XCade System
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Hello there,
Back on the petrockblog forums, about 3 years ago, I created a retropie installation I call the 'XCade'. I took an original Xbox case and highly modified it to work as a retro gaming console. Inside I hooked up a raspi 1, with retropie installed on it with a custom theme. I wired up the power button and the LEDs on the front of the xbox console to the GPIO pins on the pi to designate power on/standby state, and also to do hard resets and power on/off circuit. Unfortunately, I had to remove the original pi from the console to use it for another project at the time, and I lost the SD containing the installation. I have since found it, and have access to a newer raspi 1 model b+ (micro sd), and am looking to clone the image on the older large SD card and put it on the microsd card so that I can get the pi set back up again.
I want to include pictures of the setup for you, and I will as soon as I get everything back together, but I had a couple of questions:
How much has the theme system changed over the course of the retropie development? I built a really custom and extensive theme that mimic'd the original xbox dashboard on the original system, and once I boot it up i'd like to pull the theme off of it and use it in the newer retropie install. I also have some custom scripts and GPIO pinouts that were placed on the original install, as well as some custom stuff to rewrite the splash screen that I would like to preserve otherwords I would just start from scratch again.
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@masteryoer Well, for one we have an experimental grid view.
My custom theme is shown here.
New themes, such as Carbon, Material, Pixel....you get the point.
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Oh wow, that is helpful. My original theme just listed the titles of the games on the right side, with the cover art on the left, but the interface looked a lot like the original xbox dashboard.
I was reading a theme tutorial the other day, and it said that the main splash screen and the carousel are unthemeable? Is this still the case, or was that an old article? I don't mind doing some modifications to my theme, or starting over if I have to, but i'd like to at least be able to re-use some of it if I need to.
It would be interesting to have a completely customizeable theme, like you could use xml or watever to place individual elements wherever you wanted to on the screen. I think it would make for some really amazing and unique themes. Is something like that in the works? (For example, something like coverflow, or being able to theme individual screens with seperate layouts, etc with whatever elements you want displayed)
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Here is an example of the first iteration of the theme, based on an old screenshot I took of the system.
and here is a test-run of the system after I got it setup, but not completely configured:
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@masteryoer said in XCade System:
It would be interesting to have a completely customizeable theme, like you could use xml or watever to place individual elements wherever you wanted to on the screen.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
It would make things easier. But right now, The gridview mod. He has a list, changing the carousel color is on there.
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@lilbud said in XCade System:
@masteryoer said in XCade System:
It would be interesting to have a completely customizeable theme, like you could use xml or watever to place individual elements wherever you wanted to on the screen.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
It would make things easier. But right now, The gridview mod. He has a list, changing the carousel color is on there.
Is there some documentation on this? I was trying to find some the other day and all I could find was a tutorial about how to make themes with no in-depth coverage of the system.
I wonder if the developer would be interested in collaborating in getting such functionality built into the emulationstation core. I think it would be a huge benefit.
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@lilbud Yes, that was the tutorial that I was looking at, the same one that said that changing the look/color of the front carousel wasn't implemented.
I just sent an email to nilsbytes, the creator of the 'simple' theme for emulationstation to see about possibly collabing to get a fully themeable system in place for emulationstation. I think it would be a great addition and would allow for some amazing flexibility.
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I am thinking you would have a lot more fun getting an RPi3 and starting your journey over again... instead of trying to rework a 3 year old image of RetroPie :)
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@masteryoer with the pi3 updated you can even have the xbox boot video for your splashscreen. You can get rid of all the boot text as well. So it will look like you are booting an xbox. Plus you could put the audio sound from the xbox when you scroll through your games. You can also add the sound the xbox makes scrolling when you scroll through your games.
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