'Manually Adding Box Art / Descriptions to Menu
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Hi All,


Just thought I would make a quick tutorial on how to add images to a specific game in the EmulationStation menu. Since the scraper isn't really working at the moment, if you already have a specific image on your PC that you wanted to display when you scroll over the respective game in the menu, this is how to do it:

First, your Freeplay should be connected to the internet. If you have already set up the wifi for your device, then the most difficult part is already done, and you can skip to the next step. If enough people need to know how to do this, I can also make another post about how to connect to Wifi and insert it here.

Next, you will need to be able to access the RetroPie file folders from your computer. On Windows and Mac, you will need to find a way to access your pie over the network using a FTP Program. On Windows, I would recommend WinSCP and Mac users I would recommend FileZilla. To connect to your pi over your local network, the user is "pi", host is "retropie.local", and the initial password is "raspberry".

Once you are connected and can see the pi’s files on your computer, go to the directory /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/ and select the folder with the corresponding system name to the image you would like to add. Inside, there should be a file called “gamelist.xml”. Download that from your pi and open it with a text editing program (Notepad, TextEdit, etc). There should be a list of games with entries that look something like this:

<game>
<path>./Game_Name.nes</path>
<name>Game_Name</name>
<desc>
                   A description about the game.
              </desc>
<image>~/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/nes/Game_Name-image.jpg</image>
<releasedate>19851001T000000</releasedate>
<publisher>Nintendo</publisher>
<genre>Sports</genre>
<developer>Irem</developer>
<players>2</players>
</game>

If there isn’t as much of the game data listed, it is easily added manually. Keep this XML file open and go back to the directory /home/pi/.emulationstation/, but this time create a new directory by the name ‘downloaded_images’ and enter it. Create another folder inside downloaded_images with the name corresponding to the name of the folder you got the XML file from (nes, gba, etc.). Inside this folder, drop the box art image you want to use. Then, head back over to the XML file still open on your computer and edit the <image> tag for the corresponding game to give the path to the image file. (If the listing for the game isn’t in the file, just add one using the example as a skeleton. Order does not matter.) After you are done, save the XML file on your computer then re-upload it to your pi in the directory you found it in. To see the results, you will have to reboot EmulationStation or the pi itself. If the pictures still aren't showing up, make sure to check your XML file for typos between the document data and file names and such.


I hope some people find this useful, and good luck!

Note: The attached picture is the end result, but the default Freeplay theme is not used. The theme I use is NBBA, which offers larger pictures with no descriptions. This is more to my personal preference.


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