Hacking Custom Skin Font, Extension Icons?

[Atashi]

Hello all,

I've been out of the loop for a few years but just got interested in my old DSL & AK2i again. I've upgraded to the current version of AKAIO and have been poking around with it, and come up with two questions.

First - I have made my own skin and have a font that goes with it, which I'd like to use for all the menus and various UI elements in AKAIO. I know the font works, if I put it in __aio/fonts then edit the lang_en/language.txt file to use my font instead of tahoma, that works.

However, when I put the font file into my skin's folder and use the customUnicodeFont = [fontname].pcf option in my skin's uisettings.ini (in the [global settings] area at the top) it does not work. I just get everything in tahoma, and my custom font is ignored.

I wondered if maybe that option was depreciated, but I've run strings on akmenu4.nds and I can see the customUnicodeFont variable is still in there. So it seems to be ignored or isn't working. Or maybe the skin's font is being ignored in favour of the font setting in the language.

Does anyone know how to get the skin-based font setting to work?

The second issue is with Extension Icons. I made a half dozen icons way back when, they are in the correct 32x32x15 bmp format. I put them in my [skin]/icons folder but they don't work. I tried putting them in the __aio/icons folder, and they still don't work. By don't work I mean, I have a sav.bmp icon, a gba.bmp icon, a bak.bmp icon, and when I use AKAIO to go to a directory on the uSD card that has GBA, SAV or BAK files, they are displayed with the default icons only.

I have tested that the icons work by renaming them to match specific filenames and putting them in the same folder - this works, I can swap out icons one file / game at a time, but this is not what I want to do. Mostly I want to change the GBA files from the default purple gba icon to one that matches my theme.

I've searched the Acekard subforum and haven't found anything to answer these two questions. I did see in the stickied custom icon thread that the custom icon feature was broken for a while but as of 1.9.0 it was working again.

Thanks!

 

[Another World]

fonts have to go in the fonts folder. you'll need to include a readme that instructs users what to do and how to activate your custom font. there may have been a time when you could load custom fonts with each skin but i don't see that option in ak edit. i'm looking at the ini files for a recent skin i made an i don't see an option for it. so i'll assume it was removed a long time ago.

http://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/AKAIO#Icons

icons that change every file go in the "icons" folder. i don't recall which things you can change but you may not be able to change the default akaio "system" icons. this could explain why the save file icon doesn't change.

icons for games/homebrew must go in the same folder as the rom file. those bmp files must be named the same as the game. ie: mario.nds mario.bmp.

custom icons were broken for a long time and then recently fixed. it is possible they aren't working again. i would suggest that you try some older builds of akaio as well to help debug the problem.

-another world

 

[Atashi]

Hello Another World, thanks for the info!

The font thing appears to have been added in AKAIO 1.3 according to the readme so it's qute possible that it's been removed or depreciated since then. I did find the variable customUnicodeFont is still in the ak4menu.nds binary so maybe some of the code is still there.

I'll play around a bit more with the icons and see if I'm doing it wrong, or maybe as you suggested it could be that the built-in icons can't be overridden.

In either case it's just an aesthetic thing, needless to say Akaio and the acekard both work great.

Thanks again!