that for a personal set-up, but it still takes a lot of time.

I'll also note, that the more Systems you have set up, the longer it takes to swap between themes, which is the best way I've found to "refresh" to see any changes made while building a theme. Having to wait an extra couple of seconds each time you swap a theme can get quite annoying if you're only making small changes each time.

I've found 5 is a good number of systems, it lets you test each View and gives some viariety to screenshots. For most Themes, each System looks pretty much the same, except for console and logo artwork, and background colour, so it doesn't matter if you don't really see all the Systems when you build a theme. Unless you are doing ultra-custom work like the Old-Room theme.

herb_fargus

@mattrixk I also would rather we keep the toolkit small, its just a base. If people want custom additions then they are free to do so.

Btw feel free to merge the changes with the pull request they are satisfactory to you - at your leisure

mattrixk

@herb_fargus My lunch starts in an hour, I'll check it out then.

I extracted your gamestation 1.5 last night. I was very surprised that a 200MB download extracts to over 700MB.

herb_fargus

@mattrixk 7z is a very efficient compression. I still need to update the binaries with the carousel changes but that's just the download, it's easy enough to switch out.

Zigurana

@mattrixk said in EmulationStation Toolkit - Theme Making Helper:

I'll also note, that the more Systems you have set up, the longer it takes to swap between themes, which is the best way I've found to "refresh" to see any changes made while building a theme. Having to wait an extra couple of seconds each time you swap a theme can get quite annoying if you're only making small changes each time.

About that : it might be quicker/easier for you to start ES in debug mode (-debug) and press Ctrl-R to reload the theme while in SystemView.

mattrixk

@Zigurana You just blew my tiny little mind.

alt text

mattrixk

@Zigurana: What else can you do with the debug? Is there a list of commands somewhere?

Zigurana

@mattrixk
Let's see:
Running ES as such: emulationstation --debugwill give the following additional features :

Logging of the debug statements in the output window
Ctrl-R in a GamelistView will reload that view (including the theme)
Ctrl-R in a SystemView will reload everything.
Ctrl-G will toggle the lines of ComponentGrid.
Ctrl-T will show bounding boxes around text elements, to debug text flow and filling and such.

That's all I could find quickly. The last two items might sound interesting but are really only relevant for debugging of the components themselves, and probably not much for the theming of them. But play around with it, and see for yourself!

mattrixk

@Zigurana ctrl+T is going to come in so handy!

alphatoanant

@mattrixk, was wondering if I could ask for your help on getting this up and running. I figure I am missing something silly on my end but am stumped on what to try next =)

Essentially when I try to run any of the .bat files I get the following error:
"The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000007b). Click OK to close the application"

My current setup...

Win10 Pro Version 1607
Emulationstation folder setup at the root of my c drive (C:\Emulationstation)
contents of https://github.com/mattrixk/es-toolkit/releases/download/v1.1/ES_Toolkit_v1.1.7z copied directly into the above folder
installed Microsoft Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable from the URL supplied in the above zip (x86 and 64bit versions)
made sure I have what I believe the expected DLLs in place

I figured it would be helpful to show you what I have done so I recorded the following video:

Hoping you have run into something similar and can nudge me in the right direction. No worries if not. Thank you for simply just putting this toolkit together. My best.

herb_fargus

@alphatoanant wish everyone provided such useful videos for debugging. from Google (and personal experience) 0xc000007b error usually comes from mixing up 32bit environment with 64bit one.

My guess is it may be from the dlls. Might be 32 bit and need to be 64 bit or vice versa, im pretty sure that the emulationstation I included was the 64 bit version, but now that I think of it, I included the build from jdrassa and it's possible he compiled it for 32 bit

mattrixk

@alphatoanant I'm glad @herb_fargus was able to give you an answer of sorts, because I don't know anything about it. Sorry. I'm guessing it's probably something to do with you running windows on a virtual machine, which is why it was asking for those dll files, but as I said, that's just a guess.

alphatoanant

Thank you @herb_fargus; good find. I'll start digging on the 32bit/64bit mixup possibility and post back what I find.

alphatoanant

@mattrixk figured that might be possible as well (using a VM). I may have a access to dedicated box I could try this out on. Going to take a shot at that as well. Thank you!

mattrixk

@alphatoanant You're welcome and good luck.

alphatoanant

@herb_fargus you were spot on! I was using the 64bit versions of vcruntime140 and msvcp140 dlls. I sourced 32bit versions of them and am able to boot now.
Thank you!

herb_fargus

@alphatoanant I'll perhaps have a chat with @jdrassa on his windows builds. I don't know if there is any benefit to 64 bit in this case but it's at least good to know what we include.

Glad you got it sorted.

jdrassa

@herb_fargus I could look into updating the build script to build for 64 bit if there is demand.

herb_fargus

@jdrassa I personally have no preference on the matter. Would there be any benefit to 64 bit? Or would it just confuse things more because of the diff dlls?

jdrassa

@herb_fargus I doubt there would be much benefit, but I may look into it at some point.