@virginsteele said in ES - White screen of death on retropie 4.2:

@pjft I'm using the latest retropie 4.2. I did play with different value in the VRAM, but so far the best result is with 720px max background images, that's what I have in my SD theme version.

The goal is to try to optimize it for the best, since the theme should work for max users as possible.

When you press start, what version is listed at the bottom of the retropie menu? When you start up the retropie, do you see a "WHITE" Emulationstation splash screen or a "Black" Emulationstation splash screen?

@BuZz It returns:

Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

As the text tag list doesn't contain something like outline

Available tags:
pos, size, text, color, fontPath, fontSize, alignment, forceUppercase, lineSpacing
Source: https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation/blob/master/THEMES.md#text

you have to use a font with a outline. Just search for a folder called "art" in the root of the theme you want to edit and replace the old font with the new one.
If you don't want to mess around with the XML files, rename the new font like the original one was called.

That's it. If you need more help or a finished solution, tell me.

EDIT: If a change of the font color would fix your problem to you could edit the "main" XML (it isn't called main in most cases), located at root of the theme folder. Edit the color hash in the <color> tag

@Scannigan: I'm with @Keigan on this one.

Before you do any coding, sketch a rough layout of how you want the theme to look. You can start with simple pencil and paper to get the basic layout of elements, or use a design tool such as Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.net, Inkscape, Illustrator, etc.

Here are some simple basics. There are 4 main Views:

System Carousel with System Logos Basic Gamelist System Logo Detailed Gamelist System Logo Metadata (image, description, rating, genre, etc) Video Same as Detailed View, but with a Video instead of an Image

You don't need to support the Video View if you don't want to. Chances are, if other people like your theme, there will be someone out there that will add the Video support for you.

Start by working out what elements you want to show on each View.

The Basic View is pretty rigid, but you can add System specific images like controllers and consoles if you want. The System View used to be pretty set, but now you can style the Carousel to look however you want. Check out the BaseVid theme in the Toolkit as an example. As with the Basic View, you can also add extra images to each System if you want. With the Detailed View, you don't have to show all the metadata if you don't want to. Maybe you don't care about number of times played, or the name of the publisher. You can hide any info you don't want to show.

Now just draw some rectangles. For the Detailed View as an example, maybe you want the Gamelist on the right of the screen, so you draw a rectangle on the right of the screen. You might want a big image in the middle, so draw a big rectangle in the middle. Maybe you want the System Logo under the Gamelist, so you shorten the Gamelist a little and draw a smaller rectangle under it.

Keep going until you have a layout that you like the look of. If you are using pencil and paper, now might be the time to move to a computer program so you can get exact numbers for the <pos> and <size> poperties.

Added Atari 800, SNES, and Super Famicom.

@itsnitro I think you can use just about any image format, but you can definitely use png.

:)-

Update: Ok, Now i am all kinds of confused. I decided to make sure everything I have is up to date, after seeing in threads that ES was updated over the weekend. so I re-updated everything from source. Unfortunately this has changed the outcomes of my symptoms above. Now, after updating from source, the carbon theme as updated through ES themes update will run both the videos and images in a single system, this is great as it allows for some games in the games list to not have video and instead shows the image. The carbon theme does have the <supported feature= "video". The problem is that now carbon throws the same errors as my new theme does. My theme still has my video view as a standard view and not a feature, per above. Now both themes function the same. Both allow video and images in the same system, and both throw out the could not find file error. In both cases i have videos and images running along with all my meta data for each game in each system. Anyone else have the updated carbon and getting these errors in the es log? Thanks

@masteryoer yeeeeaahhhhh... I'm not much of a surgeon. I think I'll stick with cosmetics for now.

@lilbud

How can I contact you to give you details?

Jfurnas@workaholic-studios.net if you really want to help

@jdrassa and @herb_fargus once I sorted out the dlls the 32bit version works well. So maybe sticking with that could be ok as long as we have the info here about making sure a user has 32bit versions of the dlls available. If that works I can record a quick step by step and post it into this thread if the question comes up again no problem.

Or is it possible to include the 32bit vcruntime140 and msvcp140 dlls in the zipped bundle? Not sure if there are legal issues with doing so; if not that could help too.

@mattrixk Yes, they are both in the /art/ folder. This theme is literally a copy/paste of the 'simple' theme that comes with the latest version of the windows ES build. I literally just copy/pasted the folder in the /themes/ directory, renamed the folder, and edited the .xml file

Copied from the Help and Support Thread:

Here are some images I took of my system. One day, I will clean up the wiring a bit, as it was one really organized and neat but during iterations of adding to it it's gotten sloppy again.

After wiring the LEDs and the fan up to a USB connector together, I now get the yellow lightning bolt in the upper right corner of my screen, as seen in the video. Not sure why, the power supply is putting out more than enough power. I may disconnect the fan from it, as it's technically a 12v fan that was originally wired directly up to the 12v system. I am not sure I'll ever need the fan anyway, just wanted it as a precaution.

This first image shows the guys of the system. You can see the PI, the usb hub and the original 12v power supply from the original xbox.

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This next image shows the custom connectors I made for the back. I cut out three holes for an RCA to RCA splicer, and hot glued an HDMI adapter, the RCA splicer, and a cat5 to cat5 connector to the back of the xbox chassis.

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This is the back of the system, with the main power on/off switch, and the hdmi, rca, and ethernet ports.

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This picture shows the front connectors. I took out the original ones, and replaced them with USB extension cables. They plug into a 4-port wired USB hub inside the system. (The hub is powered by the power supply). The eject button acts as a hard reset in the case of system freeze (Its connected to the 'Run' jumpers on the PI)

The power button acts as the power on/off to put the system in halt mode, or wake it up from halt mode (jumping pins 5 and 6).

The circle of light around the 'eject' button lights up a neon blue color.

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This is the finished product-ish. Still some tweaks to do, but it's for the most part there.

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And finally, a video of the boot sequence. I need to adjust some things so that it boots faster, as I don't like the 10-15 second black screen at the start, and the long wait between the boot sequence and the ES loading screen.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/b2d75bl8yy8q0nr/01e1e1e84bb62da7c29341b95d087012a42b0a5d2d.mp4?dl=0

I am also working on a custom theme, which I have a screenshot of here:

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ALSO: Please do not pay attention to the stuff all over the coffee table. That's currently my work-space, and glass is very hard to keep clean :\

@TMNTturtlguy You're right.

In that case, my best advice is to do what I had done before I started this and fieldofcows added the OMXPlayer experiment, which is to batch convert all videos to 480x360@30fps using Handbrake or equivalent.

Works like a charm! :)

You may save yourself some time if you can somehow know beforehand which of your videos are of higher resolution, or higher fps so you don't convert all.

A note: obviously I'm biased, but I've been using my build as the main ES for the past few weeks with no real issues, so I'd be the first to recommend it :D But yes, of course there may be unforeseen problems, though it's mostly fieldofcows' code - just a few tweaks on top. If you do test it out, let us all know! Just don't use themes with overlays with the experimental player, as it doesn't support overlays on top, if that's a problem for you. :)

Best!

@pjft My code isn't up on github yet. Once it is I will post an update. Currently, the rendering order is determined by the order in which GuiComponents are added to the gamelist view (with the exception of the video component, which is specifically being inserted between the background and the extras). My implementation is pretty simplistic in that the vector of GuiComponents is sorted by z-index after the theme is applied so that the GuiComponents are in the proper order for rendering.

I did a little research into using the OpenGL depth buffer, but that approach doesn't work if want to use transparency, which most themes do.

@taekwonjudo but yeah if you do get them feel free to upload any missing screenshots on thegamesdb and/or https://screenscraper.fr/

@EctoOne Correct. Once you upgrade, if you are using a theme that doesn't support video, it should use the detailed view instead. Hopefully the carousel changes will land soon.

@BuZz said in Retropie - x86 Flavor - where to put themes:

/opt

Ahhh now I see silly me!

Thanks!