Custom theme help please.

ccaveman84

Raspberry PI 3 B+
running latest retropie
5v 3a power supply

Hey there!

OK so ive got my pi setup how I want it with retopie running like a treat so I though I would have a go at making my own theme for the UI.

As I am still learning and have no idea what I'm doing yet I've been modifying the carbon theme in order to get the feel of how the themes work and how to lay out the .xml files and such before I try making my own from scratch.

I've been making the theme using the portable windows version of Emulationstation to test changes and and so on and everything has been going well.

on the portable ES on my PC The main dash is looking how In want it and I'm currently making my own system icons and such, the system menus are coming along nicely and I'm starting to like the overall feel of the theme however I am having an issue when transferring the theme to my PI.

like I say the complete theme works flawlessly on the portable ES and Everything uploads to the pi just fine with root access and I can set the theme in ES no problem. the main dash of The ui there is no issue with but when I go into any of the game systems the whole layout is messed up and none of the images I have set are there or anything.

This is how it looks on my PC portable ES
https://imgur.com/a/pYTxsqN

This is how it looks when I upload it to my PI
https://imgur.com/a/DgWTshq

All I am doing to the theme files is replacing images with my own, renaming them the same as the image its replacing so no need to change code in the .xml and that's it really. I have no idea why it works on my PC but not when I upload the files its so annoying.

If anyone has any insight as to why the game system menus don't work properly on my pi but will on my PC it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

mitu

@ccaveman84 Take a look at the Emulationstation log file (/home/pi/.emulationstation/es_log.txt) to see the errors. Remember that

Linux is always case sensitive when dealing with filenames. Make sure the files you reference in the theme are named exactly as their name on disc
the folder separator on Linux is /, as opposed to the default \ in Windows.

mattrixk

@ccaveman84:

An idea: it could be a difference in the version of RetroPie. The portable version you are using may support some of the more recent updates, while the version on your RPi might be older so it doesn't support them.

Eg: if your Theme has Video Preview support, but your RPi version doesn't, then that can cause the issue you're seeing.

ccaveman84

@mattrixk I am running the latest retropie so that's all good but I did find what was causing the issue.

@mitu thank you very much for your help you were right it was the file path. Not an error on my part as all the paths were set correctly with / and not \ but it turns out that when making a theme in ES portable on the pc the file paths to all the images and such were slightly off.

Instead of an _Inc folder I'm weird and have my images and such in a folder called art. There is 1 art folder in the main theme folder for the main theme images and such then there is 1 art folder in each of the system folders for each consoles images.

In retropie the file path required for the theme to be able to find the images correctly is just ./art/image.png as it only needs to look directly into the art folder within that system folder.

It seems that with ES portable that the file path for some reason is ./.. /art/image.png which I presume is effectively telling ES portable to go back a folder to look for the images?

All I needed to do in the end was change it from ./../art/image.png to ./art/image.png and its all working great now.

I've been playing with the themes for the past few days and I think im almost finishedwith my theme now and I'm working on a much better one too. Might have to make a custom img to upload I've recently acquired just under 20k games across 48 platforms, going to take a while to scrape! Lol.