EmulationStation Themes

A selection of Batocera-compatible themes can be installed through the menu UPDATES & DOWNLOADS → THEMES. This gives you the option to select a and set a new theme for your system.

Compatibility issues for themes are not unheard of, so be sure to make sure there are no reported issues on the theme you’re applying.

Starting with Batocera.linux 5.24, most EmulationStation for RetroPie and Recalbox are compatible. But some features are unique to Batocera and require a theme that has been designed for Batocera.

This menu gives you a list of themes available like:

In the screenshot above you can see which new themes can be downloaded, and which themes are available for an upgrade, based on their icons. Here is a video example of how to install a theme from the content downloader:

There is a whole section for Batocera-EmulationStation themes on the Batocera website.

Here is the list of all available themes.

You can find all the information displayed on the Batocera website through this JSON feed, which is updated on a daily basis.

This script works for Raspberr Pi only.

pishoot.sh

#!/bin/bash
res_height=1080
res_width=1920
saveplace="$HOME"
compression=6      #level from 0 to 9
 
mkdir -p "$saveplace"
 
read -p "Enter name of theme now: " theme_name
[[ -z $theme_name ]] && echo "Not nice ..." && exit
theme_name="${theme_name,,}" #force lowercase
cat << _EOF_
 
We create 3 files now
1. ${theme_name}_system -> For main system view
2. ${theme_name}_list   -> For the ROMs list menu
3. ${theme_name}_grid   -> For the ROMs grid view
 
These Pictures will be saved into directory
$saveplace
 
Select the view for ES (system, list and grid)
So press ENTER to create the pictures.
_EOF_
 
for i in system list grid; do
    read -p "If you are ready then press ENTER for screenshot: ${theme_name}_$i.png"
    raspi2png -p "${saveplace}/${theme_name}_$i.png" -d 1 -h $res_height -w $res_width -c $compression
done

Starting with Batocera 36, the process for installing/upgrading/removing themes is embedded in EmulationStation code. By default, it fetches the themes from a JSON feed with the same format as the one given below.

If you want to point the content downloader themes section to your own JSON description, you can do that by editing batocera.conf and adding:

global.themes.url=https://batocera.org/upgrades/themes.json

For Batocera 35 and earlier, this process was using the batocera-es-theme script:

batocera-es-theme - downloads and installs EmulationStation themes for Batocera

It accepts two modes: 'list' and 'install <theme>'
  - 'list' for the list of themes available online, and if they are
    [A]vailable to install, [I]nstalled or [?]unknown.
  - 'install <theme>' to install the theme, from its theme name.
  - 'remove <theme>' to delete an installed theme.

If you have a local /userdata/system/themes.txt file,
it will override the one hosted on Batocera website.
[root@BATOCERA /userdata/system]# batocera-es-theme
batocera-es-theme - downloads and installs EmulationStation themes for Batocera

It accepts two modes: 'list' and 'install <theme>'
  - 'list' for the list of themes available online, and if they are
    [A]vailable to install, [I]nstalled or [?]unknown.
  - 'install <theme>' to install the theme, from its theme name.
  - 'remove <theme>' to delete an installed theme.

If you have a local /userdata/system/themes.txt file,
it will override the one hosted on Batocera website.

From https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux/blob/master/package/batocera/core/batocera-scripts/scripts/batocera-es-theme.