Emulation Station Bootup Theme Randomizer

[dmmarti]

I recently wrote a script that will automatically switch the ES theme upon bootup and randomly choose any themes you have installed.

It's a small script and a small 1-line addition to the autostart.sh script.

I placed the script into a folder I made called /home/pi/scripts and then made it executable (chmod +x).

After that, I added the line into the autostart.sh script to launch it.

/home/pi/scripts/themerandom.sh

 # Get list of currently installed themes and count
 ls /etc/emulationstation/themes > /tmp/themes
 ls /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/themes >> /tmp/themes
 themecount=`cat /tmp/themes |wc -l`
 
 # Get the currently used theme name
 curtheme=`cat /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/es_settings.cfg |grep ThemeSet |cut -f4 -d '"'`
 
 # Generate a random number between 1 and theme count
 r=$(( $RANDOM % ${themecount} +1 ))

 # Read the random line in the tmp file to get a new theme name
 newtheme=`sed -n "${r}p" /tmp/themes`
 
 # Replace the current used theme with a new one
 perl -pi -w -e 's/<string name=\"ThemeSet\" value=\"'${curtheme}'\" \/>/<string name=\"ThemeSet\" value=\"'${newtheme}'\" \/>/g;' /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/es_settings.cfg

NOTE: make sure the long lines above (if you copy and paste them) stay as a single line, they may "word-wrap" on you. For example, that last line beginning with perl -pi is a very long line.

Then the new line added to autostart.sh as the first line.

 /home/pi/scripts/themerandom.sh
 emulationstation #auto

Now, every time you start your RetroPie system up, it'll randomly pick an installed theme and make the change in the es_settings.cfg file before Emulation Station launches.

Hope some find it useful.