Resources for Emuteca: Coleco Colecovision
Icons, images, texts, videos, etc. for use with Emuteca.
Use GIT to clone the repository or download it in zip:
https://github.com/Chixpy/ETKRes-Colecovision/archive/main.zip
You can read more about media files in Emuteca's Web Page (but it's in Spanish...)
Emuteca will search media of games and groups in the next order in selected folder. Stops at the first hit:
- All suported files inside a subfolder named as SortTitle of the game.
MediaFolder\SoftSortTitle\*.ext. - Only one file with named as SortTitle of the game and a supported media extensión.
MediaFolder\*.ext. - Repeat Steps 1 and 2 with SortTitle of the game's group.
Note 1: About .ext.
- Can be any supported and searched media file extension.
- Emuteca supports many other file types than they are actually searched.
- It can be changed in GUI config file (
GUI.inifor EmutecaGUI).
Note 2: In the past, Emuteca supported searching media files inside compressed files (.zip, .7z, etc.). It's slow; and music, image and vídeos are compressed archives themselves afterall.
In short:
- Digital images: .png
- Scanned or photos: .jpg
Emuteca have some tools to help with images:
- ETKPDF2CBX: For extracting pages from PDF with pdfimages / pdftopng. Actually this tool is from another proyect for comics but can extract pages to a folder without creating a CBX file.
- ETKMagCut: For cutting magazine texts from scanned images.
- ETKIconBorder: For creating icons and logos with semitransparent borders. More info in Icons, Logos section.
- Rule #1: Original size without corrected aspect ratio. For example, if a system has 320x200 of resolution but the screen is 4:3, don't resize the image to 320x240.
Remember, all digital images in .png format at original resolution: 256x192.
Generally (except digital maps):
.jpgimages- Maximum of 2048px in its largest side, if its smaller don't scale it up.
- If it's larger than 2048px, it's best to crop (see below) before scaling it down to 2048.
- Keeping aspect ratio.
- Trying not to resave it many times. There are some transformations that can be done without lossing quality...
For game's media (Front, Back, Spine, Manual and Media):
- Box Front, Back and Spine in separated images and cropped without any border.
- Media: Whole cart, CD, etc. scanned and cropped without any border (if possible)
For Magazine texts:
- Crop original page image to article text, game images and box arts, with a little border.
- Ignore background or another kind pictures.
- If in the cropped image there are parts of text from another game can be deleted. (ETKMagCut have a button to clear a delection, ideally must be transparent...)
- One page each image, unless some text or a images is cut.
For Maps (or magazine game guides):
- If it's a magazine game guide: Same as Magazine texts.
- If it's a digital map (made with screenshots or similar): Better in .png format and keep as is (do not remove author, or other info; and if it's bigger than 2048px keep the size too).
- Rule #1: Only 1 image for group or game. No folders with multiple images.
Icons are mainly extracted from game screenshots at original resolution and usually they are protagonist frames, lives icons or recognizable icon.
Logos are usually extracted from Title or Main Menu screens.
All images are .png format. Width and Height are variable, using it's original size without resizing to a fixed size or adding more border to make it square. Emuteca handle they automatically.
The only time that the image will be scaled is when all 'icon pixels' are 2x2, 3x3, etc. pixels.
After extracting the icon image with transparent background, a border is added: Middle grey, half transparency (128, 128, 128, 128).
Emuteca has ETKIconBorder tool in its distribution. A simple image editor to cut, extract, make transparency in images and apply filters to original image.
Texts must be raw UTF8 text: .txt
Better if:
- No UTF8 Bit Order Mask (BOM)
- Empty line between paragraphs.
- No new line inside paragraphs (Textbox has wordwrap activated).
- Maybe Markdown fortmat is good, too.