Fun Facts Splashscreens

Parviglumis

Hello all!

I would like to add a collection of splash screens to my RetroPie that feature fun facts about retro games and consoles, but I need some help before I get there (I hope this is the correct place to post). I will of course share my creations when I get that far.

I was thinking of adding text to the the default splash screen of the carbon theme (this one: https://github.com/RetroPie/retropie-splashscreens/blob/master/retropie-default.png) to give it a polished and cohesive look. But my photoshop / graphic design skills are very limited, so does anyone have the image file of just the background texture used, or maybe one with a smaller logo? I would keep the RetroPie logo centered on top and add the text to the bottom.

I am also using meleu's run command custom launching images package (for the Carbon theme). Does anyone know the font that was used in that screen for the "Now Loading" etc text? For consistency's sake.

Seems like this is something that could be automated in much the same way with a new 'base' image and the custom input of text, but that is so far beyond me I am happy with throwing some captions on in GIMP and making the .jpgs manually!

Also I would love fun fact contributions or suggestions as to where I can find more! I have gathered a few which I will share below, but they mostly came from racketboy.com or random Googling. I hope they are accurate! Anything from systems to specific games. Have at it! I appreciate any and all ideas.

Fun fact dump below:
Edit: found some more on Mental Floss and some other sites. Why are there so many for Nintendo compared to other systens?

The original Nintendo Entertainment System had a resolution of 256 x 224 pixels. In comparison, the Nintendo Switch can run games at 1920 x 1080!
The Light Gun that was included with some Nintendo Entertainment Systems does not work on modern HDTV screens, due to image processing causing a display lag of about 20 to 50 milliseconds.
The PlayStation1 was able to render textures with about 700kb of video memory. The N64 only had 4kb, resulting in more cartoony styled games and clever programming tricks to add detail to the environment.
The N64 had 4mb of RAM compared to the PS1's 2mb, allowing for larger 3D worlds, better draw distances, and higher resolution.
Around 650MB of data could fit on a PS1 CD, as opposed to about 64MB on an N64 cartridge. This usually led to movie-style cutscenes, higher quality music, and voice acting on the PlayStation.
The most valuable NES game today is Nintendo World Championships Gold. Only 26 copies were produced and given out by Nintendo in 1990 as a contest prize. It has sold for more than $25,000!
The highest grossing arcade game of all time is Pac-Man, estimated to have earned $2.5 billion in quarters from its release in 1980 to 1990.
Nintendo offered repair service for the original GameBoy, released in 1989, until 2007.
When Space Invaders was released in Japan, it caused a temporary shortage of the 100 yen coin.
Mario first appeared in 1981 as the playable character in Nintendo's arcade game Donkey Kong. However, he was a carpenter known only as Jumpman.
NBA Jam creator Mark Turmell, a Pistons fan, admitted that there is special code in the game that diminishes the Bulls' chances of making a last second shot.
The Final Fantasy series is so named because the developer, Square Enix, was going bankrupt and it was thought this could be their last game. However, it was a massive success and has led to over 15 installments and spin-offs.
In the original Civilization game, Gandhi’s aggression rating began at the lowest setting of 1. If it was lowered, a bug caused it to loop around to the maximum of 255, turning Gandhi into a nuke-flinging warmonger.
Pac-Man was originally going to be called Puck-Man in the United States, but that was changed after considering how easy it would be to vandalize the arcade cabinets to say... something else.
A cheat code giving the player all power ups was inserted into the game Gradius by the developers for testing purposes, and was left in upon release. The Konami Code, as it is now called, has made appearances in many games since.
Ice Climber was the first game that Kazuaki Morita worked on. He would go on to refine the game's formula for his next title at Nintendo: Super Mario Bros.
Balloon Fight was one of the first games Satoru Iwata worked on at Nintendo. He later went on to become president and CEO of the company, and oversaw the launches of the Nintendo DS and Wii.
Metroid and Kid Icarus were both developed by the same team at Nintendo.
Ninja Gaiden was the first console game to have the story presented with cinematic cutscenes.
In The Legend of Zelda, the player character was originally envisioned to be able to travel throughout time periods with the help of the Triforce. Thus he was named Link after his connection between the eras.
According to a calendar in Nintendo Power volume 2, Mario's birthday is October 11.
Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a playing card and toy manufacturer.
In the original Super Mario Brothers for NES, the clouds and bushes are the same graphic.
The console that was to be the SNES sequel was a originally a collaboration between Nintendo and Sony. However, Nintendo backed out of the deal leading Sony to independently develop what would become the PlayStation.
At its release in 1996, the N64 had only two games: Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64.
The look of Donkey Kong County was achieved through use of rasterization: the graphics were rendered in 3D on a more powerful system, then converted into 2D for the 16-bit SNES.
In 1982, the arcade video game industry's revenue in quarters was estimated at $8 billion, surpassing the annual revenue of pop music ($4 billion) and Hollywood films ($3 billion) combined.
Zaxxon, released in by Sega in 1982, was the first game to feature isometric graphics.
Space Invaders, manufactured in 1978 by Taito, was the first game to include a continuous background soundtrack, even though it was comprised of only four notes that changed pace with the stage.
The first game to feature true background music was Namco's Rally-X in 1980.
The graphic finishing moves known as 'Fatalities' in Midway's Mortal Kombat led to the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board to give age-appropriate content ratings for video games.

And this NSFW-ish one:

There is a pornographic parody movie of Super Mario Brothers called Super Hornio Brothers, released in 1993. Nintendo bought the rights to ensure it would never be distributed again.

Parviglumis

So I went digging around and found some of the carbon theme's assets here: https://github.com/RetroPie/es-theme-carbon/tree/master/art

So I was at least able to throw something rudimentary together. Don't know how to do the cool logo shadow or the glow or anything really but this works for me!

Here's the .xcf file (it's like a .psd but for GIMP instead of Photoshop) if anyone wants to tinker around with it.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By0c01L3M2kHWUc0WGV5ZmNKSEE/view

hiulit

@parviglumis I think this could be automated using some of the code used in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/7193/runcommand-launching-images-for-any-theme by @meleu .
So the splashscreen could be created with a random fun fact from an array or something.
What I'm not sure of is if it could be done on startup.

But I like the idea of these fun facts splashscreens :)

SgtJimmyRustles

I think this is pretty slick here. I'd love to see this set up. Maybe I could even help make some.

cyperghost

@Parviglumis @hiulit The generic solution is to create the funfacts picture on the fly. This is indeed a nice option I would like to use ;)

sudo apt install imagemagick

convert picture1.jpg -gravity SouthEast -font Times-Bold -pointsize 72 -draw "text 0,0 'Hello World'" funfacts.jpg

To check available fonts use
convert -list font

This works on Ubuntu ... I'm not sure if the Raspberry gots the imagemagick package already as it needs ghostscript for text feature... If yes, then have fun facts fun :D

@meleu What's your opionion about?

hiulit

@cyperghost I'll give it a try and see if I can come up with a little script or something :)

cyperghost

@hiulit If it works then I think it can be converted as a repo to be available for all. Not only funfacts are possible. A generic launching screen can be created. Therefore you need three pictures... and merge them to one.

For Ex. Super Mario Brothers (NES)

---------------------------------------------------------------
|                        PICTURE 1                            |
|                                                             |
|           NINTENDO ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM (LOGO)              |
|                                                             |
|                                                             |
---------------------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------------------
|                        PICTURE 2                            |
|                                                             |
|                      CUSTOM ROM LOGO                        |
|                                                             |
---------------------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------------------
|                        PICTURE 3                            |
|                      NOW LOADING....                        |
|                   ROM-NAME-WITHOUT[]()                      |
|                                                             |
---------------------------------------------------------------

imagemagick can add pictures to left, right, upside, downside to create portrait photos. But in this case we can create custom launching images. But this needs lot of work and support from theme creators ;) I know that it works - as I use the same system to create stamps from Letterformat to 70mm Dymoprinter labels for parcels ;)

Maybe picture 2 can be made optional as background image. I'm not soooo common with imagemagick and mogrify but I think there are tons of possibilities ;)

EDIT:
Of course @meleu's script works the same way with imagemagick so @hiulit a fun facts screen should be easily possible ;)

meleu

@cyperghost it's doable. I also would like to see it working generating images on-demand, right before launching a game. But I'm not sure if the overhead for creating the image right before launching the game, then showing the image would be bearable...

Need more tests. I'm a little busy currently, but if you guys wanna try some coding, I can offer some help. ;-)

cyperghost

@meleu runcommand-onstart.shshould be the answer but I really don't know if the runcommand waits for it's proper exit. If it's coded in a good way (and I think it is) then it's not a matter of execution time :)

We will see... I also lack in time so I hope someone can do this ;)

BTW: MAME ROW #57 - I posted a small teaser. Just for encouragement ;)

hiulit

@cyperghost I though @Parviglumis was talking about the initial splashscreen, before EmulationStation starts. But I like your idea too!

meleu

@hiulit if generating the image at boot the overhead would be perfectly bearable!

The fun facts could be in a txt file and the script gets the text there...

Wombat

Great work! These would be cool for a screen saver as well.

Parviglumis

@hiulit

Yes, I did use them as an initial splashscreen. But that is an awesome idea! All of you are wizards.

Please feel free to take this in any direction you want (not like you needed my permission lol). But I am really happy with all the new ideas! Sorry that I am totally useless when it comes to coding.

detron

I also think this is really cool.

the images would be amazing, but even if it is only used on the command line through forture | cowsay it would still be cool

alt text

hiulit

I just wanted to let you know that I've started working on this project.

I'll keep you updated ;)

P.S. Looking good!
0_1510156218247_Captura de pantalla 2017-11-08 a les 16.49.26.png
P.P.S. @meleu When using convert, it takes a lot of time. I'm working on a Virtual Machine. Maybe it's that. I don't know. Here's a snippet of what I'm doing:

convert splash4-3.png \
    -size 1000x100 \
    -interline-spacing 5 \
    -background transparent \
    -fill white \
    -caption:"${fun_facts[$random_number]}" \
    -gravity south \
    -geometry +0+25 \
    -composite \
    result.png

And here's what time outputs:

real 0m7.172s
user 0m6.300s
sys  0m0.656s

hiulit

BTW, if anyone wants to tinker, here's the GitHub's repo https://github.com/hiulit/es-fun-facts-splashscreens

meleu

@hiulit hey man! Well done!! ;-)

hiulit

@meleu Thanks! :D It's super basic now, but it seems to be working. Now it's time to take a look at your generate-launching-imagesscript and improve mine ;)

meleu

@hiulit I'm glad to know it can inspire you. I usually spend sometime making my code readable just to help others to understand it (including @meleu in the future). Knowing that you're reading it and getting some inspiration makes me feel like the work was worth it. :D

Let me know if you have any doubt!

meleu

@hiulit a small tip: if you want to store fun facts in a text file, one fun fact per line, you can get a random line from the file using the shuf command. This way:

shuf -n 1 fun_facts.txt

EDIT: This aproach would be useful if the users want to customize their fun facts. They wouldn't need to edit the script's code.

;-)