Update: Since editing Retropie's runcommand.sh is a dirty hack that can be reverted any time if this file is being updated by the developers, here's a way to use the runcommand-onstart.sh instead. One way to edit this file is the command nano /opt/retropie/configs/all/runcommand-onstart.sh. Add this at its end: launchpic="$(dirname ${3})/images/launching/$(basename $3 .zip)-launching.png" fbi -1 -t 12 -noverbose -a "$launchpic" </dev/tty &>/dev/null & The first line will change the path and filename of the game's rom to that of the launch image. The second line invokes Retropie's framebuffer picture viewer like runcommand.sh does, albeit with a trailing & that runs it as a background process so it doesn't pause the loading of the game. The above solution assumes that your launch images reside in a sub-subdirectory images/launching in your rom directory, e.g. /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/arcade/images/launching. However this will create a strange behavior of the keyboard's Enter key in the emulator, which is especially annoying in MAME's Tab menu: Pressing Enter will either exit the Emulator or do other strange things like running Emulation Station a second time. It seems like another terminal is running in the background that reacts to the keyboard inputs in the running game. (?) I don't understand why simply running the image viewer as a background task will create this behaviour. Alas, and contrary to my last post, & disown will not fix it. After nearly two hours of research and testing, I'm giving up. My current workaround and recommendation is to use the first controller's button that also starts games in Emulation Station instead of the Enter key in MAME's Tab menu. It works without problems for me. If anyone can explain why putting fbi in the background leads to problems with the Enter key in at least RetroArch's MAME cores, or why using nohup doesn't display the image at all, and even with fbi's options -T and -d to choose a particular terminal or framebuffer, please share your wisdom with me and anyone else interested here.

I guess the fbi (image viewer) used to display the .png file does not support transparency ? Ahh ok, that makes sense. It seems it defaults to a gray background. I wonder if there's a way to either have it default to a black background OR make the side bezels match the gray background i'm getting from the .png

@jwbmonk @meleu created an amazing script https://github.com/meleu/generate-launching-images that creates launching images for a specific theme. What I think it does is take the console images of the theme and create launching images. I guess it could be possible to add an option to use the scraped box art instead of the console image.

@red5ive said in ComicBook Theme Launching Images: Can that be done and if so what do I need to do? The splash images are not part of Emulationstation, but part of the launcher - Runcommand. So, unless you find a substitute for it, the answer would be no.

@ruckage these launch images and your NES Mini theme are so awesome. Do you think you could make launch images for Kodi, Pixel Desktop and a generic catch all launch image? Thanks for all your work.