Just starting to learn how to make custom images for Pixelcade, and am starting this thread to share some of them here. As I learn more and (hopefully) improve my technique, I'll try to re-post any images that get re-done / improved.
The first few are images for the "Favorites" and "All Games" categories ("consoles"). I made these to go along with the "es-theme-ComicScrap" theme in Batocera.
Although Kodi Media Center is available in Batocera and is great, my preference is to use Quod Libet for playing my albums. I created the attached marquee for it, which should be copied to /userdata/system/pixelcade/flatpak (since it's installed as a Flatpak app).
Robotron is one of the MAME games I play most, so I thought I'd work on a few images for it.
This is my first attempt at creating a GIF, using kdenlive, and though I still have a few editing techniques to learn and master, I think the image came out OK.
thanks for sharing, looks good! have not used kdenlive before, that is good to know. if possible to do pixel perfect 128x32, it'll look even better without the artificats
kdenlive is a video-editing program, and the GIF was generated by passing another GIF (I found online) through various effects to change resolution, contrast, sharpening, etc. (somewhat like the ImageMagick commands you included in the art creation guide). I think that as I learn and improve my skills using the various effects, the output rendering will look better. I suppose I could try to get a 'pixel perfect' result using GIMP or another graphical editor on the resulting GIF, but that would be much more labor-intensive than what is involved in generating a static marquee images.
My plan is to try using the Batocera-record command to capture some HD clips (the source Robotron marque I used above was itself a lower-resolution GIF) and see how that goes.
WordPress file uploads seem to have some sort of bug, but I found that even after I upload an image file and the interface hangs up, the file appears to get the next sequential index number as a suffix, so I am including some add'l Robotron marquees that I created using kdenlive by linking to the files directly:
The first image with the in-game marquee is longer in length than the original I posted. All were created with a full HD (1080p) clip I captured using Batocera-Record. The first clip definitely looks better because it has more pixels in use compared to the others, but I think the quality of all 3 is pretty decent when viewed on the Pixelcade DMD.
I'd appreciate any feedback from anyone who downloads / uses these. I'll probably try to tackle the game Tempest next....
Some recent artwork done for PSP games, these are in the main repo
@Danno try the attachments again, just activates the advanced attachments plug-in, let's see if that works for you
Maybe it's me, but I'm still having issues with posting. I tried deleting temp browser files, and use both Chromium and Firefox, but WP still won't upload my .GIF files. I did see a "Saving Draft" appear quickly, but the window is left hung up with the greyed-out progress indicator:
(The above screen capture uploaded successfully, which is a .PNG file). I also posted both .JPG image files and an .M4V video successfully last night when posting a different thread in "Projects" showing off my cabinet ( https://pixelcade.org/forum/projects/original-2019-recroommasters-xtension-sit-down-cabinet-emulator-edition-plus-controller-with-pixelcade-dmd/#post-2611 ).
I could try posting the .GIFs in a compressed .ZIP file, but the preview showing the individual .GIFs (when posting them was working) was a nice feature.
gif test
@Danno, are you seeing this (My Media button)
@pixelcade-admin Sorry for the delayed reply. I've had some general issues with the forum where even after it prompts me to Log In, it won't recognize that I've successfully done that and every subsequent click on "Log In" (which appears to have a redirecting URL when hovering over the link) just refreshes the current forum page/thread without recognizing my forum credentials. I had to delete temp browser files to resolve both that, and to get the "My Media" page controls to appear (which I can see now!).
I will try using them now to re-post the 3 Robotron GIF files again, and see if that works better:
Well....I just tried, using both the "Attach Files" link and going into "My Media" and trying there as well. Either way, the upload of the GIF file just seems to spin with the "Working..." progress indicator, but never seems to complete successfully. I even tried renaming the file to remove the underscore character in case that was tripping things up.
I'll try to attach a screen capture showing what I'm seeing. Sorry to get off on this tangent with the posting issue....hopefully we can delete some of the related posts if/when things get sorted out. Thanks for your patience!
Well, the screen captures seem to have uploaded successfully, but the area where I'm typing shows some HTML-like code to attach the image files by numerical reference instead of showing the graphical preview. I've had this happen in other postings, where I'll get the detailed HTML breakdown instead of the usual preview. What also tends to happen is the graphical toolbar where you can select things like bold, insert link, enable HTML, etc is also gone. Weird....
