Now I like your idea, but for me personally, it needs some work. The font is terrible. I'm sorry, I can't sugar coat it. It's barely legible looking at it on my computer, and the size and spacing you need to use to help people read it takes away from the overall look. There are a thousand better pixel based fonts that would suit this far better. The system logo is far too big. It's taking up a ton of real estate that would be better used for a games list. The user should have an idea what system they are on, so it doesn't need to be what your eyes are drawn too. Personally I would scrap it all together, or maybe split the rating, etc box into 2 smaller ones and put the logo there and then have the information a bit smaller. Spacing/Consistency. It seems kind of slapped together with a general idea of a layout, but no set spacing. The games list is closer to the top than the bottom as well it's further from the left side than the box other side of the screen. Visually it looks so much nicer when things are evenly spaced, and it's such an easy thing to master. I'm attaching an image below of an old theme I had made like 3 or so years ago just as a suggestion as to how I would approach this. As you can see I create my full layout with guides and then build using them, even spacing between all the windows as well we as the edges. Tiles Use hard pixels since you're basing your design off of a pixel game. In both NES and SNES the tiles you've used are blurry, they should be crisp, as well the bricks in the NES should be the same size as the blocks. To be real picky I'd also say the bricks and blocks should be the same orientation since they are in the game, but maybe that's too much. Again I like the style of the theme, but needs to be cleaned up a bit to really grab the interest, at least personally to me. I apologize for being an overly critical person, but when someone asks for criticism, I assume they want to hear more then "it looks great", when there are obvious flaws.

I kinda gave up trying to fix the magazine madness theme as I wasnt getting anywhere with it,ive installed the comic book theme which i really like so will keep that for the time being,thanks for your help anyway

@bogaboy The different collections that I've seen in the Carbon theme are in these folders: auto-favorites auto-allgames auto-lastplayed custom-collections So if you want to play with logos for favorites, edit the log in the auto-favorites folder and adjust the xml file if your filename is different.

Thanks both. I'll try to dig into it, now with a theme to easily replicate it on my end. Best.

I opted to skip on the Achievements for right now and am in the process of making this now. As all themes I've ever made, I'll give people the files and info if they care to make it a theme, but I manually create all my gamelist files and make all my own screen shots/start screens/sprite files, so unless you're going to take the time to do that, theme won't look good. Here's a looping GIF of what it looks like so far. I've only grabbed 1/2 my SNES sprites so far and am using start screens for the screen shot until I get it fully set up and then I'll replace them with actual screen shots. I think it came out pretty nicely, I may look into the Pegasus avenue, and need to really buckle down and improve any coding knowledge before I can even come close to my end goal. Things that I plan on fixing is the GAME INFO box, and the Title Box. I'll have them expand to the size of the text inside, but I don't believe there is a way to pad the edges, so I don't know how I'll like the look.

@sgtjimmyrustles Only one way to find out. ;)

@meleu Doesn't really bother me what you do with them. Also, despite both of you mentioning me, I didn't get any notification.

@string7th you can put emulation station into kiosk mode and set all the menu options as "hidden" so the retro pie menu doesn't show up. To bring back full menus, you use the konami code. As far as retroarch, open the configs from your network and go to configs/all/retroarch/autoconfig and open the controller you want to edit. you can just remove the input_enable_hotkey_btn line and that pretty much disables hotkeys for that that controller. If you want to disable all hotkeys except exit, go through the file and remove all the features you dont want like save state and menu toggle, ect.

@pokeengineer said in Retropie wishlist: @paffley I might be able to put background music in ES based on Recalbox's version, when I have time... I have school stuff to do. Sounds great! Keep us updated :)

@ectoone I'm certain it wasn't but I will double check and let you know.

@movisman @cosmo0 Thank you guys!

Do you have any video scraped for your games ? That's the source for the screensavers - so you should get those using the Steven Selph's scraper - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Scraper/. Then, you can look in the video posted by @retroprogrammer - skip the whole updating and re-installing - to see how it's configured in EmulationStation.

@zerojay that's a cool idea, I hadn't thought of that angle. I'm focused on making a single script that does everything i need and adding support for several of the more popular themes.

maybe, not really sure

@nsantalu Good read. Thanks for posting all of the steps and links, as it helps others see first hand exactly what you are building. The evolution you describe seems to be common among DIY arcade builders over the past decade or so (pre-raspberry pi). While plenty of users buy the X-Arcade solutions and stop there, it can be a gateway to other considerations leading to more controls, more customization, and generally, a much deeper understanding of the hardware and software. I too am curious about your answer to @chigundo's question: knowing what you do now, if you were going to do it over again, would you follow the same path or go completely scratch built? The one fly in the ointment of an X-Arcade story is the image which they provide for download as the suggested start. By downloading their image and continuing your build from there, customers are in an unsupportable situation--we have no idea what configuration changes X-Arcade may have made to the image they are providing. Moreover, they are in violation of several license agreements which is a legal problem. Finally, the recommendation against full updates is sure to eventually cause support issues. This is unfortunate because it is not difficult to start with the official RetroPie image and install the relevant drivers after that. The silver lining is that, if necessary, X-Arcade owners can switch to an official RetroPie image at any time and they have a decent bundle of arcade controls that are likely going to last a long time. I am anxious to find out what you think of the TurboTwist 2 spinner. I have two of them in my cabinet.

@alturis I'm not fully sure about the theming aspects of it, and how that's structured. The custom-collection theme folder has the theme settings for all the custom collections that will be grouped under the "my collections" err... collection, as sub-folders. You won't be able to further customize them there - there is a single theme/layout for each ES "system". If, however, you're looking to add specific custom collection artwork, add them to the root of the theme. Look at some of the other custom collections (mario, kids, shmups) in that theme for a good example. These will show at the main carousel level, though, not inside the "My Collections" folder.