Carbon Theme Suggestions

monstermadeofman

@Rookervik
Sorry I'm completely new to all of this and I'm struggling with editing the XML files properly. I pretty much just want to change the colour palette of carbon. Like the colours of the controller outlines, red line along the bottom. and the red line along the top in the game select screen.

Also changing the font?

I'm sorry to post this here but I didn't want to start a new thread for something so mundane and I apologise profusely if this is an inconvenience

mattrixk

@monstermadeofman

Fonts

You can change the font by adding a new .ttf font file to the art folder, then doing a find/replace for "Cabin-Bold.ttf" to replace Cabin-Bold with your own font.
Or you could delete Cabin-Bold.ttf from the artfolder, place your new .ttf there and rename it to Cabin-Bold.ttf. This way seems like cheating though.

Controller Overlay Colour
carbon.xmlhas the following chunk of code within <view name="system">:

<image name="ControllerOverlay" extra="true">
    <color>8b0000</color>
</image>

This controls the colour of the controller outline on the System View. Change this value to any Hex Colour Code you like. Do the same to <image name="CenterFade" extra="true"> and <image name="BottomBar" extra="true"> to change the colours of the glow around the Carousel and the bottom bar respectively.

Note that these 2 have 8 digits instead of 6. The last 2 digits dictate the opacity of the Element.

To change the Bottom and Top colours on the Basic and Detailed Views, change the <color> values of <image name="bottom" extra="true"> and <image name="top" extra="true"> (they are at the bottom of carbon.xml).

I hope this answers your questions. If you have any other questions, I just completed a theme tutorial. It's up on the wiki now if you want to check it out. It should give you a grounding in theme building.

monstermadeofman

@mattrixk

Thank you so much :)

I'm currently at work so I couldn't watch the video haha.

So kind of you man :)

mattrixk

@monstermadeofman No worries mate. Good luck.

monstermadeofman

@mattrixk

Hey man sorry to bother you about this once again. But how in gods name do I get into the ES Themes file from Samba? I'm really confused haha

Rookervik

@monstermadeofman

You can't do anything with themes through Samba in a basic configuration. Takes ftp or some command line file copies.

Only 'hack' way to do Samba is to grab a keyboard, get on your pi, log in, make a folder in ~/RetroPie/roms called something like 'transfers' then go to /etc/emulationstation/themes and find the file you want and copy it to the transfers folder. From there you can access it through Samba.

Can do the file hoops with SSH as well. Or copy it directly to your computer with WinSCP.

mattrixk

@monstermadeofman

I'm glad @Rookervik answered, as I have no idea what samba is. I use WinSCP so I can just browse the Pi's file tree as I would Windows Explorer. Then you can make the changes directly on the Pi.

monstermadeofman

Thanks guys. Just struggling to actually find the carbon theme folder. Not 100% on any of this if I'm honest. All I want is to edit the hex colour codes in it. But I have no idea where the actual files are to change any of them :/

mattrixk

@monstermadeofman

Open Winscp and log in to your pi
Browse to /home/pi/.emulationstation/themes
The Carbon folder should be in there, and you want to make the change to carbon.xml.
You can either edit the file directly on the Pi, or drag it to your computer, edit it, then drag it back.
It's also a good idea to drag a backup copy of the file to your desktop first, just in case you break something, you can just copy it back to the Pi and overwrite the broken file.

I'm not at my Pi at the moment, but that should be the path you need (I stole it from @Rookervik's instructions on this thread).

monstermadeofman

AHHHH ok I've got it now

mattrixk

@monstermadeofman the "." in .emulationstation means it is a hidden folder. You may have to enable the 'view hidden files' option.

What exactly can you find? Can you find /home/ but not pi? Or /home/pi/ but not .emulationstation?

BuZz

that folder is a symlink on latest RetroPie to /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation so you can just use that folder instead (available over network)

BuZz

There are no themes installed in that location by default - but you can copy themes into a themes folder there, and they will take priority over the distributed themes - which live in /etc/emulationstation/themes

mattrixk

Ahh thanks @BuZz. I knew I was in the right area with my explanation, but I wasn't near my Pi so I couldn't make sure.

smartroad

@Rookervik can ES display both box art and a screenshot?

herb_fargus

@smartroad ES only displays one image at a time. a workaround is to mash up two images in on screenshot with gimp so it looks like two, but not a very clean way of doing it

smartroad

@herb_fargus I thought that might have been the case, shame. Thanks for the reply though :)

mattrixk

@smartroad Theres a guy named ruckage on the old petrockblog forum who was working on a few systems. You can see the post here.

They looked like this:

megadrive
and
snes

Very impressive, but it was only for snes, megadrive, pc engine and arcade. I've downloaded them but haven't really looked through them, so I can't vouch for their quality, but what I have seen looks amazing.

Rookervik

Be forewarned, very large box art slows down gamelist browsing heavily. I've found any box art larger than about 320x240 slows the gamelist down a lot while scrolling through the list. I use some large box art for my Infocom games, but there aren't many of them so the slow browsing doesn't annoy. Love Infocom :D

mattrixk

Thanks @Rookervik, I didn't think about that. If I decide to use them I'll resize them all first. I have a free program called Fast Stone Image Resizer that I use for just that purpose. It's quick and very simple to use.