Carbon Theme Suggestions

[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:

and

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.

[Rookervik]

@mattrixk Irfanview ftw. Has been for like 20 years. LOL

[mattrixk]

@Rookervik I use Irfanview for viewing images... I didn't know it could resize them too.