Keigan
Participant
Post count: 52

Finally got back to playing around with my theme.

So far I’ve done SNES, Gameboy and NES.

Here are some screens of the main console selection screens and then the game sleection screens.

NES Select Screen:

NES Screen

SNES Select Screen:

SNES Screen

GB Select Screen:

GB Screen

NES Game Select Screen:

NES Game

SNES Game Select Screen:

SNES Game

GB Game Select Screen:

GB Game

So the game select screens, I tried to make it feel retro using Mega Man style borders and backgrounds for the NES and the Gameboy and then A Link to the Past for the SNES one. It was a tedious process to space everything exact since I’m my own worse critic about that I probably spent way too much time with no reward.

As for the main screen it’s hard to do anything with since you cannot remove that white bar, so I tried to incorporate it into a design. I added some screens of games in for something different, would love if animated GIFs were possible or looping video for this but for now static images will work.

So the main part that is still a work in progress is the gamelist/images. For all of the games I have I have opened and screen capped the titles. I have a weird, particular naming system from years of organizing files, which helps a lot in this process as far as linking it in the gamelist.

I created some actions in Photoshop to size the images the way I need them, 400% or 500% so that the pixels weren’t skewed in anyway, and for game boy games I forced it to use only the 4 classic colors from the screen.

I created a batch file to list the roms folder, and then pasted the results into an Excel file I created using some formulas to easily create a gamelist that I can copy and paste into the XML files. So as I add more games, it’s basically a click of the mouse to get everything else set the way I wanted.

If anyone is interested, my set up is for 1920 x 1200 but I did create a 1920 x 1080 layout that I could upload for people with the xml file, but as for the screen caps that might be something you would need to do on your own. I can help with tricks that I had learned though.

The only other system I’ll probably add is sega, but not even sure if I will to be honest, but if so I will update this post again at that time.

EDIT: The space in the bottom left I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do. I had a few ideas as seen in the past, but it’s so damn time consuming. I had the system logo there but it kind of looked out of place so maybe some day I’ll revisit it.