alternating marquee images?

[dt42o]

im running a raspberry pie 4 in my custom cabinet me and my kids built during all this 2020 lockdown mess. also using a raspberry pie 3 with a 3.5 inch screen as a marquee/removeable-portable device. everything works almost perfect after countless hours of work on both pies but im trying to figure out how to make the marquee images alternate between different images like box arts, screenshots, individual game control setups, etc. ive tried searching these forums and around the web for something like this but all i can find is the basic, one image marquee setup that im currently using. am i expecting too much or is this possible?

[mitu]

I think the current theming capability in EmulationStation doesn't allow that - cycling images with an image placeholder. You may want to combine the images in a simple video and add the video instead of multiple images.

[dt42o]

@mitu nice. thanks. no clue why i didnt think of that myself. now im off to search how to implement that into my setup and get it working properly. im guessing it would be as easy as just swapping out the still .png files with video files right?

[mitu]

It's not that simple. EmulationStation uses a gamelist.xml file to store each game details (image/desc/video/played/rating/etc.). You'd need to add a video tag, in addition to the existing image tag, and add the path to the video. Each system (rom folder) has its own gamelist.xml, which you can find under \\retropie\configs\all\emulationstation\gamelists.

Here's an example entry for a game with video/image/marquee (artwork is saved under the media sub-folder of the system folder, but you can save it anywhere, as long as the path is correct).

      <game>
                <path>./King of Fighters R-2 - Pocket Fighting Series (World) (En,Ja).zip</path>
                <name>King of Fighters - R-2 (World)(En,Ja)</name>
                <desc>Using again the J..</desc>
                <image>./media/screenshots/King of Fighters R-2 - Pocket Fighting Series (World) (En,Ja).png</image>
                <video>./media/videos/King of Fighters R-2 - Pocket Fighting Series (World) (En,Ja).mp4</video>
                <marquee>./media/marquees/King of Fighters R-2 - Pocket Fighting Series (World) (En,Ja).png</marquee>
                <rating>0.8</rating>
                <releasedate>19990101T000000</releasedate>
                <developer>SNK</developer>
                <publisher>SNK</publisher>
                <genre>Action</genre>
                <players>2</players>
                <kidgame>true</kidgame>
                <playcount>4</playcount>
                <lastplayed>20200320T195703</lastplayed>
        </game>

[dt42o]

@mitu thank you very much sir. you have helped me thru this entire project without knowing it seeing as how this is my first post and i have been living in these forums back in April when i started this. this was the only time that i have been completely stumped but i knew if i got on these forums it would be you that showed me whats up.