Write Themes For EmulationStation

Batocera offers many options for EmulationStation theming. A lot of features have been added to Batocera 5.24, and a lot new more are added in Batocera 29th release (BATOCERA 29 below).

If you'd like to work with Batocera's Carbon theme, feel free to download it from https://github.com/fabricecaruso/es-theme-carbon (click the green “Code” button and download as a ZIP).

If new to theme development and you want to take a look at how a simpler, easier to understand theme works, take a look at the following:

The rest of the recommended themes can be found at on the themes wiki page. The current themes listed in the content downloader can be found here

When creating themes, it's recommended to keep their total space down so that weaker hardware (such as the RPi) can hold everything within their small VRAM successfully.

Tools that can be used to compress image data can be found at ImageOptim's alternatives page, and for PNGs specifically PNGQuant be used to compress it (PNGGauntlet can also be used (use 96% compression to not lose any quality)).

The gamesplash feature is only supported on x86_64 due to the video drivers on other devices not supporting shared mode. This may change in the future.

The latest documentation can be found here: https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera-emulationstation/blob/master/THEMES.md.

If there is something not covered by the readme, looking at the source code directly can help.

If you are creating per-system logos and would like to see what all systems look like in your theme on a live install without having to actually have ROMs in each system's folder, simply go to MAIN MENUGAME COLLECTION SETTINGSSHOW EMPTY SYSTEMS

Before. Enable "SHOW EMPTY SYSTEMS". After.

  • write_themes_for_emulationstation.txt
  • Last modified: 14 months ago
  • by atari