sudomod

I'm working on a pixel perfect retropie theme for 320x240 displays and thought it would be worth sharing. I suppose many of you use the same screen, either because it came with Kite's SAIO or because it's so affordable and easy to install.

Normal themes aren't optimized for such a small display at all: the icons and fonts are blurry and barely readable. The best theme, as far as I've seen, is es-pixel-tft. It's mostly crisp, with a nice pixel font, but still far from perfect:

• Text aside from the game list is blurry

• System logos are blurry

• Background suffers from anti aliasing

• The console images have no common style

I'm going to test around a bit and update whenever I have something new to tell, so feel free to hang around. If anyone has input or wishes, just drop a comment.

Screenshots:



Current status:
Groundwork done

Next steps:
Finalizing Layout

Download:
(TBD)

Progress:

• Base smoothing?
  The main question is whether it's even possible to display images and text "crisp" without anti aliasing. Luckily there is no "base smoothing". Whether elements are smoothed or not actually depends on their size (fontSize, maxSize), which is related to the screen's size. It can even be something wonky as 0.33, but if it fits, the pixels won't "bleed" into the neighboring pixels.

• Basic design
  The default position for the system list is in the middle of the screen, overlapping the console images. I've placed it at the top and will make two different color schemes, one with color and one that emulates the original gameboy's green dot matrix display. Something interesting about the latter is that everything needs to be green. I needed a while to figure that out, but if even one element is white, black or colored, the whole theme will look wrong.

Looks great to me! I'm looking forward to being able to use this theme, thanks for your work!

Subscribing to this! really interested in this theme!

I am curious about how other consoles look and how the listing for games and sub-menus look.

Subscribing too

Yes! Very excited for this. Let me know if you need a hand.

T

Looking forward to your finished theme. I'm subscribing.

Your are going under pressure now 0xF0F0F0 hahaha, people are watching you

Looks gooood... Maybe a 640x480 version?

This Topic is now under intensified observation...

Nice! It's good to see all these small-screen themes popping up.

Getting pixel-perfect mapping is tough for our displays, particularly since quite a few GBZ builds actually have analog connections to the displays. I assume GPI displays like those in Kite's AIO can probably pull it off, however.

Also, the fact that Retropie themes scale by percentage instead of pixel count complicates things on this front. Relating to the post by @moooarcuuuus post above: you'd think that this would mean that scaling between 320x240 and 640x480 would be seamless -- just double the pixels, and everything should fall in exactly the same screen locations. Nope. It's seriously a pain it is to get the gamelist to display the same way on every resolution you'd think to throw at it.

While you're at it, you might consider keeping a copy of your theme on github for possible future inclusion in RetroPie-Setup. You'll need to name your repository "es-theme-[themename].". See mine on github for an example. Once it's done, getting it included in the official RetroPie package involves adding a single line to the theme list (which is the middle section of this file)

What is the current status?