Custom Theme Appears as Blank

eupholoGamer

So I made a custom theme for a RetroPie that is going to be a birthday present, based off of a theme called Hurtaut.

I replaced and/or modified all of the images, sounds, and theme.xml files in the original download and then installed the theme as instructed for the Hurtaut download under both etc/emulationstation/themes/themeName and home/pi/.emulationstation/themes/themeName (I've seen a lot of disagreement on which is correct so I tried both).

I got a few errors (one for each active system asking for a <formatVersion> variable, which I added to the <theme> in theme.xml) but even after those were resolved and ES restarted I can only get a white background with basic black text and default-looking box art/metadata.

I installed Carbon as a control and that works fine, is there something obvious I'm missing?

Edit: here's the page I found the Hurtaut theme on: http://aloshi.com/emulationstation

herb_fargus

@eupholoGamer if you have too many systems than you'll get a white screen see:
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/themes

eupholoGamer

@herb_fargus This was my first thought as well, but rather than just a blank white screen I still have a basic menu. Also, I only have 5 systems (NES, SNES, N64, GBC, and GBA) installed with a total of 3 ROMs.

Rookervik

Could still depend on your memory split. If you have a single 1920x1080 wallpaper, just one, and only 128MB RAM split, you will get white screen on ES with a theme. Carbon doesn't use anything larger than 128 pixels, and some SVGs. So the RAM consumption is extremely low. White screen is, from my testing, always a memory issue.

Now if you're talking about a white background, functional menus and you can still access your systems, that would be the "default" Emulation Station theme. What appears when there are problems with the theme.xml.

Here's an example of ES with a flawed theme loaded. alt text

If you see that, it could be any number of errors in your xml. Pretty much any formatting error will cause the theme to load like that. Miss a space, error. Forget to close a section, call for a font that isn't there, put a tag where it shouldn't be... error. :D

herb_fargus

@eupholoGamer https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=86715

You might want to look at nbba which is the most similar to that theme

eupholoGamer

Ah. So it's not an error IN the xml, the xml itself is just not compatible. That makes sense. Thanks so much for the help, and I'll definitely check out NBBA!