User Submitted Themes & Media (Uploads)

[Adultery]

^^Nice touch!

[Draco1962]

Adultery - try these on for size!

[Adultery]

Love it!!! It will look great on my rig!!!

Here's a less personal one for everyone else if you wanna bezel it out Draco! Also adjusted the logo positioning just a smidge.

[Draco1962]

Here ya go!

[celly]

Great looking marquee and bezel(s) gents!

[Adultery]

As per Draco's request...

Here's the PSD for making controller layouts for those of us that use XBOX 360 controllers on their rigs. It's actually based on the BlueBox theme, but you can change the background image and header text to suit your needs. The resolution is set at 800x600 and looks great on my machine even though it gets slightly stretched to fill up the WS. Thanks as always to Greatflash for making the theme I use and releasing the PSDs so tweaks and improvements can be made.

If you make the images and set your emulator to this PNG in the emulator's menu (Controls path to be specific), it will pop up much like the MAME cpanel does before launching a game.

Everything on this PSD is customizable right down to the markers on the analog sticks. I'm here for ya if you have any questions!

Enjoy!

Click here to download!

[Draco1962]

Here is the Logo Pack I promised that I created as I was making the Sins of a Solar Empire theme. They are good for any theme that can support them! Give 'em a go and let me know what ya think! I have enclosed the PSD and XCF files for creating your own with Photoshop and GIMP respectively. Below are few more that were made after I sent up the pack to Tom.

[couslev]

Hey all, I uploaded my first theme, you can get it here:

http://www.gameex.com/themes/Dark%20Nebula%20Widescreen.zip

Dark Nebula is an alpha theme. I reworked all the logos so they were appropriately alpha channeled and adjusted the position of content in the images so the items will appear in the same place. The top bar was redone to be alpha channeled, color adjusted, and I smoothed out the sharp lighting edges. The theme references vista/win 7 fonts, so if you are still on XP it won't be quite as intended. The please wait dialog and bar were completely replaced, both making heavy use of alpha blending.

Overall I'm pretty pleased with the theme, especially the please wait dialog. For once, I wish things would take longer to load. You'll have to check it out to see what I mean. Its pretty amazing what you can accomplish with enough alpha blending. I really enjoy dark themes and space, so it makes GameEx feel like home. For the complete effect you need some nice space muzak so, I highly suggest you point GameEx's radio to listen.di.fm/public5/ambient.asx and just soak it up.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you all think. I'm still learning so I definitely appreciate suggestions and constructive criticism.

[Adultery]

Great to see you jump in! Welcome to the forums, and the GameEx family!

[couslev]

ty sir!

[Adultery]

EMU CONTROLS 2.0:

So I actually went and re-created my control panel screen, since using this delicious forum and have figured out how to make shift keys in xpadder (even make the controller vibrate when shift is pressed? Holy crap, this is an awesome little app!). I wanted to share the PDF in case anyone wants to use it. I used a size that matched my theme this time, so the template is 1680x1050. Of course, everything is customizable (as is the way with PSDs right?)

Thanks to all of you who help me figure out how to get the most from my rig (and xpadder which was intimidating at first, but clearly superior once you get the hang of it), and thanks to Flash for his awesome theme!

Hopefully someone will find this useful, no?

Click here to download the PSD.

[Hunk_4TH]

That looks really awesome Adultery! I love the black 360 controller controls. I use this exact controller for my GameEx setup on my desktop. Have you released this theme yet?

[Adultery]

Thanks Hunk! I love these controllers so much I decided against building a cpanel and just using these instead.

I actually use an extremely modified version of BlueBox. That thing is pimped to the nines with Mario & friends clipart. If you do decide to use BlueBox though, I have a whole bunch of emu baks and GameEx pages that aren't in the initial install that you can certainly have.

If you want to use a Mario version of BlueBox I'd be happy to zip it up for ya!

[Hunk_4TH]

Thanks Hunk! I love these controllers so much I decided against building a cpanel and just using these instead.

I actually use an extremely modified version of BlueBox. That thing is pimped to the nines with Mario & friends clipart. If you do decide to use BlueBox though, I have a whole bunch of emu baks and GameEx pages that aren't in the initial install that you can certainly have.

If you want to use a Mario version of BlueBox I'd be happy to zip it up for ya!

Not a problem man! Those turned out fantastic! I have a wired one too. And have a chatpad that I'd love to get working though the driver from mp3car doesn't seem to work for me. Could be my chatpad though.

How does this sound. The emu baks and Mario one zipped? That is if it's not too much trouble. I might end up doing a Sonic one sometime. Though my theme editing skills are not the greatest ha ha!

[Hunk_4TH]

If it isn't too much trouble could you still zip this for me?

[Adultery]

Sure, of course! I'm working on Future Pinball snaps ATM, but I will get to this today yet.

In the mean time, the emubaks I made are here

[Hunk_4TH]

Sure, of course! I'm working on Future Pinball snaps ATM, but I will get to this today yet.

In the mean time, the emubaks I made are here

Cool man! Don't mean to sound like an ass. No rush

[Adultery]

No worries bud!

[Hunk_4TH]

I downloaded the bluebox theme so I'm not sure if I still need this from you. But if yours is different then by all means I don't mind

[Adultery]

The bg's are new to the theme, but other than that the only difference is cosmetics (weather and RSS feeds, mario themed stuff, etc).

[Hunk_4TH]

Ah ok. I still wouldn't mind checking it out

[Draco1962]

The one thing I wish we could see more themes developed and submitted but the users of this community. I know some probably prefer to keep them to themselves due to the time invested to tweak them, but I think that the more themes we have available for share with the user community, the easier it is for those new to GameEx and Arcade Emulation in general. I appreciate the functionality of GameEx immensely! I think that with more themes available to the new users that chance upon us, we have a better opportunity to sell the product on the eye-candy aspects as well.

What I would like to do is start by throwing down my next theme in development (Enter the Dragon) and challenge the user community to a contest. Perhaps Tom, Circo, and a few of the other admins or mods wouldn't mind sitting in as our panel of judges. They could possibly determine several categories for an initial "semi-final competition" and the winners of these categories move on to the finals to determine the top 3 themes of 2011. This will give everyone plenty of time to brush up if it has been a while or to pick up the programs and skills to show their creative flair!

Give your thoughts on this. I think that this can be done fairly and I know that the talent is out there!

[Adultery]

I'll buy a lifetime license for the winner! *wink wink*

I think it could be fun, and anything to push the creative output of the community is always welcome. Maybe it's time I really sat down and finished off this BlueBox mod I'm working on too, and moved on to trying my hand at throwing together a new theme. Ahh but where would I start? As I recall it's quite an undertaking.

.:EDIT:. Man it would be cool to have two development comps. One for best plugin, the other for best theme. They could run at the same time even... Wonder if maybe I should ask around and see if the interest is there?

[Draco1962]

When I first started, I just loaded a few themes in Theme Editor to get a good feel for the layouts. I later found that setting up the layouts in an image editor helped me to speed my creations immensely and Theme Editor to tweak where the size and location of where the images will appear in the finished theme. Using psd files (or xcf if using Gimp) on this latest theme I have started to combine the elements in one package to created the custom screens makes things even faster to compile.

I think that the interest and the need exists. I have other theme ideas that I have considered in the past and I am willing to throw out if someone wanted to take off with them and run! ehuonder already flew with one I had entertained with his WOPR (War Games) theme (and, from the screenshots I saw he far surpassed what I had toyed with in my mind). Other themes could include the arcade machine from The Last Starfighter, Tron (Tom has a fantastic Tron theme - other takes I am sure would be welcomed!) and Tron Legacy, Weird Science.

[ehuonder]

Thanks for the kudos on my WOPR theme... As with most themes, it's still a work in progress! It's a 1600x1200 theme using custom menus, and I 'planned' a full image/bg/logo replacement. I can't make a decision (actually I can, I just keep changing it back and forth), as to if I want all of my logos as glowing line art (like any graphics in the movie), or nice full color images. I've attached a couple of examples. I've also bounced back and forth on Video versus Logo versus .X files.

I usually use Gimp, but with this theme, I've been trying a different approach. I'm using a makefile and ImageMagick command line calls to build up the graphics. It's making global changes, such as font changes, easier to implement. I really need to spend more time on it, because I really enjoy the results, but life is busy! I'm no where near having a complete logo or background list as well...

At what point would/should someone share a theme? I'm all in favor of sharing it, but it's not 'done'.