MORE Tinkering with RetroPIe!

The fun never stops! In this entry, I'll show you new things I learned to do in RetroPie over the past month:

• Splash screens
• Download user-made splash screens
• Use video splash screens
• Menu music
• Boot games from USB

 Here we go!

Splash screens
-- Downloading user-made splashscreens --
 I recently discovered just how active the RetroPie community was through their amazing collection of splash screens. A splash screen is the image you first see when you boot up RetroPie. This is the current default one:

While it is a good design, you might want to personalize it a bit. Fortunately, you can! It's very simple, in fact. Go to the RetroPie options (where you went to configure your audio and wi-fi) and select "splash screens". You will see this menu:

Select option 9 - Download RetroPie-Extra splashscreens, and they'll all download automatically from github directly on your Raspberry Pi (they are located in ~/RetroPie/splashscreens/retropie-extra). One thing to note: you can put any picture you want in that folder, and it will act as a splashscreen. For example, I made this Neo-Geo mockup, which I think looks great! It's not yet in the official RetroPie github directory, but maybe one day if I figure out how to use github. Feel free to use it if you want, in the meantime!

 
You can have a look at them by choosing option 7 - Preview splash screens. In the next menu, you can select between viewing a single splash screen, or a slideshow. You also have the option to play a video splash, but more on that later.

The fun begins when you select option 3: Enable splashscreen randomizer. This will show a random splashscreen when you boot RetroPie instead of the usual one. You can select between randomizing official RetroPie splash screens (no fun), or randomizing your own splash screens (fun!!). You can also randomize all splash screens to include both. You can even create a list named /etc/splashscreen.list that contains the filenames of splash screens you selected (by doing option 6 - append splashscreen to list in the menu) and randomize splash screens only from that list!

Alternately, you can select option 1: Choose splashscreen. This will specify which splashscreen you want to use a your default boot screen. I'm not sure what happens if you select this option at the same time as the randomizing option discussed above, so try out the available combinations to make sure it works the way you want.

-- Video Splash Screens --
Now, things get reaaaally fun. What if you want your RetroPie to boot up with the Dreamcast sequence, or maybe even the GameCube? What if you want to boot up with a fatality montage from Mortal Kombat, or the overdrive tech demo from Evoke 2013? What if you just found a fancy video splashscreen on the RetroPie forums (this guy makes very nice splashscreens)? You can do any of these. As long as the video you want to use in the .mp4 format, just copy it to your ~/RetroPie/splashscreens/retropie-extra directory, and it will detected by RetroPie. You can have a look at it by doing "Preview Splashscreens -> Play video splash -> Own/Extra splashscreens" from the splashscreens menu of RetroPie. Even if they're videos, you can randomize them just like the picture splash screens. 

One piece of advice I can give you: I filled my /etc/splashscreen.list file with videos only, and randomize that list. That way, I always get a random video instead of a random picture (most of the time) or a video (rarely), because there's simply much more pictures than videos in the retropie-extra folder.

Menu Music in RetroPie
Quite possibly the most interesting discovery I made by checking out other RetroPie setups online: you can play any music you want in the RetroPie menu while you're selecting your games. This is not a function usually built-in RetroPie. How it works is someone programmed a python script that plays music from a folder you select. All you have to do is follow the instructions in synack's post here (see picture below, in case his post gets lost). Make sure you read and follow each step slowly, and you will be completely fine. It's a 5-10 mins process, well worth it in the end.

I compiled the list of the songs I'm using in my menu right here, so you can have ideas (and hopefully find more music you might like!). The site I download my music from is http://downloads.khinsider.com/ if you're looking for it.


Playing a game from your USB drive (not micro-SD)
This is very helpful if your micro-SD card is 97% full (like me), but you don't want to invest in a bigger micro-SD card (these things are expensive and can corrupt easily if you're not careful). Follow this helpful video!