About This File
For a long, long time I searched for the perfect Bigbox Theme to use with my TV. Every time I found one I thought was pretty cool, there were just so many little things that didn't sit right with me. Either it didn't have game descriptions in the platform menus, or the game descriptions they had were too small (I use Bigbox on my TV), or the platform views of the theme were unappealing. Well, no longer! I discovered what I thought was the absolute best combination of themes, Colorful - Dark by Viking for it's incredible platform wheel 2 system views, and Coverbox by Faeran for it's incredible Text game views (which have a unique look for almost every popular emulated system out there). Luckily, both Viking and Faeran made their theme's community theme creator files publicly available for anyone to edit, so all my minor (and in some cases not so minor) annoyances were very possible to fix. After months of on and off work, I'm very pleased to release my custom versions of both themes so everyone can enjoy them as I have.
At the end of the day, this is a series of relatively minor and moderate tweaks I made to two already fantastic Bigbox themes, and all of that credit goes to the original creators of those themes, Viking for Colorful - Dark, and Faeran for Coverbox. Part of my hope in releasing this to the community is that they take notice and possibly implement some of my changes into the mainline releases of these themes in the future.
The optimal configuration for these themes in my opinion is Colorful's Platform Wheel 2 for platform selection and Coverbox for Text List with Details, with any system not covered using Colorful's Text LIst with Details. That's the configuration this modification is aimed towards, but you can use any combination you wish.
This release includes a changelog of everything I've changed in both themes, down to the positioning of the elements X and Y positions and their Width and Height. Since going through every change I made would be impossible in this description, Here's a list of the most significant ones.
Main Changes
- Platform Descriptions in Colorful's platform wheels have had their font increased and their sizes expanded. This was to make the text more legible if playing on a TV, which I do exclusively. If the font were bigger by default I may not have modified Colorful at all.
- Game Descriptions in Colorful's game wheels have had their font increased and their text boxes expanded. This compliments the change from above. Personally I prefer the Text list with details view for any system Coverbox doesn't cover, but the others are usable.
- Text Scrollers for Game Descriptions has been added to every platform theme in Coverbox that didn't already have one except for the Atari Lynx, Nintendo Virtual Boy and the Famicom Disk System.
- Each systems Text Scrollers have been given fonts that are related to that system in some way (I did reuse some of them though). For instance, Sega Genesis uses the HUD font from Sonic the Hedgehog, Game Boy Advance uses the Gen 3 Pokemon font, etc.
- Coverbox Text Scrollers that were too small had their fonts increased. The biggest beneficiary of this change was PSP, that font was TINY and impossible to read on a television. This change was also made to the Wii and the Wii U
- Background elements have been erased and replaced with modifiable image placements to make room for text scrollers, which makes them editable for those looking to make their own changes.
I have included a complete changelog documenting every change I made to both Colorful - Dark and Coverbox, as well as included the logos and fonts I found and created for use in this modification, both of which can also be downloaded here if you want to revert any of my changes or recreate them in some way. If you like what you see, make sure to show your support to Viking and Faeran on their respective theme pages, they created two incredible Bigbox themes and are the ones that deserve most of the credit. I hope you enjoy my changes!
