Help with some E200 themes?

[Roboturner913]

I realize I am way behind the times and nobody probably uses these anymore, but I just got a couple of Sansa E250s. There are a whole bunch of themes I like but some of them don't work exactly right.

Specifically, ART in Red is a theme I really enjoy but the cover art display is broken somehow. I've tried embedded jpegs and cover bitmaps but I always get the same result: a display where the album art flickers on for a brief second occasionally, but then goes back to blank. ART, another theme I like, does the exact same thing. Azure Ultimate is another, but it seems to be missing certain elements on the WPS.

I've done plenty of theme modifying for Fuze, Fuze+ and Gigabeat themes but these have me turned around. I don't need my hand held, but if somebody could diagnose the cover art issues with the two ART themes and point me in the right direction I think I could figure it out.

Also, is there any way to change the font in an SBS screen? I'd like to change that from the default text to something a little more modern if at all possible.

[Roboturner913]

Nevermind on changing the font, I figured that one out. Still would love it if somebody smarter than me can figure out what is wrong with album art on the ART in red theme. Thanks in advance....

[lebellium]

Hello there.

I looked at the ART in Red theme and indeed there is an issue with the album art. It's an old theme (early 2010) so maybe at the time (Rockbox release 3.4) it worked properly, I don't know, but for sure it can't with the current skin engine since there are only 2 layers (backdrop layer + foreground layer) and you're not supposed to draw several images on top of each other on the foreground layer. The guy who made this theme used ARTinRed-wps.bmp for background, that's OK but used both cover.bmp and the album art on the foreground layer. The skin engine doesn't know which one is supposed to be on top of the other, that's why you see the album art flickering: sometimes the album art is on top, sometimes cover.bmp.

The first workaround I was thinking about is to merge ARTinRed-wps.bmp and cover.bmp into a new bmp file, and then display this background as conditionnal (depending on play or pause playback status). It would be something like:

Code: [Select]

%xl(back_without_cover,ARTinRed-wps.bmp,0,0)
%xl(back_with_cover,ARTinRed-wps2.bmp,0,0)
%V(0,0,-,-,-)%VB
%?mp<%xd(back_without_cover)|%xd(back_with_cover)|%xd(back_without_cover)>

But that would require editing the WPS code, which is not so easy since it looks terrible and confusing (sorry for the Author :S)

Then I thought about a much easier workaround: edit cover.bmp and replace the background with transparency, so that the album art would always be visible, even if cover.bmp is on top.
So just replace the current cover.bmp in .rockbox\wps\ARTinRed by the one I put in attachment and that should work

PS: as bmp files are not allowed in attachment, I renamed it to jpg instead. So just rename it to bmp again.

[Roboturner913]

Wow, clever fix! Works great now. Thanks a ton!