[Theme] CRT

Nismo

@Dominus said in [New Theme] 'CRT' with support for Video Preview:

. And same with the description, I stretched it out a bit, and fixed the Last Played so you could see it all.

Yes, maybe it looks ok until you have videos and marquees...

@Linkseo said in [New Theme] 'CRT' with support for Video Preview:

these all look great. thanks for the hard work on these. was wondering if any themes will be made to cater to a 4:3 ratio? they currently all seem to be for 16:9. when I install them they look squished on my 4:3 monitor :(

It's very difficult to make a simple theme working for both 4:3 and 16:9.

I'll try to explain easy... characters for "players", "last time played", "developer", etc, etc...
If you are a theme developer, and you make the theme for 16:9 it's all ok. When you change to 4:3 all characters are on top of the others.

To solve this you need to place for example "developer", "atari" too far ago one from the other, that way you can see something like this to make it compatible with 4:3:

16:9:
Developer: --------------Atari

4:3:
Developer: Atari

If you make a theme for 16:9 screen you doesn't place the words so far away and then when in 4:3 you see some words in top of other words.

Linkseo

@Nismo Yes. Thats exactly what i get now on my 4:3 monitor. Letters on top of each other :(. No love for old school aspect ratio. Still great work

Dominus

@Nismo Oh I never knew that, I was wondering why it looked like it was only using a 4:3 ratio of the screen. I'll have to look into it a bit more.

caver01

@Nismo I second @Linkseo (and there are probably many others) regarding 4:3 displays. It seems many of the old die-hards building true retro systems using displays that match most of the original systems we are emulating are sometimes overlooked by theme builders. That said, we do have themes that work on both, so I am not really complaining as much as adding another voice to the 4:3 cause. Not everyone uses their home TV to run RetroPie.

abodi

@Dominus yes heatsinks installed

Nismo

@caver01 In a theme like mine, it's not possible to do it because it's a lot of hard work to make a 4:3 theme, but for this one, would be very ease to make 2 versions, one 4:3 and another one 16:9, only need to edit some values on main theme.xml file.

But it's a @alphatoanant decision, he's the creator of the theme.

Kischa

Wrong thread...sorry.

alphatoanant

I have been away on holiday and wasn't able to respond sooner

@abodi and @Dominus, I'll continue to tweak spacing and the size of the text list soon. I definitely still have work to do to make it more consistent across different resolutions and thanks to the windows build that @Nismo posted it will be easier to try resolution variations. I am prioritizing 1280x720 and 1920x1080 right now but please don't hesitate to send me any other variations that you are on (more on 4:3 ratio below)

And @Dominus, totally fine regarding tweaking the theme XML manually. I'll use your changes as the base for the text size changes. You are not stepping on any toes at all. I very much appreciate your help to me and the rest of the group here.

@Furluge, I am not sure I am going to add back in release date and genre yet. But I did try something out visually to see what I could change to accommodate it. See here: http://i.imgur.com/e6y0kIl.png
I had to reduce the description to 4 lines which I think could be ok. I am mainly trying to keep it easy to scan. Please let me know what you think of the above though.

@mrpinchy, I see that Nismo reached out with help (thank you Nismo!). If you still need help just let me know.

@Linkseo and @caver01, I am planning on doing a version specific for 4:3 ratio resolutions as soon as I finish work on the handheld I am building. Nismo is correct - it's difficult to make one theme support 4:3 and 16:9 if you have graphical elements in place (like the CRT outline in my theme). So I am aiming to have a version that can be downloaded to work on 4:3 screens. It might look like this: http://i.imgur.com/pubsyyv.png

Thank you everyone

mattrixk

@Linkseo and @caver01: the Io theme was designed to be used by everything from big screen TVs, to 4:3 CRTs, down to small handhelds. You just have the change the io.xml file to point to either small, medium or large.

@alphatoanant: you can use <include> this way to point to different templates, so you don't have to create and maintain a completely separate theme.

Dominus

@alphatoanant I've actually done some more work and figured out how to add things, and fix it so I really liked it. This is a picture of it, just on my widescreen monitor. When I get a chance I will upload my theme.xml.

caver01

@mattrixk That seems an acceptable way to do it. Are themes that work on both aspect ratios without requiring any edits just built to a least common denominator such that they don't tend to take design cues from the extra width offered by wide screens? I can see how you might take advantage of the screen real estate on a widescreen TV with in ways that just wouldn't fit on 4:3.

mattrixk

@caver01 said in [New Theme] 'CRT' with support for Video Preview:

Are themes that work on both aspect ratios without requiring any edits[?]

None come to mind, sorry.

BertGoblin

I did a batch Handbrake convert to 30fps/23 quality factor to get videos working in attract mode. Somebody stated that 60fps videos were more of a problem than resolution. Haven't had any probs there.

I want to test videos out a bit for this ES theme, but I have no idea how to add my folder of videos without manually editing each gamelist entry (which is tedious). Any help on that score would be greatly appreciated.

alphatoanant

@BertGoblin this thread created by @Nismo may help with what you are looking for - https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/6589/easy-way-to-add-video-and-marquees-tags-in-your-gamelist-for-video-support

BertGoblin

@alphatoanant Thanks, I don't suppose there's a bash script that does the same thing? (I wouldn't know where to start as far as converting it from powershell).

Dominus

@BertGoblin Once you make the file, just right click and it should says Run with Powershell.

BertGoblin

So, I wanted to report back on my video usage with this theme. Converting to 30fps made all my videos work fine. I didn't have any particularly high res videos, but at 60fps, many would stop and go grey.

The one problem I do have is that it seems rapidly switching between videos actually overheats a stock clocked pie with a heat-sink fitted. That seems absurd right? I've tried the Pi indifferent environments and it's pretty cold at the moment. This wasn't isolated to this the theme though, attract mode also produced the same result.

If anyone out there has a live temp monitoring overlay, I'd be curious to see what their levels do with consistent video switching.

MWGemini

@BertGoblin That's somewhat of a known issue. The version of the video preview feature that is in the current official source tree uses VLC player, which uses a lot of CPU. There's a new version being worked on by @fieldofcows that uses OMX player instead. You can read more about it (with some temperature tests I did) here: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/5823/looking-for-testers-for-es-video-preview-on-raspberry-pi/141

Furluge

@Dominus So, you get a chance to upload that xml yet? :p

Furluge

@alphatoanant Looks pretty good though I like what I see with dominus a bit better since I use widescreen too.