Comic Book Theme 16:9 Full Release

CyberOptek

This theme is awesome. Thank you so much for all the hard work and time you guys put into making this.

chrisdodgen

This is so killer. By far the best theme yet for ES. It looks like it was a ton of work. You deserve a medal. I'm loading it up to test drive, but I didn't realize how long it takes ES to compile from source. Pretty sure this won't happen until morning, but I can't wait. You're the man.

fastlowrex

Hi. Awesome theme. Is there any plans to do Super Graxf, Amiga CD32, Pixel Desktop?

TMNTturtlguy

@fastlowrex super grafx is already completed, there is an Amiga as well, but not CD32, wasn't sure that was used much. As of right now there are no plans for more systems unless i get an overwhelming number of requests for something i missed. I will take note of Amiga CD32 and Pixel Desktop. Thanks

pjft

@chrisdodgen you'll want to exit emulationstation and go through RetroPie Setup manually to update it from source, as you may run out of memory when updating it from within emulationstation itself, not to mention that it'll take more time and other errors may arise (I'm not even sure it can replace the emulationstation binary when it's in use).

chrisdodgen

@pjft said in Comic Book Theme 16:9 Full Release:

(I'm not even sure it can replace the emulationstation binary when it's in use).

Well now I know. It worked though. Took about 2 hours.

chrisdodgen

So how do you scrape for this theme? Do I need to use the Sselph Scraper? Is there a different one to use for screenshots?

TMNTturtlguy

@chrisdodgen scraping is the same process regardless of what theme you use. The theme uses the data you scrape. You can use a variety of scrapers and sources. Sselph Scraper works but i do not think it has video scraping yet? Universal XML scraper has multiple options for scraping including video. It pulls its data from screenscarper.fr

When scraping you will want to make sure to choose options to scrape for video, image and marquee. You can also build your library manually, but that takes a lot of effort. I would search a the forum as well as youtube for scraping information and choose what you think will work best for you. Here is a link to a video on using universal xml, i can't remember if he shows how to get video, but once you watch this, you will be able to find the video settings

@ETAPRIME also has good videos on his youtube page about various scraping techniques and adding video.

chrisdodgen

@TMNTturtlguy Thanks for the link.

Sorry, I should have added that no scrapes are populating in this theme for me – not box art, not metadata, nothing. No games I've previously scraped show up, and I have tried scraping since installing the theme, and the scraped data doesn't show. Is that normal? Is there something I'm not doing?

TMNTturtlguy

@chrisdodgen have you checked other themes you have to see if the information shows up in them? It sounds like either something is wrong with your gamelist or the gamelist or art is not I. The correct location. This theme should run no different than any other theme. You should. It need to do anything to make it work properly.

chrisdodgen

@TMNTturtlguy Yeah, I had Futura running fine before with scrapes. I'll tinker and look around.

chrisdodgen

Just for my own reference while I'm playing around with it, would whatever scraped box art I have already scraped show up in this theme or is that large black area only specifically linked to screenshots/video?

TMNTturtlguy

@fastlowrex can you tell me the folder name for amiga cd32 and pixel desktop. I don not have either of these and if I decide to create backgrounds and logos I will need to create a folder in the theme that matches with the name in es_systems.cfg. Thanks

AlexMurphy

@TMNTturtlguy PIXEL is just called desktop it also appears automatically under ports when you install it. I think you need to manually set it up as its' own system. Amiga CD32 is just under amiga but I'm sure it could manually be set as its' own system again.

TMNTturtlguy

@chrisdodgen your already scraped images should show up in the bottom right grey area. The large black area is for video. You must have video scraped in order for anything to show up in that area.

chrisdodgen

@TMNTturtlguy Ohhhhhhhhhhhh. Hmmmm. Is there a quick way to tweak that on my end so that it would show large screenshots instead?

TMNTturtlguy

@chrisdodgen if you don't want any video at all, you could try this, it is not quick, but not hard.

open comic_book.xml
Delete lines 92-116 (this will be the entire Feature supported = video)
Save and restart ES. You should now only have image support.

Now, in the theme folder go into the folder for each system you are running:
open theme.xml
find the follow: (it should be lines 60-64) and delete it.

         <image name="md_image">
		<pos>0.918 0.525</pos>
		<maxSize>0.127 0.17</maxSize>
		<origin>0.5 0.5</origin>
	</image>

Save the file.
Repeat for each system you are running.

Restart ES. Now your scraped image will show in the large black box. nothing will show in the small gray box.

Otherwise just get one video for each system and put that into your gamelist. Once one rom has a video in the gamelist, the large black box will display the Images for the other games in the large black box.

Let me know if that works.

chrisdodgen

@TMNTturtlguy No, that sounds like it will probably work for me. I'm going to give it a shot. Once again, great work across the board.

chrisdodgen

Stupid. Just noticed the setting under the ES UI for "Gamelist view style." Mine was defaulted to "basic" after the update. I now see the metadata and box art I was expecting. I thought that was determined by whether or not you had metadata at all. Everything's working now.

Anyway, I'll let you know on the Screenshots vs. video. I'm going to try it both ways. My issue is that I'm running off SD, and I'm concerned I will have to increase card size like a mofo if I go to video, and I don't really want to waste several gigabytes of storage just holding a bunch of mp4s. data.

TMNTturtlguy

@chrisdodgen great that you have it working! As for video, again all you need is one video per system and then the theme will show the image in the large black box. Give that a try before editing the theme.

Also you should make sure to reduce the size of your videos using a program like handbrake so they will not use as much space and run better in ES.

I have also requested that a future improvement for ES be the ability to theme multiple scraped images in a theme. Right now we are only allowed one scraped image per view. When this request is implemented i will be able to improve this theme.