Neo Geo X Build
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@danyo said in Neo Geo X Build:
@ruckage Is there any progress update of the neogeo theme? Or does any donation goal exist to apply as a beta tester? ;)
Hi. I have the theme working on my Neogeo build. I'm a little bit concerned about releasing it 'as is' though as I think peoples expectations are a bit too high. I think people are expecting it to support every system and currently it only supports Neogeo and Capcom (those 2 systems were my only goal when I started making it). To support other systems would take a fair bit of reworking - even if they all used the neogeo style red and white stripe background.
The main concerns I have are:
The game logos: I created custom game logos based on hyperspin wheel art which I added the border to. Now I can easily create these as I created a photoshop batch file to do that for me but I don't think every systems will have the hyperspin logos available. And although it's automated, generating the icons will take a while as some systems will have 1000s of logos (these would also need compressing using pngoo to keep the filesize as low as possible which takes more time). Admittedly this wouldn't have to all be done at once though.
It's also extra complexity for the end user as they would have to download these logos separately.
The alternative is to alter the layout and just use standard scraped marquee art but without the game logos the theme just won't look the same.System specific backgrounds: Do I go for a purely NeoGeo aesthetic with the red with white stripes (possibly just with a different colour for each system)? Or system specific backgrounds as seen with the capcom background I made? The latter obviously would be a lot more work.
What systems to support? Do I stick to my original idea and only support arcade based systems or do I try to support everything (eventually)?
The preview window: The theme looks nice with the game preview filling that window area but it probably won't look as nice with vertical games (black bars either side) or if people prefer scraped box art as opposed to screenshots so I need to find an acceptable solution to that.
Sorry for the lengthy post but I wanted to explain why this wasn't released yet. If anyone has any thoughts regarding my concerns let me know.
@TMNTturtlguy said in Neo Geo X Build:
@ruckage is there anyway we can clone you? or maybe we can create an 8th day in the week? :) I hope all is well man, you are doing great work. Make sure to stay healthy and take some time off for yourself.
:D Thanks, yeah I will take some time for myself, I bought Crash Bandicoot for my PS4 last week and it won't play itself :).
You probably need to take some of that advise yourself as well as you've been putting a huge amount of work into the comic theme - perhaps there should be an annual themers vacation :) .@lilbud said in Neo Geo X Build:
@TMNTturtlguy Maybe is @ruckage wasn't so damn stubborn he'd let other people help out with his themes. :)
Excuse me, I feel I'm getting old now and it's every old persons right to be stubborn ;)
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@ruckage said in Neo Geo X Build:
Hi. I have the theme working on my Neogeo build. I'm a little bit concerned about releasing it 'as is' though as I think peoples expectations are a bit too high. I think people are expecting it to support every system and currently it only supports Neogeo and Capcom (those 2 systems were my only goal when I started making it)
Hi @ruckage I'm aware about those things, would you mind to release it as is in some other way (rather than the "official one": retropie-setup). Maybe a github repo with a README saying very clearly that the theme doesn't have all systems.
I would love to use the same way as you on my arcade build. And I think I can tweak the marquees with some ImageMagick sorcery to make the white borders. :-)
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@ruckage I can understand being busy with crash, as I just played through the original trilogy.
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@ruckage of course this is your project so take my thoughts for just that, thoughts.
I like the novelty of just neogeo and capcom. I created an es_systems selector tool which allows you to save multiple systems config files and change between them. I plan to make an es_systmes.cfg for just neogeo and capcom and then I can use the selector tool to set my arcade to that file and your theme. Then when I want other systems, I can switch my es_systems file and theme that supports other systems.
As for the wheel art, one solution would be to put all the wheel art logos into a folder in the theme and then build a gamelist for just the systems you support and point the gamelist to the theme folder. Then users can have the ability to use, copy paste or rebuild their lists based off of yours.
Good luck, this seems to be a lot of work with no clear and easy one size fits all solution.
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The only "system" I would miss is the "Arcade Classics" system. Neo Geo and Capcom are the most important, but I would create the Arcade Classics on my own if I could get my hand on this.
If you would upload your theme related stuff to github, maybe others can contribute and fall in love with it. For me it is a very special arcade theme, not aimed to cover all console systems. And that is good. -
@ruckage i wouldnt bother going past neo geo, capcom, mame/arcade, nintendo vs. system and nintendo playchoice 10.
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@edmaul69 Wow - you just added like 3 or 4 systems to the poor guys workload!
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@TMNTturtlguy yes i did. I chose those because like neo geo and capcom they have chip swappable boards allowing one cabinet to be used without swapping the entire board. I have them seperated in my own theme as well.
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@ruckage if you decide to do a playchoice 10 theme, this might save you time. i used original nintendo playchoice 10 graphics and modified it to make my theme. it took me a long time to do this way. so i figured i could give you a starting point. as far as the playchoice 10 marquee, you can find good ones on google as i shrunk mine to a size acceptable for my theme before the white screen fix was released. here is a link to the font it uses too. also if you use this, take note of where each green color is used.
https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/919856/playchoice_10
this one was resized to 1920x1080
this one was done in 320x240 using original pixel size.
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@ruckage also if you are interested in overlays for the playchoice 10, the pd-10 had an instruction secreen. i am putting them into overlay form. in the blank green box i am thinking about putting in the title screens game name.
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As meleu said if you could release it as github project that would be great.
NeoGeo and Capcom is all "I" need. No need for additional systems.
The release of this theme is probably same exciting like the release of Game of Thrones on July 16.
Can't wait to get my hands on it.
If you could also add the game marquees and explain how you did the custom per game loading screen that would make this perfect.Again, no need for further systems. NeoGeo and Capcom is all I need.
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@ruckage personally i'd leave the theme as it, the neogeo and CPS systems are very similar in game styles and what you have created reflects that, adding other systems such as arcade would ruin the feel of the theme as not all other arcade games are on par with the neogeo & CPS.
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+1 to what Stuart just said.
I created an es_systems selector tool which allows you to save multiple systems config files and change between them.
How did you do that? Please create new topic with small tutorial.
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@meleu @FlyingTomahawk
I'll see about getting a release put together soon. Along with the logos and custom launch screens for neogeo/capcom.@edmaul69
Thanks for the playchoice10 pictures but it doesn't really match the aesthetic of this theme - I'm not really going for matching the real life look of those systems. If I were to add it then I would make it match the look of the rest of this theme.@TMNTturtlguy said in Neo Geo X Build:
@ruckage of course this is your project so take my thoughts for just that, thoughts.
I like the novelty of just neogeo and capcom. I created an es_systems selector tool which allows you to save multiple systems config files and change between them. I plan to make an es_systmes.cfg for just neogeo and capcom and then I can use the selector tool to set my arcade to that file and your theme. Then when I want other systems, I can switch my es_systems file and theme that supports other systems.
As for the wheel art, one solution would be to put all the wheel art logos into a folder in the theme and then build a gamelist for just the systems you support and point the gamelist to the theme folder. Then users can have the ability to use, copy paste or rebuild their lists based off of yours.
Good luck, this seems to be a lot of work with no clear and easy one size fits all solution.
Thanks for your input. I tend to agree as I keep building retropie machines myself that only support limited systems and I like each one to have it's own look.
Your es_systems selector tool sounds really interesting. As @FlyingTomahawk said I'd be interested to read more about it if you have a topic for it. -
As @FlyingTomahawk said I'd be interested to read more about it if you have a topic for it.
I have a thread for this that is a few weeks old. Here is the link: post 16
Post 16 is the one with the download link and instructions. There is also readme file with the instructions on github. There are 2 other threads related to this where @meleu and @cyperghost and I were trying to create a way to restart ES from within this script. We were able to get a command to restart es from command line, however for some reason it will not work properly from within a script so i had to remove the auto restart feature. You just have to restart ES manually after running the script. The script can be operated with a controller or joystick so a keyboard is not required.
@ruckage, if you test this out and like it, i can add another option for your neogeo/capcom systems. Let me know if you have any questions. I had a few others test this out and it works great, but it would be cool if you guys tested as well and let me know if there are any tweaks that need to be made.
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@TMNTturtlguy I forked your bash script to restart ES and added forced restart again. You may test... so far I detected no errors. I didn't test copy and deleting functions of this script because this is unchanged to yours.
Branch is available here -
@cyperghost Thanks, I will give it a test tomorrow when i get a chance. Is this method still based on the current ES build, and might it have issues with future updates? The reason I removed your original method which worked perfectly was because I don't want it to not work or break things on future updates or ES.
Thanks
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@TMNTturtlguy It's based on the latest method. Oh did not notice that it worked with my first method, too. To be true, I expect that even that method will work in far far future. But I was honest and I really can't say ...
Your source code was in terrible state and wasn't expected to run because of unused functions calls. Maybe it was broken in the latest versioning? I have to agree I just tested without copy/move files but that was kept as in original state.
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@TMNTturtlguy Again me!
@meleu Did take a branch to your es_selecter.
He resolved the small bug also by breaking while-loop. So the function of mine and his are same. But he cleandup the code more that I only mentioned but he did... So it's clear which branch to use.I see still place for improvement to make the usage much much saver. If you like you can use my recommendation to symlink to
es_systems.cfg
rather then to copy and delete files. If you are in need in help I can help and I'm sure @meleu is also willing to do so. -
@cyperghost thanks for your hard work, please move this conversation out of @ruckage thread and over to our other thread dedicated to this topic. Thanks!
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