Hacking EZ4 Skinner - The Starter Pack!

[SeongGino]

Having just ordered my EZ-Flash IV microSD version a few days ago, I decided to take advantage of the time and prepare for it's arrival in advance! And then I realized there were little to NO documentation or... ANYTHING really on current skins for EZ4, let alone skin making software.

Today, that all changes.

Cobbled together in about two days starting from my own need to have documentation for future possible skins, I decided to take looks at every possible piece of relative importance for skinning your own EZ4 Loader (GBA Only, sorry). This simple to extract ZIP file includes everything you need for the basics of skinning, as well as my own piece of documentation in .docx format, explaining the files included, specific resolutions for every BMP, and how to customize the text. I also took the time to include a few pieces of templates in a special "Templates" folder in .psd format, which really at the moment just outlines exact placement of objects in a few pieces of the loader.

At the moment, the placeholder BMPs used are from Clearlooks v6 and the version of EZ4Skin was modified to work on GBA Loader 1.750 and up by libertyernie! You can check out the original here.

It's a very much work in progress, but I hope for everyone either veteran or new like myself, this provides some use. If you have any questions or suggestions for future version, please do tell! I'm always looking in ways to improve this to better help the newbies to the EZ-Flash IV scene!

Changelog: Revision 2.1 - I'M AN IDIOT edition! Fixed REALLY stupid oversights in file listing, now all files SHOULD be properly described in their use. Don't kill me please...
Revision 2 - Added details on compiling for those confused, refined wording somewhat, refined file descriptions.
Initial Release. Need to implement finishing touches in file listing, add more sample images, add more sections.

As a side note; this is ONLY for the GBA Loader side of the EZ4. Since 1.75+, DS loader has been cut since R4i's exist now, so only GBA loader works properly. If you want DS mode stuff, I likely won't touch on the subject, and suggest you instead buy an R4 card instead. They are generally better for DS stuff.

 

[tiduscrying]

Hey! Awesome pack! I was poking around through the files of the "official" theme tools from EZ Flash's website and found a program called "BATGBA" which lets you see your skin running and allows you to open menus and stuff. I've attached it so perhaps you could add it to the pack, just so people can see their skins easily, instead of making mockups in Photoshop or taking pictures of it!

 

[Doubledjunky]

This may be a bit old, but I could use your help. I tried running EZ4skin.exe, but I only get an error that I am missing MSVCR120D.dll and it does not finish. How can I fix this?

I tried running just the Skin_it.bat and saw the same error.

I am running Windows 8.1.

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

disregard. I found a copy of the dll online and pasted it into the directory with skin_it.bat. Working now.

Thanks for the great skinner.

 

[Fraccoon]

It's been a long time I guess, but I need help with something, after a lot of tries to get the Clearlooks fonts into my ezfla_up.bin, I got this:

"WARNING: It looks like you're using firmware version 1.75. Putting asc.dat in the gba folder will not work. Instead, you need to insert it into the file yourself. In 1.75 it's at the offset 0x3A689."

I still don't know how to compile the fonts into the .bin, tried to open the .bin but it seems to be impossible, also, I don't understand anything about the offset basically, I don't which is "the file", and how to insert the "asc.dat" into "offset 0x3A689"