Some Mala screens I'm working on (done for now I think)

[shock_]

These are 1280x1024 downscaled for forum friendliness.

I'm kinda running out of ideas where to take this; perhaps I've been fiddling with it too long.  Suggestions please! 

[edge]

nice job, schock.  i like the atari 2600 one.

With the Mame one, does the marquee change as well?

[squirrellydw]

Looks nice, not as nice as the apple one though

[shock_]

With the Mame one, does the marquee change as well?

Yep, and the cpanel and video/snap.  And the cartridge on the Atari, too, since I found a nice big .rar of those

Another option is sort of like this:

[loadman]

I've said it once and I'll say it again

"I love your work, It's simple yet sexy"

A lot of layouts produced are too 'Busy' for my taste

Sometimes 'less is more'

IMHO

[fatfingers]

Sometimes 'less is more'

 

[headkaze]

I have to 3rd that notion of less is more. And here is a free Photoshop tip: Avoid using filters as much as you can (including Filter->Render->Clouds). Photoshop filters almost always look bad for backgrounds. Your better off finding a nice image and alpha blending it bit with a pure black background or something. Or finding some sort of pattern from a photograph or 3d rendered image for the background. Your last white theme would also look good in a black variety, it's simple and effective. Keep up the good work!

[shock_]

I have to 3rd that notion of less is more. And here is a free Photoshop tip: Avoid using filters as much as you can (including Filter->Render->Clouds).

Yeah, I think the clouds is letting it down quite a lot!  Other than offset and gaussian blur (which are indespensible sometimes) I baulk at filters too - especially as wallpaper.  Cheers for the focus.

[squirrellydw]

Another option is sort of like this:

I like this one better than the other ones on here.  Almost looks like the Apple one you made, simple and sexy.  Is the Apple one done??

[Razor]

Congrats, I really like those 

[loadman]

...at the risk of pushing it

Would you consider doing a couple of vertical layouts too? 

[shock_]

...at the risk of pushing it

Would you consider doing a couple of vertical layouts too? 

Have patience

I won't be able to distribute the cloudy ones without lots of revision.  There's too much IP buried in there - thank you Google Images   

The white ones maybe so - but generating layouts for public consumption is not my core focus right now.  The Applesque ones in the other thread were mainly an exercise for me to play and see whether or not I actually knew how to do it

That said, I'm generally happy to share with others what I do for myself, as long as the packaging and maintenance is easy and won't leave me open to legal liability or too many groupies 

[BamBam]

Okay, okay stop the presses.  Has anyone seen the NES, SNES, Gameboy, SMS, Genesis mala layouts here?  I'm only seeing mame, C64, Atari 2600, Visual Pinball 
You can't just stop there.  You gotta finish the collection.  Horizontal, vertical etc.
I love your first set.  Can you tell?

[shock_]

Okay, okay stop the presses.  Has anyone seen the NES, SNES, Gameboy, SMS, Genesis mala layouts here?  I'm only seeing mame, C64, Atari 2600, Visual Pinball 
You can't just stop there.  You gotta finish the collection.  Horizontal, vertical etc.
I love your first set.  Can you tell?

I was doing this one for me, and haven't really got any plans to do emulators/machines I don't actually plan to run... I don't even know what most of them look like    The hard part about those first ones is finding nice clean images of the controllers and doing all that fiddly ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---.  Perhaps that's why I'm leaning back towards that white-ish one, or even the black thing I did in another thread for squirrellydw.

Cheers anyway though for the kind words of encouragement 

[boboli]

did someone mention they have a file/files with Mame marquee images? I've been looking for these but can't find them on the net (and I'd love to use them within MaLa layout). If you have these and would be willing to share I'd be very appreciative.

Also, love the appleque layouts.

[boboli]

nevermind, I'm an idiot - I just noticed Howard's sticky post about marquees!

[shock_]

Starting to combine cleanest bits of both - but being mindful of "clean and simple".  Obviously this is WIP - look at that horrible stroke on the reflected text!

Also experimenting with squares rather than rectangles, to keep vertical/horizontal exactly the same.

[shock_]

Getting there...

[joebells]

looking sweet, any chance of a 1280 x 720 version? I use mala on a hdtv in the living room

[squirrellydw]

Looks nice, I like it

[shock_]

looking sweet, any chance of a 1280 x 720 version? I use mala on a hdtv in the living room

joebells I might be able to swing something for you  - what are you after?

[edge]

nice job, shock!  i like the crispness of it.  any chance of doing a low-res version for arcade monitor resolutions? 640x280 (or is it 288)?

[shock_]

How does that work?  Is it really 640 x 576 interlaced, or do you literally do a 640x288 layout that looks all squished and let the monitor sort it out, or what?  A bit like those boot screens for Win98 where they had to be 320x400 but would display at 320x200 ("It is now safe to turn off your computer" etc)

[edge]

On my Golden Tee, with an ArcadeVGA graphics card and standard resolution monitor, I run windows at 640x288.  That looks the best since it is not interlaced/jumpy.

It is running native at that resolution.

[shock_]

I'm thinking there might be too much detail in this skin I'm working on to scale down that far; I'm planning on running MaLa in 1280x1024.  But I guess it could be adapted or something.

Anyways - here's the latest WIP.

[joebells]

looking sweet, any chance of a 1280 x 720 version? I use mala on a hdtv in the living room

joebells I might be able to swing something for you  - what are you after?

Well I run it on my widescreen so all these look stretched on my tv.  But it probably would be a pain to relayout all the stuff and make a custom one for probably just 1 person so don't worry about it maybe i'll just copy it when its done. I copied/modified the retro one and its been a bit of a pain but has come out ok so far but I think I want something more like this. Is that the tree you are using there? I started to play with it but didn't have enough time to figure out quite how it works yet. Maybe I'll use your themes config files as a reference since I haven't seen a theme with tree used yet.

Like the way the theme looks its coming along nicely.

[shock_]

1280x720, right?  I'll try and have a look at recomposing in that ratio - might work out after all.  I'm planning to use the Mr Do cabinet images since they're so big and beautiful - as you can see from that last screenshot.  There could be a way of working that into all that width you've got there somehow.  I can't promise anything but I will look into it   I had a quick play with a 1280x720 variant after you originally posted, and it turned out crap - but most new designs suck until you sleep on them for a week or so and then work some more.

My desktop machine runs in 16:10 so a widescreen skin would be sort of handy for me anyway.  I can imagine a few others in the same boat, even if cabs are generally 4:3.

Regards the tree thing - I'm not sure if I'll use Tree.  I have played with it a little.  Was thinking the tree views of this skin would basically be that side menu centred and bigger, with the icons larger too - then when you drill down into a specific emulator, the screen shown replaces that view and you can choose a ROM.  So basically, stealing horribly from this concept.

The thing with trees though is that they are a pain to set up (lots of screens to render), and you have to move up and down them to change your emulator.  Without a tree, you can just map a button or stick to swap the emulator.  Trees are certainly more user/newbie friendly though so I'd consider them for a cab you want to leave unattended.  Personal preference really.

I'm thinking for this one that I'll just map either a "shifted" joystick up/down to change emulators, or buttons 3 and 4 or something. Each emulator then needs its own variant of the skin with the correct "button" highlighted.

[squirrellydw]

looks nice, any chance on adding the system icons on the left to the apple theme you made as an option?

[joebells]

as long as you don't mind and it'll be of some use to you. But really I don't mind recreating it I learned quite alot recreating the retro theme, it was fun. Would the arcade cabinet be loaded into the skin so it can change if you are playing say snes or is it part of the background?

[shock_]

looks nice, any chance on adding the system icons on the left to the apple theme you made as an option?

Shouldn't be too hard. But I thought you wanted it clean ?   

as long as you don't mind and it'll be of some use to you. But really I don't mind recreating it I learned quite alot recreating the retro theme, it was fun. Would the arcade cabinet be loaded into the skin so it can change if you are playing say snes or is it part of the background?

I know what you mean - it is fun getting in and dirty with this stuff.  Would you like my .psd file with all the layers to play with?

The cabinet image is called by MaLa at runtime, like the snaps are - and disappears if there isn't one for the selected ROM.  The only thing rendered in the image is the background / window blocks and the left nav menu.  So there are as many background images (and therefore variant layouts) required as emulators you need to add in that list.  I'm planning 5 at the moment  but left room for more.

[squirrellydw]

I do but I also like how that looks.  Didn't know if you can have it as an option or if you have to make a new one.

Great job

[shock_]

Thanks.  As usual I can't decide on the colour 

Would probably ditch one of the screenshot boxes to make room.   I liked how that Atomic version turned out I'll also have to up the font size a fair bit so it is readable on your crap resolution monitor   

[squirrellydw]

I like the Atomic also

[joebells]

Regards the tree thing - I'm not sure if I'll use Tree.  I have played with it a little.  Was thinking the tree views of this skin would basically be that side menu centred and bigger, with the icons larger too - then when you drill down into a specific emulator, the screen shown replaces that view and you can choose a ROM.  So basically, stealing horribly from this concept.

The thing with trees though is that they are a pain to set up (lots of screens to render), and you have to move up and down them to change your emulator.  Without a tree, you can just map a button or stick to swap the emulator.  Trees are certainly more user/newbie friendly though so I'd consider them for a cab you want to leave unattended.  Personal preference really.

I'm thinking for this one that I'll just map either a "shifted" joystick up/down to change emulators, or buttons 3 and 4 or something. Each emulator then needs its own variant of the skin with the correct "button" highlighted.

Ah see somehow for some reason I thought you had the tree setup so that you could always access those emulator pictures over on the left side like possibly moving your joystick over to the left and then up and down to pick one not sure why I thought that exactly and it is nice being able to either page up by pressing left or going up by letter by going left so thats not even a good idea. I don't know why I thought that.

I've figured out the tree thing now I think. I just didn't know what tree fields matched up with what skin layout fields. But a bit of trial and error and just taking a second to think about what was logical and now I believe I know which is which. I'm not sure if I'm going to use it or not either I guess.

[shock_]

Decided that trying to squeeze too many definables into that space was a bad thing.

Trivia: did you know that you can calculate with the golden ratio directly in Google?  Cool !

[squirrellydw]

Shock_ I am starting to hate you   I like this one a lot also and now I don't know what one to use.  I really like the how at the top it tells you what to do, great idea for when friends come over and not sure what to do.  Any chance of combining this one and the Apple one?  Maybe add the emulators and the "key" to the Apple one??

Great work

[nexus6]

With the Mame one, does the marquee change as well?

Yep, and the cpanel and video/snap.  And the cartridge on the Atari, too, since I found a nice big .rar of those

Another option is sort of like this:

this looks very, very nice on a pc-monitor. unfortunatelly its not so good on an arcademonitor bacause the white backgriund flimmers on a 60hz screen. but anyway: good work!

[shock_]

yeah it's designed for a PC monitor (specifically, mine - mwa ha ha!)

The instructions are probably different for everyone's specific front end configuration, so that makes it a bit tricky.  I don't even know if those instructions are what I'll end up using myself yet!

And the button layout in the help text is specifically what my CP will be like (6-button candy cab config).

All of that makes it a difficult thing to sort out if/when this skin is published for general consumption.  I think I'll make it a little more generic when I'm done, and use a modified version for myself with my own controls mapped etc.

And there's still that matter of the 1280x720 thing to sort out for joebells

Ta for feedback. Weird how it's starting to resemble the one at the top of this thread again!

[joebells]

shock_ I seriously don't mind recreating it in fact I'll enjoy it.

[Tiger-Heli]

Wow, really like the 4A and the 5c ones.  Great work!!!