@kiro Thank you for the help! The problem is that I just don't understand what I'm doing.

So up top I have my variables listed in theme.xml, but that's just to avoid confusion here. In reality, I have my variables in variables.xml, with I have included in theme.xml. It should do the same thing, or so I thought.

Viewing the code to carbon, I noticed the include tags are in carbon.xml, not theme.xml.

In my theme I included variables.xml to views.xml and it seemed to have fixed everything. I don't understand why though, you think it would need to be added to the main xml the theme loads so that way all xmls inherit the variables. I have a helpsystem.xml just like the views.xml, but I only included the variables to views.xml and it fixed the helpsystem... I just... don't understand...

Anyway, thanks for the help, I'm going to go cry in a corner and question if I should even continue haha.

Currently the themes installation menu shows (installed) next to installed themes:

01966fb0-e9b7-47ce-bbe8-06dfa2ff2527-image.png

As for the error during install, the only thing I see being an issue is the internet connection - is your Pi system connected to the internet ? If you run an update of the RetroPie-Setup script, does it work or it errors out ?

Submitted PR#740 to address this.

As this question has not really been answered yet: for the people who bought a 4/8GB Pi4: as far as this amount will never be useful for the emulators, would it be helpful to increase the VRAM to 2/4GB?

We don't support 3rd party images, as outlined in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.

Use the image from retropie.org.uk/download to install RetroPie.

@WeirdH
Noticing the same thing myself. My guess is it's the images being loaded one by one but it does look ugly. Not sure if anyone else can confirm this or if a fix is possible.

I tried to apply some of the themes from the list you linked and they don't work either. Same result as on the first screenshots I posted.

The Carbon theme kind of does apply but now breaks when opening a system:

I guess there's just something wrong with the package on AUR and I need to find some other way of installing the ES. Thanks for your help!

@Crispy The only change that would affect this should be the changes in Emulationstation. The desktop - I assume - is only started on-demand.
You can take a look at the theme - it's in /etc/emulationstation/themes/carbon. If you wish to modify it, copy the folder to $HOME/.emulationstation/themes/carbon-mine and make your modifications there.

I have the same setup as you (mostly) and had the exact same problem. Do what @mitu said, set gpu memory split to at least 256MB.

That was it! So it seems the selectorColor property is a multiplying value.

Regards and thank you very much.

EDIT: You can see the result here alt text

...no I can remove the UP/DOWN help from the bottom.

@iazrt The Showcase theme (my favorite) does the same thing as well and also has a blank tag which I just removed. Just search for >< and you'll easily find a blank.

@ciofalello That's not all the information asked in the page.
What is your Video RAM limit in Emulationstation ?

It worked thanks guys:)

@dal1980 While you're developing your theme, it's good to start ES with the --debug flag and look in the log file to spot any errors coming from the .xml files parsing. The log file is in /home/pi/.emulationstation/es_log.txt.