Making Retropie look great with themes and images

running retropie on a raspberry pi makes a fantastic retro gaming console but the default setup looks a bit basic so let me show you how to pep it up a bit [Music] [Music] once you've installed retropie and loaded a few games you'll start to notice that the user interface is a bit boring with just simple lists of games but we can easily turn this into a really slick gaming system with lots of box art game info and more so let's give retropie a makeover when you first install retropie you might find that there is an ugly black border around the whole screen now this is due to the raspberry pi compensating for something called overscan and we just need to stop it doing this so select the retropie configuration option in the main menu and then start the raspy config utility we need to select the display options and then under scan and you'll be asked if you want to turn on over scan compensation so use the tab key to go down to the bottom and select no and then when you're back to the main menu select finish you'll be asked if you want to reboot so select yes and the raspberry pi will restart and once that's back up and running you should now have retropie filling the whole screen when you've just installed retropie and go to a list of games you just get a simple list of titles now it would be great if we could get some images and game info to make it easier to browse through the thousands of games we've just installed now to do this we need to scrape one of the online games databases now this functionality is built into retropie or at least it's part of emulation station so call up the emulation station menu by pressing the start button and select the scraper option in the script from option make sure it's set to the game db you can turn ratings on or off as you prefer and then select scrape now and this lets us set up what we want to scrape from the database so in the filter section select all games as this is our first scrape we can then specify what systems we want so select the systems option and you'll get a list appearing select any option to turn it on or off and for this tutorial i'm only going to scrape the atari 2600 games that we downloaded then we go back to the script menu if you're updating a system you can leave the user decides option on but this will stop the process and ask you for input every time it can't work out what to do now i usually leave this turned off so the process will just run by itself automatically now just select the start button at the bottom and your raspberry pi will start downloading the box art and game info now this is going to take quite a while depending on how many games you have so just leave it and let it run through when it's finished scraping you can just use your b key to get yourself back out to the main menu and then when you select a game system you should find that your list now includes images and text on the right hand side which just gives you a bit of information about that particular game the biggest change we can make to the look and feel of retropie is to change the theme themes are different layouts for the home page and game pages that you can download and install if you've scraped the game images these will be incorporated into this theme design to make scrolling through your games collection a real pleasure whilst making it easier to see what each game is about before you try them so go to the themes page in the retropie website and you'll get some instructions on how to install the themes along with some previews of how they look so just scroll down through the list until you find one that you like and make a note of its name we'll also see in a few seconds that we can preview the themes actually on the raspberry pi so that you can see it on screen before you install so i'm going to install the box alloy red theme but you can basically try one out and if you don't like it just install another one in its place so going back into retropie we need to go to the retropie configuration menu and select the es themes option this will open up one of the retropie console apps when you first get there the top option will be to install the theme gallery so click on that and then just wait for it to install you'll now get the top option as the view and update the gallery so select that option and then the option to view the theme gallery this will start to show you full screen images of what the theme will look like it will automatically run through the main menu screen followed by a game screen and you can use your a button to step forwards and b to go back if you look in the bottom left corner you'll see the actual name of this theme so when you're finished just press the x button to take you back to the themes app now that you know which theme you want to install you need to scroll down the list and find the one that you want select it and that will cause the raspberry pi to download and install the relevant files once that process is finished just select the cancel option to get back to the main retropie screen you now need to enable the theme by pressing the start button to call up the emulation station menu then select the ui settings option followed by the theme set option and this will bring up a list of the installed themes just highlight the one you want select it and then use your b button to get back to the main retropie display and now retropie should look completely different so for my theme if i scroll through the different systems i get some nice console box art for each of them and then if i go to a section where i've downloaded some images and game info i can see all of that in a nice well-designed format now as i said earlier if you install a theme and don't like it just go through the process again to try out one of the others so i hope you enjoyed this video please do remember to click the like button and subscribe to my channel so you don't miss out on any of my next episodes don't forget to also check out my main website for more hints and tips and to have a look through the rest of my videos for more retro gaming coding and making projects so have fun playing with your retropie console and bye for now for more games programming electronics projects and retro gaming please make sure you like this video subscribe to my youtube channel and visit my website

Channel: Bytes N Bits

Views: 588

Keywords: retropie, raspberry pi, retro gaming

Id: m-IshO2WpWs

Length: 7min 44sec (464 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021