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JaysArcade

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Everything posted by JaysArcade

  1. Hey I just released a new version. I took your advice and changed the delay time for the video. I didn't include it in my theme, but here is the games view for the pinball hall with 16:9 aspect ratio selected item video. You can drop this in your ..Themes/Mr Cs Arcade/ Views folder to overwrite the default view that I uploaded with the theme. Wheel2GamesView.xaml
  2. You're right. It does look a little jerky. I think the video makes it look a lot worse than it is, but it is there a bit. I might be able to adjust the animation stuff to see if I can correct it a bit.
  3. Mr C's Arcade View File INTRODUCTION The arcade in my local hometown mall growing up was called Mr C's. This theme is a tribute to Mr C's, and all the quarters I spent there back in the 80's. I've heard of other Mr C's arcades, but I don't think ours was part of any chain or anything. Overview.mp4 VIEWS The way to think of this theme is not so much in terms of views, but more like rooms. The rooms are, Main Arcade, Pinball Row, and The Breakroom. If you must think in terms of views, each room has platform views and games views. The only real exception to the rule is the Breakroom also has text games views. This was done in order to render the Games Details Screen. INSTALLATION Download the zip file and unblock it by right clicking the file, go into properties and check the unblock check box and click OK. Once the file is unblocked, extract the folder into ==\Launchbox\Themes\ SWITCHING BETWEEN THEME VIEWS In order to see the various games views for the different platforms, you'll need to change to each view. If you set a hotkey within Bigbox (Keyboard Mappings/Controller Mappings - Switch View) to change views, this makes it easy to change views without going into the settings each time. CTC FILES The file titled: Mr Cs Arcade - Theme Builder Files is intended for anyone that wants to tinker with the theme. You'll need to unblock the files the same as how I descibed above. FUTURE UPDATES As time permits, I'll attempt to keep this theme up to date. Please PM me with any suggestions, or issues you have with the theme. CREDIT Thanks to @y2guru for the most excellent Community Theme Creator upon which this theme is built. @SonicFan53 for the device images which are included in this theme. As always, thanks to @Jason Carr . Submitter JaysArcade Submitted 09/02/2021 Category Big Box Custom Themes  
  4. Version 1.1

    441 downloads

    INTRODUCTION The arcade in my local hometown mall growing up was called Mr C's. This theme is a tribute to Mr C's, and all the quarters I spent there back in the 80's. I've heard of other Mr C's arcades, but I don't think ours was part of any chain or anything. Preview.mp4 It may be a vsync issue or something else but the video makes the animations look kind of jerky. The theme actually runs pretty smooth. VIEWS The way to think of this theme is not so much in terms of views, but more like rooms. The rooms are, Main Arcade, Pinball Row, and The Breakroom. If you must think in terms of views, each room has platform views and games views. The only real exception to the rule is the Breakroom also has text games views. This was done in order to render the Games Details Screen. INSTALLATION Download the zip file and unblock it by right clicking the file, go into properties and check the unblock check box and click OK. Once the file is unblocked, extract the folder into ==\Launchbox\Themes\ SWITCHING BETWEEN THEME VIEWS In order to see the various games views for the different platforms, you'll need to change to each view. If you set a hotkey within Bigbox (Keyboard Mappings/Controller Mappings - Switch View) to change views, this makes it easy to change views without going into the settings each time. CTC FILES The file titled: Mr Cs Arcade - Theme Builder Files is intended for anyone that wants to tinker with the theme. You'll need to unblock the files the same as how I described above. FUTURE UPDATES As time permits, I'll attempt to keep this theme up to date. Please PM me with any suggestions, or issues you have with the theme. CREDIT Thanks to @y2guru for the most excellent Community Theme Creator upon which this theme is built. @SonicFan53 for the device images which are included in this theme. As always, thanks to @Jason Carr .
  5. Looks good so far. I copied all the options menu xaml files and the menuitemview.xaml. I don't plan on theming any of it. I'm just grateful that it works. If I send it to you can you take a quick look to make sure it works OK on your end?
  6. Hey thanks. I might take you up on that. My other theme uses Faerans xaml for the backend, but I didn't think it would fit in this theme. I'll take a look and see what I can do with it.
  7. It's Not Called Tate View File INTRODUCTION I could have called this BigTate, or Hypertaint, LOL. I've settled on It's Not Called Tate for the name because I've always thought calling vertical themes Tate, to be ridiculous. But that's just like my opinion, man. Anyhow, its kind of a silly take on the HyperTate theme. It doesn't have nearly the animation from the old school HS stuff, but it is what it is. Originally I had these faux video transitions but wow did that ever bog down Bigbox. One video per view is all she can handle it appears. In the download, you can choose from two different themes. It's Not Called Tate has image transitions which again, aren't really transitions like Hyperspin had because we have no transition options to work with. I call these faux transitions. I spent a good deal of time trying to get something going here and, well, you'll just have to judge for yourself. The transitions are basically slowed down animation sequences with a slightly quicker "transition" image that flashes right before the main image comes on. It kind of has a sluggish feel to it. I'm not super stoked how it turned out to be honest, but it is what it is. The other download, It's Not Called Tate - No Bling is the same theme but with the transitions stripped out and the animations sped up to a more normal speed. I actually think this might be the better theme.... The other two files are for those interested in messing with the Community Theme Creator files. With these files you can edit my theme to your heart's content. If you come up with something cool, share it with the rest of us! VIEWS Both themes have special games views for.... Arcade (vertically oriented video) Comic Books (no video) Fruit Machines (vertically oriented video) Future Pinball (vertically oriented video) GCE Vectrex (vertically oriented video) Pinball FX2 (vertically oriented video) Pinball FX3 (vertically oriented video) Visual Pinball (vertically oriented video) Super Nintendo Entertainment System (rotated box art) Generic Text Games View (this allows the game details screen to have some styling) In addition: A note on the background images, Arcade Views all use Arcade Flyer Front images, whereas consoles use Box Front images. Pinball and Fruits use Game Play images. Just seemed to me like the most logical way to go about it. See the section below titled Switching Between Theme Views for info on the best way to switch between these views. If you don't switch the views, you're going to have a bad time, as they say. Both themes have multiple views that look almost identical except for the video size. There are horizontally oriented videos and vertically oriented videos. Because this theme is 3x4 ratio friendly, there is a third monitor size to better accommodate 3x4 screens. I sourced a bunch of patent images to use for Platform Banners. For the consoles that I couldn't find patent images for, I used what I could find. These banners are included in the theme. To change any banner out, go into the ..\themes\It's Not Called Tate\Media\Platforms\(platform name) folder and change it out there. In writing this right now, I realize this could be an issue if you add a console that I don't have in this folder structure. The only place the theme knows to look for these images is in here so you'll need to add your banner image here if you need to add one. In a future release I'll address this. In scrounging up all those images, I came up with quite the collection. I will attempt to release these as a Platform Banner Pack for vertical systems in the future. CREDIT I'd like to thank whoever created the original Hypertate theme. All jokes aside, your theme is actually pretty damn impressive. Also thanks to @y2guru for the excellent Community Theme Builder. I couldn't have done this without the Theme Builder. Incredible tool for theme building in BigBox! Thanks as always to @Jason Carr. INSTALLATION Download the zip file and unblock it by right clicking the file, go into properties and check the unblock check box and click OK. Once the file is unblocked, extract the folder into ==\Launchbox\Themes\ SWITCHING BETWEEN THEME VIEWS In order to see the various games views for the different platforms, you'll need to change to each view. If you set a hotkey within Bigbox (Keyboard Mappings/Controller Mappings - Switch View) to change views, this makes it easy to change views without going into the settings each time. 9:16 ASPECT DEMO 9x16 demo.mp4 3:4 ASPECT DEMO 3x4 ratio games.mp4 Switching platform views to demonstrate different selected video sizes and orientations. These will look different on 3:4 orientation. playing video screen sizes.mp4 No bling version demo No bling demo.mp4 Submitter JaysArcade Submitted 08/31/2021 Category Big Box Custom Themes  
  8. Version 1.0.0

    155 downloads

    INTRODUCTION I could have called this BigTate, or Hypertaint, LOL. I've settled on It's Not Called Tate for the name because I've always thought calling vertical themes Tate, to be ridiculous. But that's just like my opinion, man. Anyhow, its kind of a silly take on the HyperTate theme. It doesn't have nearly the animation from the old school HS stuff, but it is what it is. Originally I had these faux video transitions but wow did that ever bog down Bigbox. One video per view is all she can handle it appears. In the download, you can choose from two different themes. It's Not Called Tate has image transitions which again, aren't really transitions like Hyperspin had because we have no transition options to work with. I call these faux transitions. I spent a good deal of time trying to get something going here and, well, you'll just have to judge for yourself. The transitions are basically slowed down animation sequences with a slightly quicker "transition" image that flashes right before the main image comes on. It kind of has a sluggish feel to it. I'm not super stoked how it turned out to be honest, but it is what it is. The other download, It's Not Called Tate - No Bling is the same theme but with the transitions stripped out and the animations sped up to a more normal speed. I actually think this might be the better theme.... The other two files are for those interested in messing with the Community Theme Creator files. With these files you can edit my theme to your heart's content. If you come up with something cool, share it with the rest of us! VIEWS Both themes have special games views for.... Arcade (vertically oriented video) Comic Books (no video) Fruit Machines (vertically oriented video) Future Pinball (vertically oriented video) GCE Vectrex (vertically oriented video) Pinball FX2 (vertically oriented video) Pinball FX3 (vertically oriented video) Visual Pinball (vertically oriented video) Super Nintendo Entertainment System (rotated box art) Generic Text Games View (this allows the game details screen to have some styling) In addition: A note on the background images, Arcade Views all use Arcade Flyer Front images, whereas consoles use Box Front images. Pinball and Fruits use Game Play images. Just seemed to me like the most logical way to go about it. See the section below titled Switching Between Theme Views for info on the best way to switch between these views. If you don't switch the views, you're going to have a bad time, as they say. Both themes have multiple views that look almost identical except for the video size. There are horizontally oriented videos and vertically oriented videos. Because this theme is 3x4 ratio friendly, there is a third monitor size to better accommodate 3x4 screens. I sourced a bunch of patent images to use for Platform Banners. For the consoles that I couldn't find patent images for, I used what I could find. These banners are included in the theme. To change any banner out, go into the ..\themes\It's Not Called Tate\Media\Platforms\(platform name) folder and change it out there. In writing this right now, I realize this could be an issue if you add a console that I don't have in this folder structure. The only place the theme knows to look for these images is in here so you'll need to add your banner image here if you need to add one. In a future release I'll address this. In scrounging up all those images, I came up with quite the collection. I will attempt to release these as a Platform Banner Pack for vertical systems in the future. CREDIT I'd like to thank whoever created the original Hypertate theme. All jokes aside, your theme is actually pretty damn impressive. Also thanks to @y2guru for the excellent Community Theme Builder. I couldn't have done this without the Theme Builder. Incredible tool for theme building in BigBox! Thanks as always to @Jason Carr. INSTALLATION Download the zip file and unblock it by right clicking the file, go into properties and check the unblock check box and click OK. Once the file is unblocked, extract the folder into ==\Launchbox\Themes\ SWITCHING BETWEEN THEME VIEWS In order to see the various games views for the different platforms, you'll need to change to each view. If you set a hotkey within Bigbox (Keyboard Mappings/Controller Mappings - Switch View) to change views, this makes it easy to change views without going into the settings each time. 9:16 ASPECT DEMO 9x16 demo.mp4 3:4 ASPECT DEMO 3x4 ratio games.mp4 Switching platform views to demonstrate different selected video sizes and orientations. These will look different on 3:4 orientation. playing video screen sizes.mp4 No bling version demo No bling demo.mp4 OPTIONS MENU ISSUE A problem with these vertical themes is the Options menus don't scale down properly in order for them to be usable. Currently the Theme Creator does not do any editing to these files and I have no plans to try to learn XAML just to make the options menus for these themes. A trick to be able to see the options menus is to go out of BigBox and temporarily switch your aspect to a 3:4 ratio (if you usually run 1080x1920, try switching to 1440x1920). Once you do that and go back into BigBox, you should be able to mostly read the menus as they will be scaled enough to see what you need to do. Not perfect, but at least you'll have a chance to figure it out. 9x16 3x4
  9. Game Launcher Clone View File This theme is an attempt to recreate an old frontend that was made in the last millenium. Game Launcher was the first frontend I ever messed around with, and it was already a dated launcher when I first installed it in 2003. Game Launcher was a very simple frontend, but for it's time it was pretty radical. A simple text list with accompanying game play image, displayed with selected game. No videos or flashy... anything. Just pictures and a list. I hope you like it. For more about the original Game Launcher, visit https://www.davedribin.org./dave/game_launcher/ This theme "should" run just fine in any aspect ratio. Please let me know if it doesn't. As with any theme, it is only as good as the media you run it with. Included platform images are from either Viking or SonicFan53's platform image sets. Apologies as I can't remember exactly which set but I'm sure it was one of those. They are very handy, thanks to both of you. Some of the other platform images I scrounged off of the interwebz. I've included the theme as well as the Community Theme Creator files. Many thanks to @y2guru for the CTC and @faeran for the excellent tutorials. I couldn't have done this without you guys. 2021-08-27 20-35-19.mp4 2021-08-27 21-23-07.mp4 2021-08-27 21-23-07.mp4 Submitter JaysArcade Submitted 08/27/2021 Category Big Box Custom Themes  
  10. Version 1.0.1

    69 downloads

    This theme is an attempt to recreate an old frontend that was made in the last millenium. Game Launcher was the first frontend I ever messed around with, and it was already a dated launcher when I first installed it in 2003. Game Launcher was a very simple frontend, but for it's time it was pretty radical. A simple text list with accompanying game play image, displayed with selected game. No videos or flashy... anything. Just pictures and a list. I hope you like it. For more about the original Game Launcher, visit https://www.davedribin.org./dave/game_launcher/ This theme "should" run just fine in any aspect ratio. Please let me know if it doesn't. As with any theme, it is only as good as the media you run it with. Included platform images are from either Viking or SonicFan53's platform image sets. Apologies as I can't remember exactly which set but I'm sure it was one of those. They are very handy, thanks to both of you. Some of the other platform images I scrounged off of the interwebz. I've included the theme as well as the Community Theme Creator files. Many thanks to @y2guru for the CTC and @faeran for the excellent tutorials. I couldn't have done this without you guys. 2021-08-27 20-35-19.mp4 2021-08-27 21-23-07.mp4 2021-08-27 21-23-07.mp4
  11. Bro its really rough, LOL. I can share it with you but its not super smooth. I was really just seeing how far I could push things to get it close to the old school stuff. I'm at work now but I'll try to share it with you tonight or some time this weekend.
  12. The box front priorities issue I reported seems to be fixed. Thanks guys.
  13. JaysArcade

    Demo Mode

    I've not tried it myself, but there is a user project called arcadeEIP that was shared on another major frontend forum that does exactly what the OP was requesting. You'll need to do a Google search for arcadeEIP to find it. It looks like it would integrate easily enough with Launchbox as it supports launching from command line.
  14. Hopefully within the next week or so. I just need to clean up some stuff in the media folders and go through each view one more time to make sure everything is working the way it should. I'll also be releasing a slimmed down version for 3x4 resolution displays.
  15. My theme uses marquee images which require me to ask my theme users to uncheck everything but arcade marquees in box front priorities. This allows the theme to display marquees properly without a bunch of box art and other un-desired images showing up in the marquee area. Ideally, it would be nice to have some sort of image priorities that worked with marquee images so I could also use 2D box art in the theme. Even better would be a way as a theme creator to turn off image priorities in the theme alltogether. Anyhow, thats not really what I came here to report - but it is sort of related. When I uncheck everything in Box Front priorities, close Launchbox and re-open Launchbox, it's not remembering that everything was unchecked and the defaults will be checked again. If I uncheck everything except Arcade Marquees, close Launchbox and come back, Amazon Poster along with Marquees is checked. I think this is a relatively new issue. Not sure when Amazon Posters were introduced.
  16. New pinball views coming to the theme. These views are inspired from the Coinops pinball builds. The new views have a color tint applied, like the Coinops build. There are two seperate views that are idententical except for the spacing of items on the wheel. This is to allow the use of the docklet style clear logos to space them properly in the wheel. The other view will use more traditional spacing. 2021-08-21 17-07-30.mp4
  17. My theme uses marquees and I have this issue as well. The built in image priorities within launchbox will cause havoc with your marquees. The only way I've found to get around it is to uncheck everything in the box front image priorities. Unfortunately this breaks the box front view if you intended to use it in your theme as well. It would be nice if this got some attention from the development side. The odd shape of a marquee is pretty intentional and having other images shown in their place doesn't really work very well in my humble opinion. From a theme creation side of things, I wish we could turn off image priorities completely, but I'm not sure we'll ever get that kind of control.
  18. You're welcome. But the real thanks goes to Faeran and y2guru for putting these together in the first place.
  19. Glad you like it. It wasn't really designed with 3:4 in mind so it might take some work on my part. The good news is the new version of the theme creator has built in 3:4 and 9:16 support. When I built the theme originally, it was all done in a stretched to fit ratio. I wouldn't expect it too soon but I will certainly give it a shot. It will likely not have all the custom views for each platform however.
  20. Been working on a different concept for a vertical theme, Was going to call it BigTate, or Hypertaint, LOL. I think I'll settle on It's Not Called Tate for the name because I've always thought the name Tate for vertical themes is ridiculous. But that's just like my opinion, man. Anyhow, its kind of a silly take on the HyperTate theme. It doesn't have nearly the animation from the HS stuff, but it is what it is. Here is a preview. 2021-08-16 22-19-46.mp4 Not sure if there's any interest, but If anyone would like to contribute, or play around with the theme, I can share the Theme Builder files. It uses some HS assets (transitions) so I'm not comfortable sharing it publicly on the forum, but if you PM me I will gladly share.
  21. Just a thought. Try right clicking the pico8 executable, click properties and see if it needs to be unblocked. Maybe see if disabling windows defender or try putting the pico8 folder in an exclusion helps. Just some things to try. If that doesn't help, I;m not sure what to say. Maybe try a different game? Try downloading the executable again, maybe yours is corrupt? You said the shortcut from the desktop worked? Try setting the shortcut up as the emulator as opposed to directly pointing to the EXE. See if that helps.
  22. Emulators folder is where I have my pico8.exe installed. For the games themselves, it doesn't really matter. Select them and drag and drop them into Launchbox. The rom import process begins. Tell it to copy the games to the launchbox games folder or just run them from where they currently reside. Personally, I copied my games to the images/clear logo folder, then did the drag and drop routine from there. Since they are dual pupose files, Launchbox can use them as the game and as an image.
  23. The problem is XAML is a bit harder to do the animation stuff than it was with Hyperspin. Hyperspin used flash which is pretty much obsolete nowadays due to all the security vulnerabilities it has. I'll try to share the latest with you when I get a chance. It might be a few days though because I am going to be out of town for a bit.
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