What are your favourite RetroPie customisations?

simpleethat

A few little things I always do that I think really add to the experience:

For launching images I like to have game cartridges/discs
Customizing the es_systems.cfg to be in a more logical order (I usually organize by year of release but sometimes do consoles/handhelds)
Overlays
Shaders
Meticulously edited gamelists (I'll be honest, I've yet to actually complete this as it gets to be rather daunting, it's on-going) to include:
a. Games in a series grouped together in the appropriate system
b. Correct number of players
c. Genres formalized
d. Consistent game descriptions (I may never succeed at this but a guy can dream)

Other things I like the idea of:

Personalized splashscreens (especially videos that can fill the boot time)
Background music (not my cup of tea but I like the idea)
Removal of all that bootup text for a cleaner looking start (I have this on one of my builds and like it but everything else is still being worked on as it's kind of a last thing to me).
Dynamic marquees on a secondary display that show the game/system being displayed (really awesome in my opinion but I haven't come up with good way to pull it off in my living room so it doesn't look out of place).

mitu

@mattrixk said in What are your favourite RetroPie customisations?:

Has PS3 controller support for ScummVM gotten any better than it used to be? (I remember the button configuration was bonkers and I had to jump through flaming hoops to change it)

Try the SDL2 variant, it might have better support for gamepads.

Is Grid view a fully supported feature? When I last looked into it, it was still a niche idea. Are their any good themes to highlight it?

Yes, it's baked in the stable release now. Try one of @ruckage's themes:

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/19016/neo-geo-mini-theme

mattrixk

Thanks for the answers everyone.

@xFJSx Completely changing the front-end seems like a lot of hassle, and I'm not really sure what the difference will be. I like making my own themes, and I don't know if they'll work on that new front end. Thank you though, maybe something to look at in the future.

@wmarcio I don't really like noise while scrolling through. I've removed all sound effects and even considered muting any videos I get (but I don't currently use videos).

@simpleethat Some of these I've done, and some are on the cards. Editing the game list is something I hadn't thought about, so thanks for that (but yes, it is a bit daunting)

@mitu Oh, great, I'll give that a try! Nice to hear about grid view. I'm looking to get back into theme building, so it will be great to have some examples. Hopefully I can find an updated Windows version of ES that will run them.

wimpy

At the moment my fav customisations are what I just completed for my setup:

Updated retroachievement + savestate information which is generated into game specific images (using <marquee> for this artwork). This happens when you quit a game. A custom script is run from runcommand-onend.sh for this task.

alt text

Future customisations I'm contemplating are:

Second screen to display artwork/banner of game playing etc. If it pans out it's not possible to do this via the second HDMI on RPI4 I will create a solution to use a PIzero or a second RPI3/4 to display these images and update it over network with runcommand-onstart.sh and runcommand-onend.sh scripts.
Retroachievement custom improvement to display up to 4 other friends to compare scores. (reason I've left some space in the custom <marquee> image shown below:
Create custom dynamic launch images using custom retroachievement/game-related artwork,. Which will mean once launching a game a lunch/splash screen will be generated (if any changes since last) to display artwork,screenshots and retroachievement information, system logo ++ etc.
Further improve my own gamelist/synopsis system, which is a system I created to be in control over what ends up in my gamelist.xml and a system which I use to curate all my xtras (game-artworks etc)

Cool to see what other custom solutions are out there! :)

wimpy

Here is an example of a game that has savestates and unlocked achievements for comparison.
alt text

Hopefully I can de-attach this so it can be used by others sometime soon. Or someone else will pick up the idea and beat me to it :D

wimpy

@mattrixk in regards to Ports I've always enjoyed installing and playing the following:

SuperTux
Super Mario War
Doom, Doom II

and for some reason I really enjoyed playing Dinothawr the other day :)

sirhenrythe5th

I renamed all my games to sort them.
For everything but MAME i sorted the games by genre, so i.e. "RPG - Zelda: A link to the past".
I furthermore sorted them logical, i.e "MERCS became COMMANDO II: MERCS".
In MAME i sorted the games by developer starting with ATARI.
A lot of work indeed but worth every hour, me and my buddies love it.
You dont get this with just using a scraper and there is not a single "in da houze"-prebuilt offering this.
As we are talking about scrapers, i also exchanged every scraped image against an own searched in the WWW.

Clyde

@sirhenrythe5th You, sir, are my kind of addict. 🧐

sirhenrythe5th

@Clyde yep, it seems i am guilty 😄

ts-x

Opinions may vary, but to me DXX-Rebirth (Descent 1 & 2), Cannonball (Outrun), UR-Quan Masters (Star Control II), and Super Mario War are must have ports. Cave Story, Mari0, Openblok, and Tyrian are worth a look as well.

rilight

@wimpy I would absolutely love documentation on how you got all this working! It looks amazing, and I'm definitely hoping I can get something like that set up on my install in the future :D