Hacking Adapting Darkwii for USBLoaderGX

[Chemodile]

I'm pretty amazed this hasn't been done yet given the popularity of Darkwii, so kindly correct me if I'm just bad at searching. What I'm looking for is a (roughly) 1:1 copy of the Darkwii system menu theme for USBLoaderGX. Nimrod's DarkSlazor mod v4 has come pretty close, but I have some issues with it.

1) The buttons on it are misplaced and overlapping. -- Possibly due to bad coordinate scaling on a 16:9 display?

2) The background in Nimrod's version is much darker than in the original Darkwii theme.

3) The buttons at the top look ugly and out of place. -- Pabo's DarkSlazor v5 fixed this but made all the other buttons look ugly instead. (An N64 icon, really?)

4) The black cursors are cool, but for the sake of consistency I'd like to use the same cursors included with Darkwii (system menu defaults I think?)
I've been trying to combine the two themes to get something like Nimrod's mod with 16:9-optimized coordinates and Pabo's topbar buttons, as well as a background image that looks closer to Darkwii's. Here are some problems I've come across:

QUOTE1) As I understand it, the Wii displays at 640x480 regardless of aspect ratio, but stretches the image inward when compensating for 16:9 mode. Does this apply to USBLoaderGX as well? Should I be calculating coordinates under the assumption that they'll be stretched, or should I use a 16:9 base image?

2) How can I hide the Homebrew Channel button? I'm assuming this can be specified in gxtheme.cfg, but given that the HBC button shows up in the middle of the screen without being mentioned at all in Nimrod's .cfg, I don't know where to begin. (Here's what I mean.)

3) How can I generate a (w)background.png based on the original contents of the Darkwii theme? I've been researching the .mym and .ash file structures and as far as I can tell the Wii generates the system menu background based on several very small tiled images. But which ones?

4) Read as #3, but with cursors instead of the background.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide. I realize it's a quite lot of effort for a small improvement, but surely someone knows the ins and outs of Wii theming better than I do.

 

[Chemodile]

I've made some progress. Many of the button problems in Nimrod's theme were due to missing files, which I've fixed by importing from Pabo's mod where possible. However, Pabo was missing some too so I added in new icons for the HBC and parental controls lock, as well as a proper mouseover for the SD icon. I've also fixed the graying out of such icons, which for some reason was inverted in Nimrod and Pabo's releases.

I would still like to fix the background and cursors to look more consistent with Darkwii, but in the meantime I'm calling my mod DarkSlazorv4.5.x, since it's halfway between Nimrod's v4 and Pabo's v5 with some original improvements thrown in.

Binary to come when I finish it, if there is interest.

edit:

 

[giantpune]

you shouldnt need to do too much work for most of this.
use thememii to unpack the darkwii theme and extract the files. convert them to png.
open the image you want t replace from GX in photoshop or gimp
drag the image from darkwii theme into the one from GX and adjust the placement within the image
press save.

 

[Chemodile]

you shouldnt need to do too much work for most of this.
use thememii to unpack the darkwii theme and extract the files. convert them to png.
open the image you want t replace from GX in photoshop or gimp
drag the image from darkwii theme into the one from GX and adjust the placement within the image
press save.

Sure, but my biggest problem with this is the image files in the .ash are so convoluted and confusing to work with. It seems the majority of the system menu background is generated based on a tiling image that's something like 4x2px, and as far as I can tell all the color data is stored in separate files? The best explanation I've found for the system menu file structure is here, and even that is just an ugly spreadsheet with no explanation from almost a year ago.

 

[giantpune]

in that case, just get somebody with a usb gecko or a capture card to grab a screen capture of the system menu. from there, you can photoshop the screenshot into each individual image. the usb gecko will grab the framebuffer right from the system menu, so it will be as close to the source as you can get.
using a screen capture card in a pc will get you the image after it has gone through a few more thing, so it will be not quite as perfect, but still will be good enough to work with in photoshop

EDIT>>
dolphin should work as well