Mupen64 PickleLauncher skin


gruso

thunderbox
Joined
Feb 28, 2008
Messages
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Age
47
Location
Sydney, Australia
Website
pandorapress.net
Decided to play around with a Mupen64 PickleLauncher skin today. It's not quite done, but this is probably about as far as I can take it.


Mockup:


F6YW5.jpg



As you can probably tell, it's based on the Snes9x4P skin (translation: I just ripped those images and edited them). Some areas could be refined a little (like the Start & Quit buttons). But it has some bigger issues, mostly with overlapping text elements when shoehorned into the Mupen version of PL. I guess this will need some code changes to be properly integrated.


You can try it for yourself, all the files are here: https://www.box.net/...2upod1f43lvc9h0 (3.7mb zip) (note: newer version in post #7)


Drop the /images folder into /mupen/appdata and the skin should work, warts and all. There is an alternate image set included, which is a bit tidier if people want to keep using the skin in the interim.


If anyone wants to further hack away at it, or see about integrating it with Mupen, be my guest. :)
 
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You see... this is why great people shouldn't disappear! I called out for a nice skin when I had time to configure Picklelauncher for mupen, but no-one had time or ability.


Thanks Gruso!
 
Very nice work already Gruso (haven't checked it out on Pandora yet) but its great you turned your hand to getting something done to improve things. Thats whats great about the OS community. I had a stab at altering minimenu skins awhile back myself but lacked the time or the skills to really get anywhere. Something I will return to eventually, aswell as my attempts to make PND's thanks to mcobits help (which whilst they worked, were never quite right). Need more uninterrupted time, which 5 kids don't allow for.
 
I may tinker a little further now that I've slept on it. Those buttons on the right are really bugging me! Might play with some alternate backgrounds too.


A couple of tips for people who might want to tinker but don't feel they have the skills:

  • I lifted the images from Snes9x4p by simply opening the PND and copying the files out. 7-zip beta has squashfs support these days, so install it, associate PND files with it, and you can open & browse PNDs like they're zip archives. The support is read only though; you can extract the bits you want, but you can't put new things in. Which brings me to:
  • Foxblock's PNDTools. Some people might have seen PNDTools in their travels and thought it was just for devs... not true! It's a great GUI based program that not only creates PNDs, it allows you to open existing ones, edit the contents as you see fit (eg. add files, folders etc) and then save as a new PND.


tl;dr You could build your own Mupen PND with custom skin, with no skills other than a bit of basic image editing. ;)
 
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^ Good to know. :) Do you think you'd have time to tweak PL to make this fit, or would it be better if someone else did that and we just got you to upload? (see update at bottom)


Slow day at work, so here's some progress.


oGbm2.jpg



Apart from the obvious background image change, all buttons are now greatly improved. The Power button could use some expert pixel refinement - it's ok at original size but didn't resize perfectly.


Updated image set (now with more PSD): https://www.box.net/...x3q8jne6ylesqh1 (about 2.5mb)


Update: I read up on PL and realised the tweaks could be made in config.txt. Once again I borrowed from Snes9x, and now it works perfectly. A few more tweaks and I can repackage the PND, then give it to Poke to update in the repo. :)


If anyone wants to have a go at improving the Start and Power buttons, please do. If not, they'll go in as-is. I'll wait a day or two before handing it all over to Poke.

WvVJa.jpg
 
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I'm taking no comments to mean no complaints. Good, good. :p


One question: In the existing PL for Mupen, there are buttons for 'Folder Down' (pretty redundant really, it's the same as tapping a folder on screen or hitting B to open it), and 'Edit Item' (I've never used that one either). These are missing from this new config, as it just mirrors what is present in Snes9x4P. Will anyone miss those two functions?
 
could maybe add something pandora specific to skin? so the people know that its for our one and only. just pulling random strings here
 
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