[ruckage]

[quote=121341]
Your programs to create images are great, but gamelist.xml for megadrive was not what i need.
[/quote]

The game list generator I made is only simple as I explained earlier in this topic – just enough to display the correct name and image. Personally I don’t care about the metadata and don’t display it (nor do many others) and it’s a pain having to scrape the roms then replace the images. I prefer to just have a really big preview image which is why the images are quite high resolution.

[ruckage]

Hi,

I’ll be making more preview sets soon. Master system, SNES, Nes, and GBA will most likely be the next sets with more to follow if there is enough interest.
The 3d boxes you found are nice but are lower resolution than the ones I’ve made myself and I’m trying to keep a consistent look. I have a source of nes scans so I will make a high resolution set of 3d boxes myself.

I have made several programs that I use to generate these previews. One for generating the 3d boxes and another program that combines all the images together and finally one to create the gamelist.xml needed by emulationstation. Unfortunately they aren’t suitable for sharing as they aren’t at all user friendly, I have to modify the code for each new system. Also everything has to be renamed so that all the images match correctly so it does take a bit of preparation to get everything ready. Finally once everything is ready I use a png compression program to keep the file size as small as possible.

I may at some point get the 3d box rendering program to a state where it would be releasable as it would be useful for quite a few frontends and commercial software for doing this is expensive.

[ruckage]

[quote=120714]Any plans to release this with support for Child-friendly mode?

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Child-friendly-EmulationStation

[/quote]

Hi, I think the should just work with it but it will be missing the ‘child friendly’ specific tags (correct me if I’m wrong). The current version I’m working on no Meta data displayed at all anyway, I’ll ad that to a seperate version for those that want it.

[quote=120854]It looks fantastic, this will be my Theme in the future. Great work!
Cant wait for a download

[/quote]
Thanks :). It is still being worked on and I would like to release a version soon. There are still a lot of systems to do though.

[ruckage]

You can certainly use overlays on any libretro system which does include Gameboy, GBA, Gamegear etc. I was toying with the idea of making some overlays that look like the actual handheld for these.

I don’t know if any non libretro systems have overlay support though, apart from maybe the mame emulators..

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Here you go: http://bit.ly/1QSc2a8

I noticed you were playing Master system. The Master system only has a resolution of 256×192 so needs a different scanline image. I’ve created it for you and it’s in the zip file. – Choose ‘scanline-768p-192.cfg’ and this will match the master system resolution. Master system is a perfect system resolution wise for a 768 display as 768 divides exactly into 192 (768/192=4) so there will be zero distortion with the scanlines.

If you’re playing megadrive or other systems with a screen height of 224 use the “scanline-768p-224.cfg”. This will have slight variation in the scanline height but it will mainly be noticeable on single colour backgrounds (and isn’t too bad even then).

[ruckage]

Thanks for posting those, I see what’s causing the problem problem now. The actual vertial resolution is 768 on those images – I assumed that a 720p display would be 1280 x 720 but I think your TV (and probably many others) actually use a display that is actually 1366 x 768.

Give me a few minutes and I’ll make you another scanline image which designed for a 768 display.

[ruckage]

[quote=120193]i move it up because the lines were not evenly spaced, ill take some screen shots later before work

[/quote]
Thanks, sounds like there could be an issue somewhere as theoretically it should look exactly the same as the mockup I made. Scaling it up that much should mean that the scanlines don’t line up with the emulated image at all.

Just a thought, make sure that you have your TV set to ‘Just scan’ or the equivalent scaling mode for your TV – otherwise the TV will be displaying a slightly scaled image which would mess up the look of the scanlines (you might have a PC mode on your TV which would do this and turn off all unnecessary processing). Also make sure that all the overscan settings are disabled on the RPI itself.

[ruckage]

[quote=120182]ok, all good, thank you,
overlay opacity 0.40
overlay scale 1.70

can i add these values to the retroarch.cfg so they load for each game, like a shader?

save the settings via the menu

[/quote]
Thanks for trying it out and glad it works. I’m curious though why you’ve changed the overlay scale? That shouldn’t be set to 1.7. if you’re doing that then something is wrong as you’re basically telling it to scale the image to 1.7 time it’s size and as the overlay is exactly 1280×720 it should be set to 1 (no scaling).

Could you get some screenshots of an emulator running with the scanlines so that I can try and see what’s going on? It should be hotkey plus f8 on the keyboard (right shift is hotkey on the keyboard). If you could get one with the overlay scale set at 1 and one with the overlay scale set at 1.7 that would be great. (also set the opacity to 0.6 so I can see it clearly).

The screenshot will be saved in /home/pi/.config/retroarch/screenshots/

Thanks

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[quote=120125]sadly it’s not letting me unzip the file

[/quote]
That’s odd, I just downloaded again myself to check and the archive is fine and unzips without issues (using both built in windows unzip and 7zip. Have you tried downloading it again as you may have gotten a corrupted download?

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[quote=120080]oh that’s awesome thank you! I’ll hopefully get to try it over the next few days, thanks so much

[/quote]
No problem. Below is a mockup of how they should look (hopefully). The opacity in this mockup is at 65% which looks pretty good in my opinion. (right click and select view image to see full-size)

[quote=120082]Hi ruckage, just let me know if you’d like these to be added to the video manager tool here:
https://github.com/biscuits99/rp-video-manager

[/quote]
Sure, that would be great. I’ll get some made that support other system resolutions as well.

[ruckage]

[quote=120044]lookin great!
is there anyway these can be converted to be used on 720p tv’s?

[/quote]
Hi there. I’ve created a 720p scanline for you if you’d like to try it. It won’t look quite as clean as the 1080p as due to the lower resolution the unevenness in the line scaling isn’t so easy to disguise. Having said that, from the mock-ups I made while creating it I don’t think it will look too bad at all (particularly if you lower the opacity a bit). Unfortunately I can’t test it myself as I don’t have any 720p displays.

I haven’t made a version with the aperture grille as I didn’t think that it looked very good as the pixels are too big to make the fine lines needed.

720p scanlines: http://bit.ly/1peDVhI

[ruckage]

Hello,

I’ve just finished a Super Nintendo set. This caused a few problems as I couldn’t find a source of every cover, I have a virtually complete USA set but not much from other regions. Where possible I used the USA for all regions but there were still lots missing (particularly Japanese games) so for those games I created fake covers using the title screen as the cover art. It’s not perfect but it means that every game has a 3d box.

I’ll link all of the preview packs so far below so that they are easily visible (I can’t edit the first post for some reason otherwise I’d put the links there.)

SNES previews: http://bit.ly/1UVk8QX
Megadrive previews: http://bit.ly/1U50F0G
PC Engine previews: http://bit.ly/1TwgfCu
Arcade previews: http://bit.ly/1RBHK7D

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[quote=119508]Super FX games will work better on pocketsnes

[/quote]
Hi lilbud. I have been using that for those games and it’s definately faster but isn’t quite perfect.

[ruckage]

[quote=119479]I can tell you that with my RPi2 and overclocked, I had no issues with 32x. This was back on Wheezy so Jessie may have reduced performance.

[/quote]
Didn’t run well on my RPI2 even overclocked running Retropie 3.2, I only tried a few games but certainly was nowhere near full speed.

[ruckage]

[quote=119492]
Some users have been posting questions regarding PSX/32X/SNES/etc performance and I do not believe there were any issues regarding these on the old RPi2 (overclocked at least). Please correct me if I am wrong.
[/quote]

32X is quite slow on RPI2 (even overclocked) and SNES has problems with games using enhancement chips such as SA1 and Super FX. Not sure about PSX as I haven’t tried it.

I should be getting a RPI3 in a few days and I’m hopeful that it will be just fast enough to play the problematic SNES games at full speed. Not so hopeful about 32X though.
I think it should also be fast enough to play some of the MAME games that struggled a bit on the RPI2.

Tests I’ve seen state an an increase in speed of 60% in single core mode over RPI2 – that is quite a big difference if true.

I have to reserve judgement until I get to do some tests but for me if it’s fast enough to play the problematic SNES games and Mame games it will be worth every penny.

[ruckage]

No problem, glad I could help.

[ruckage]

Was Emulationstation running when you copied over the gamelist.xml?
I had a similar problem which was resolved by closing emulationsation before copying over the xml files.

[ruckage]

I think the delay when exiting is due to emulationstation saving all the gamelist data. I agree it is annoying and it would be nice to have an option to switch off the save on exit as once the gamelists are setup it doesn’t need to be saving them every time.

[ruckage]

You configure a keyboard in exactly the same way as you do a controller.
On the configure input menu it asks you to “hold down a key on the device you wish to configure” so just hold down a key on the keyboard.

[ruckage]

Do you mean changing the retroarch hotkey button? If so you can change it in the retroarch config files. Got to this folder:
/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch-joypads

There should be a config for each controller.

In the config file change: input_enable_hotkey_btn = “0”
To: input_enable_hotkey_btn = “16”

Button 16 should be the home button on the PS3 controller.

[ruckage]

I think the file you probably need is /home/pi/.emulationstation/es_input.cfg
Edit this file and delete the section relevant to your controller (make a backup first though just to be on the safe side.)

Reboot the Pi with you controller connected and it should then hopefully start the controller configuration program.

Also if you’ve configured emulationstation to work with a keyboard you could just use that to access the input controller menu which would be easier.

[ruckage]

I had an idea, lets see if the link works if I use a URL shortening service:

Retropie PC Engine Previews <== Click Here to download :)

And we have success :) Phew! That was hard work.

To download the PC engine previews click the link above. It contains 419 previews showing the 3D hucard, Game snap and title snap.

[ruckage]

[quote=119202]Yeah that’s a fact. We’re working on getting a new site and forum

[/quote]

That will be good :). Though in the meantime I seem a bit stuck as it refuses to let me post this link (tried again repeatedly).

[ruckage]

I’m trying to post a link to the PC Engine previews but the posts just vanish. And if I try and repost it says that it’s a duplicate. Very frustrating, these forums seem really buggy.

[ruckage]

What is up with these forums, won’t let me post again.

[ruckage]

Thanks. I’m still working on it as there are a lot of systems to theme but I should have a download available soon.

[ruckage]

Sorry for the delay. I’ve just uploaded the Megadrive previews to Mega.

You can download them here: Retropie Megadrive previews

To use them copy the “images” folder and “gamelist.xml” to either your “megadrive” or “genesis” roms folder (depending on which you are using).

This pack contains 1597 previews featuring 3D boxart, title snap and in-game snap and covers most if not all games I believe.

[ruckage]

Strange, my post keeps vanishing. I’ll repost below.

[ruckage]

I’ve reworked the theme completely in order to make it easy for me to create various different colour schemes for the theme.

The game art for the system select is now completely separate from the background so in order to create new colour schemes it’s just a case of creating 3 background images and a corresponding XMl file. To change the scheme just one line needs to be changed in the main XML file to point to the chosen colour theme xml.

So far I’ve created 32 different schemes to choose from, you can see a preview of them all below.

NewGen Colour Schemes

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[quote=118321]Looks really good! Wonderful use of the space on the system chooser. It’s really hard to deal with that big white bar in the middle. I’m afraid ES might crash with the hi-res backgrounds being used, though. How many systems can you load before ES dumps you? A 256 meg memory split should get you about 10 systems before white screen of death.

[/quote]
Thanks. For my project I won’t have that many systems so the 1080p backgrounds won’t cause a problem (I hope). However I do realize it could be a problem for others after reading several people experiencing crashes due to large backgrounds and lots of systems. The solution I think is to release 2 versions of the theme, a 1080p version and one with lower resolution backgrounds. If I reduce the backgrounds to 960×540 they are a quarter of the size and still look pretty good.

[ruckage]

[quote=117500]very nice theme!!

[/quote]
Thanks :)

[quote=117499]Beautiful theme! Nice touch having a separate .xml file for the info on each system, was that easy to do?

[/quote]
Yes, it was quite easy to do. You use an <include> tag which merges the XMLs together.

In my case this is the beginning of the theme.xml (each system has this file).

<theme>
    <formatVersion>3</formatVersion>
	<include>./../simple.xml</include>
	<include>./info.xml</include>

The first <include> merges the simple.xml which is in the parent directory.
The second <include> merges the info.xml which I have in the same directory as the theme.xml

[ruckage]

[quote=117040]You could put a usb port in the slot. And a usb drive in the cart. Roms go on the usb drive

[/quote]
Yeah you could, I had thought the same but it seems a bit unnecessary as there is so much space on the SD card.
It would be a cool gimmick, but personally I’m happy with the cartridge just being cosmetic.

[ruckage]

[quote=116970]Really cool. I like it

[/quote]
Thanks :)

[quote=116971]Is the cartridge purely cosmetic, or does it have a function?

[/quote]
It’s purely cosmetic. I just wanted for it to be able to still hold a cartridge for nostalgia reasons really, and if I want to I can swap the cartridge for another to have a different look.
Also on the original consoles you couldn’t play anything if there wasn’t a cartridge in the system (with the exception of the Master system which had a built in game) so I think it looks more authentic :).

[ruckage]

Really nice theme, looks like you’ve put a lot of work into this.

[ruckage]

Looks fantastic, amazing transformation.

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