Steam Deck Guide: Custom EmulationStation Themes

[Music] hey everybody this is Russ from Retro Game core now I recently released a starter guide for emulation on the steam deck and one of the things I mentioned was the ability to use emulation station as a front end for your favorite retro games well today we're going to take a deeper dive into one of my favorite aspects of emulation station on the steam deck and has the ability to add custom themes this ability has always been there for emulation station but they just recently released a repository to show some of the themes you can add and so we're going to do exactly that here in this video I'm going to add two of my favorite themes to emulation station on my device and so without any further delay let's jump into it [Music] okay to start this guide assumes that you've already installed emu deck and emulation station on your steam deck so if you haven't done any of that stuff then I will refer you to my previous guide which I'll have Linked In the video description to get started did let's go ahead and open up the Firefox browser and then go to retrogamecorp.com here we can navigate to my steam deck guide and then within here in the table of contents you'll find one about emulation station desktop Edition now I did a video about emulation station overall about six months ago and I have that video linked here in the guide within this section I'll also point out the fact that I have listed my favorite preferred emulators for emulation station but for this guide in particular you want to go down two more paragraphs and go to the section about adding additional themes there's a link here to the Wiki page for emulation station desktop Edition specifically to their themes list and now within here under the 1.2 Legacy themes you can see there's about eight or nine themes available and so I would recommend scrolling through this page and just getting a feel for which themes you want to download obviously you can download all of them but for me in particular I'm just going to grab two of them for demonstration purposes the first one I'm going to grab is this one here called retrofix Revisited and really all you have to do is just open up that link that is associated with the title we're going to do do the same thing with this theme here called elect full each of these links are going to take you to their GitHub pages and what you want to do here is click on the green code button right here and then select download SIM this is going to save it to your downloads folder so just go ahead and do that for any of the themes that you want to download now as you can see here on my downloads folder I have these two zip files right here so go ahead and select each of these then right click and select copy next we're going to go into the home directory of our steam deck and then here over on the top right of the menu bar go ahead and open that up and select show hidden files within here you'll find an emulation station folder as well as one called themes within here let's go ahead and right click and then paste those two zip files now we can select them again right click and go extract extract archive here once you're done with that you can go ahead and delete those two other zip files now depending on the theme there's some customization you'll want to do next let's go ahead and open up one of these theme folders and then find that theme.xml file right click on this and then select open with and K write now in the top of the code here you should see some variable levels that you're going to be able to adjust most importantly among them is change the aspect ratio from 16x9 to 16 by 10. there may be some other options like for example with the electful one I like to change the color scheme to the dark one now if we go into the retrofix theme and we also open this up with the K write app you'll find that the aspect ratio is already 16 by 10 by default so that's super handy so no need to make any changes on this one we're actually good to go and believe it or not we've done all the installation we need to do now let's go back into our file manager here and go into our SD card and then go into emulation and then tools here we can just go ahead and start up emulation station right here on the device without going into game mode this is going to be really handy if you want to test out a theme before actually switching over to Game Mode now starting up emulation station we have one of the default themes right here I think this one is called modern so now let me show you how to change the different themes you're going to go into the main menu by pressing start then go into UI settings and then theme set within here you can now see those new themes that we recently added we'll start with the elec full theme first and yeah moving over just like this we now have the Dark theme of electful running in 16 by 10 and it looks great now the box art that I have already downloaded on my device here is kind of old it doesn't have actually the full information and it just shows the boxes but it's pretty easy to get better media for example a nicer screenshot and also some videos playing back as well to do that go ahead and press start to open up the main menu and then go into the scraper menu within here you can choose whichever system you want to scrape we're just going to pick Nintendo GameCube right now and then also I recommend going in here and adding your screen scraper username and password if you don't have one already then I recommend going to the screen scraper FR website and then signing up for a free account anyway after you've added your information here in the menu there's not a lot of other changes I would recommend making however I do recommend going into the other settings section and then change it to your specific region and that's it from there you can start up your scraping and it'll go through each of your games and then find the requisite game media and then download it onto your device and this might take some time depending depending on the size of your game library that you're scraping overall I have about 750 games within my entire library and I just re-scraped them the other day and it took me about maybe 60 70 minutes altogether so just be prepared that it might take some time to do that scraping that first time anyway once it's done you can go ahead and press OK and you should now see your updated scraping now it has a screenshot and the title of the device and a game disc and the game box too on top of that it has more information like a synopsis about the game how many players things like that and that scraping will carry over through any of your other themes so let's change out to the next theme set next same thing we'll go into UI settings then theme set and then now we've changed it over to the retrofix one and yeah this one looks really nice and clean too however this one is not quite perfect for example final bernil and Mame and Nintendo DS don't have any of their assets I don't think it's a huge deal because the theme overall looks pretty good but it would have been nice if it was a little bit more seamless anyway that's really about it the beauty of emulation station is that you can hide all of your games within it and it's only going to show up as one app within your Steam OS so this is a great way to access all of your retro games without cluttering up your main game interface anyway that's about it for this video let me know if you have any questions in the comments below and as always thank you for watching be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 39,977

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Id: uIQbBwZ68N4

Length: 6min 30sec (390 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 23 2022