[Theme] Art Book

[fabio78]

I find most themes to be overworked and a little tacky. Now this... This is very classy, and good at combining box art and video under the same view. I love it!

[herb_fargus]

@alphatoanant I really like this theme its very clean

[alphatoanant]

Thank you for your feedback everyone

Updates 07/24/2017:

• I refactored my theme xml to make adding new systems easier
• and added the following systems: psx, atari2600, atari5200, atari7800, n64, sega32x, gb, gbc, gba, fds, virtualboy, retropie, ports, ngp, ngpc, gamegear, arcade, mame, fba

Download latest: https://github.com/anthonycaccese/es-theme-art-book

---

Notes:

Over the last few days I have been refactoring my theme xml to make adding new systems a bit easier. Basically... from the research I have been doing it looks boxart sizes seem to fit into 3 types - portrait, landscape and square.

So I created a template for each type and started categorizing each system against which boxart type it fit best.

For example:
Landscape for snes & n64
Portrait for nes, genesis
Square for gameboy, psx

Then I updated each system's theme file to reference is corresponding layout

Getting this sorted allowed me to add the following systems tonight:
psx, atari2600, atari5200, atari7800, n64, sega32x, gb, gbc, gba, fds, virtualboy, ports, ngp, ngpc, gamegear, arcade, mame, fba, retropie << heads up @HurricaneFan

Examples:

Video View (Gameboy - Square Layout)

Detailed View (Gameboy - Square Layout)

Video View (Atari2600 - Portrait Layout)

Detailed View (Atari2600 - Portrait Layout)

Whats Next:

• Continuing to add systems (i'll try to post a status list soon)
• Better documentation on recommend sizes to scrape for boxart (for now a box of 540x540 should do the trick)
• Once all that is complete I am aiming to do another run through of each to see if any system needs more direct customization (I can see maybe needing to manually tweak mame for example)

Hope this sounds good and looking forward to your feedback.

[HurricaneFan]

@alphatoanant Awesome Work! I'll test this in the morning. Your refactoring makes total sense and should help with new systems going forward.

[lilbud]

Now, this isn't a problem with your theme in particular, but I've noticed this with several themes. Do you know why this happens? @alphatoanant

[HurricaneFan]

@lilbud What build of EmulationStation are you using?

[lilbud]

@hurricanefan I'm using @pjft's Custom Collections build, but this also happens on normal ES.

[herb_fargus]

@alphatoanant another thing that you could consider is some people use screenshots which may be squares or may be the native resolution of the original game, so I don't know if there's any way to make it perfect, but its all looking good so far

[pjft]

@lilbud yeah that happens with some fonts and there are a few comments about it in the past.

I think someone had dug a bit into that but I can't recall much about it... @jdrassa Was it you who had dug into this and explained why this happens in these fonts (it's similar if not the same as in carbon)? Was it a memory thing? Resolution? I can't quite recall...

If I find something I'll post it here.

Great job - I'll try it out as well!

[HurricaneFan]

@alphatoanant I noticed when I was testing the Game Collections feature that the video gamelist looks different for the Collections than it does on the normal NES, SNES system pages.

Are you using the new DEFAULT theme feature? It would be awesome if unthemed systems look the same as your theme systems, minus the logo of the system of course. Is this possible?

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/EmulationStation-Advanced-Theming

NES Themed

Collection Un-themed

[JuL1Xxx]

Is possible put a screenshot instead of a video?

[alphatoanant]

@hurricanefan I am not sure if the recent, all, favs, custom-col systems support the fallback to a specific system theme on a game by game basis (as you scroll). Thinking about it now it would be awesome; but not sure if it works that way. I'll run the idea/question by @pjft in his thread. Thank you for helping test!

@JuL1Xxx One thing I could do is add in the marquee tag to display behind the video on view views. With that setup the marquee(screenshot) would show for any game that doesn't have a video scraped. That said you would need to make sure you scrape screenshots for the marquee tag. There might be other workarounds but thats the first thing that comes to mind. I will play around with it.

@herb_fargus for sure I need to think about that. A quick and dirty way would be to make a separate version made specifically for scraping screenshots =). For now I made the default the square layout (which doesn't help for systems I setup for portrait and landscape view). More to think about.

---

Also starting to look at Arcade/MAME/FBA in earnest. I am not totally happy with the look for those so far and need to spend more time with the different scrapers and what type of artwork they can pull in. My preference for an "art book" style would be flyers but I don't know of a non-command line way to make that the default with any of the major scrapers. Onward to research...

[KampfVerein]

Hey, just downloaded the theme from GitHub, transferred it over...and I'm getting no graphics whatsoever! Just the default "theme didn't work" setup...you know the one, all white, simple black text...what happened?

[alphatoanant]

@kampfverein checking it now. Can you let me know are you on the latest version of retropie/es (e.g. updated through the setup script)?

[KampfVerein]

@alphatoanant Ah, that did it! It's a fresh install, so EmulationStation wasn't updated. Sorry! Thanks for your hard work.

[alphatoanant]

@kampfverein all good! I tried adding some backwards compatibility checks but still working on it. Glad the update to ES worked well. Please let me know if you find anything else.

[HurricaneFan]

@alphatoanant Where did you get your gb videos? Mine don't use the whole gray box apparently.

[pjft]

For the videos, you may want to use "size" rather than maxSize, to force them to adhere to a specific region and stretch if needed - such as the case here in the GameBoy theme.

An alternative is to center the elements (rather than align them to the top/left) and perhaps use a fake image in the background to delineate the region, with a dark-grey background, kind of like letterbox, in case some artwork isn't exactly the size you expect. I can imagine for Arcade at least that that may be a problem with different resolutions and such.

I'll reply to your comment in the other thread - haven't had the time to actually draft a proper response :)

Thanks!

[alphatoanant]

Thank you @pjft, great advice. Will look at that this evening (likely will go with origin changes so I can keep maxSize for proper scaling to keep things like arcade looking good). Regarding my comment in the other thread, not urgent at all - I know you are busy.

@HurricaneFan, I am using videos from emumovies.com. That said i'll plan to update how I have origin set that should help to center videos that arent' 320 width. Should be able to do that tonight.

[HurricaneFan]

@alphatoanant Hmmm, I used videos from that site too. Wonder why mine look so much smaller than your screenshot.