Cardboard Mini NES + Nes mini and Famicom mini themes

[ruckage]

@dankcushions said in Cardboard Mini NES + Nes mini and Famicom mini themes:

not sure if i'm reading these last few posts right but FYI emulationstation already applies some sort of subtle smooth scaling on the pi. if you're only testing on windows you won't see it i guess!

@Rookervik 's pixel theme has a similar style and i think it has small source images. looks crisp here!

I was wrong, I just did a test and contrary to what I thought it actually appears to do nearest neighbour scaling but the scaling artifacts still appeared with the low-res images. Its not easy to see on busier backgrounds but as this theme has large areas of single colours it's more apparent think.

Thanks anyway, it was worth checking.

[robertybob]

Are any of these themes going onto Github? Would love this to be added to RetroPie too :)

[postmangav]

This is incredible! Sorry if this has been asked before but where do you get the HDMI cable which screws onto the back of the machine from? I really like how neat they make projects look but have never known where to find them. Don't even really know what to search for to be honest! Great project dude :)

[ruckage]

@robertybob said in Cardboard Mini NES + Nes mini and Famicom mini themes:

Are any of these themes going onto Github? Would love this to be added to RetroPie too :)

Maybe, though I've never used Github so I'll have to look into it.

@postmangav said in Cardboard Mini NES + Nes mini and Famicom mini themes:

This is incredible! Sorry if this has been asked before but where do you get the HDMI cable which screws onto the back of the machine from? I really like how neat they make projects look but have never known where to find them. Don't even really know what to search for to be honest! Great project dude :)

Thanks :). I bought the HDMI panel mount from ebay.
Here is the link to the one I bought: HDMI Panel Mount

There are cheaper ones but this one had a shorter cable which was ideal for my project. I did strip off the plastic sheath on the cable to make it slightly more flexible.

[ruckage]

I really wasn't happy about the image scaling at 1080p so I took the plunge and re-made everything at a resolution of 480x270 which scales cleanly to 1920x1080. I really wasn't sure how it would look but I'm quite pleased with it. I've redone the graphics for both themes but have only started editing the famicom-mini theme xmls so far.

There are few benefits to this change:

• Slightly longer game names will be displayed without being cropped

• The game description window is a bit bigger.

• The low-res images can be used as they should hopefully scale to 1080p now without any artifacts. This should reduce the amount of GPU memory needed which has been a problem in the past when using lots of systems (I think that has been fixed now but I still think it's good to save memory)

Here's a screen capture of how it looks.

I wanted to keep the number of entries in the game list as an odd number so that the selection bar is in the middle when scrolling so I decided to stick with 7 names displayed at a time. As this left more space at the top and bottom of the list I have drawn some new larger arrows to use a little more of that empty area.

[Stuart2773]

@ruckage

that looks pretty good :)

[ruckage]

Here's a mockup of the 1080p version of the nes-mini theme (based on the famicom-mini capture). The arrows are simpler than the famicom version to fit the style and are coloured red now so I have some of the red on dark blue as seen on the real nes classic menu.

[runik]

@ruckage So impressive , I cannot wait to see the SNES , Super Famicom Themes you are planning :)

[momaw27]

Oh yeah!!!

Looking great!

Do you have your next release planned yet?

[ruckage]

@runik @momaw27
Thanks for the replies.

I will have a new update soon but bear with me as I've created more work for myself with the conversion to a 1080p optimized theme as I will have to remake all of the backgrounds - it shouldn't take too long but I want to get both themes up to the same point and then I will add some more systems. I've already drawn logos for GBA and SNES so they will definitely be next.

Sadly there is a downside to my change to 1080p and that is that the theme unfortunately no longer displays correctly at 720p as the the gamelist doesn't line up correctly - even though technically it should. I believe this is due to a bug within ES itself as Ive had lots of problems with textlists (a good example is that if you alter the line spacing for a textlist the selector bar no longer lines up with the text - that was a big headache on my theme.)
However if a 720p version is desperately wanted by lots of people then I'm sure I can sort something out, but to be honest I think 1080p is far more popular anyway.

[Stuart2773]

@ruckage

just wandering if you created a new SVG for the famicom version?

[ruckage]

@Stuart2773
Yep, already done one.

Regarding the SVG logos - I think I'm going to switch to PNG as I think they look better than the SVGs for pixel art (no antialiasing so sharper). It may also possibly speed up loading of the theme as all images for this theme will now be very small PNG files.

[momaw27]

Cool. The slow load time is something I've noticed as well. Hopefully (and most likely) the smaller file sizes will fix the problem!

[Stuart2773]

: Off Topic,

i was just going through my NES collection and noticed that Castlevania is not displaying fully,

heres a pic i took via retroarch:-

heres a screen i got off google as a comparison,

ive no idea how to fix the screen to display fully

any ideas?

[mediamogul]

@Stuart2773

You can turn off cropping in the core options menu.

[momaw27]

Also, changing the emulator fixes this problem.

[mediamogul]

@momaw27
That's true. However, I believe lr-quicknes is the only NES emulator that doesn't crop by default. While lr-nestopia's cropping is only done horizontally by default, it still presents the same problem in some other games. All in all there aren't to many games affected by this to begin with, due to most being designed for over-scan originally.

[Stuart2773]

@mediamogul said in Cardboard Mini NES + Nes mini and Famicom mini themes:

@Stuart2773

You can turn off cropping in the core options menu.

ahh thats it, i couldnt find the where i had seen it before,

thanks so much problem now fixed.

[ruckage]

Slowly making progress. The famicom-mini theme is now fully updated to 1080p and I'm now working on the Nes-mini theme. I've also finished off a few more logos ready for the next batch of systems so thought I'd show those now. These were all drawn by myself with the exception of the 'Famicom' logo which was copied from the real Famicom mini menu, I did however draw the Katakana that is displayed beneath (hopefully without any mistakes).

[Stuart2773]

@ruckage

WOW !!!! they look amazing, great work