Hacking R4 DS skins

[SkH]

after reading 50+ pages, i have to say kiruyama's R4/DS skin is my fav!!
beautiful and thanks!

BTW does anybody have a good .ini for this skin?

Yeah, I have, I created for it a professional theme.ini!

Looks like original!

 

[marth989]

@serg0

Thanks alot

im glad you enjoy them

 

[.TakaM]

getting better marth, what do program do you use?

 

[marth989]

photoshop CS2, lols I'm getting pretty good at using it now

 

[.TakaM]

ah photoshop, k you should try working on a larger canvas then shrinking it down to the DS's resolution, easy way to make it crisp

 

[marth989]

I've tried that before all i seem to get is a load of jaggies when i shrink it down

 

[.TakaM]

when you go
- image
- - image size

make sure you've got 'Resample Image' ticked, and set to bicubic

 

[marth989]

Ah kk ill do that from now one and may even re issue ~Gear like that

 

[brn]

I'm working on a theme based upon the FF XII-gui but I've encountered a huge problem with the displaying of gradients. Anyone of you got any tips on how to fix this or is it a problem with the R4 firmware that brings down the colours so much? Maybe dithering will work?


UPDATE!
Here's the finished icons.bmp but I'm still missing a way to get the gradients smooth. I've tried saveing as 64 colour dithered gif and then saving that as bmp and all sorts of weird ways but the image just gets more and more fucked up. While fiddling with the saves Photoshop accidently crashed so I lost my psd-files but the original bmps are intact save for background1 but I have the gif and it looks ok still. If anyone of you could figure this problem out (please use my icons.bmp as a test) I'd appericiate it

EDIT: shiiiit, just remembered I fucked up the icons.bmp too! 5 hours of hard work just ruined.



FUCK.

 

[bobrules]

marth989 i'll wait for your fixed version

 

[marth989]

@bobrules, i will hopefully be re issuing them tonight

so it wont be long, but this time ill put all 3 in one zip file

and im making a set of 3 the same style that will work better with black ds

enjoy blurry Gear for now

 

[ruiner17]

great skins everyone. makes my ds feel more complete

 

[procrastix]

@brn

There's no way to fix the image gradient problem. It has to do with the DS's display. You can check out some games which use that (ie Game&Watch) and you'll see what I mean. The best way to do it is to use gradients similar to something like the battle background for FFTA. You'll still be unable to avoid the jaggies though.

BTW great icons.bmp! IMO I'd look nicer without the DS lite on the left, though...

 

[bang3r]

dang i just downloaded this skin, chodaskin v1.0!!! it's TIGHT!!!

 

[rice151]

I should be getting an R4 soon, so I started to experiment with skinning.
Well, I'm a fan of Korean music so I'm just messing around with pictures that I have, and resizing them to DS resolution. Here are previews, I think they came out well using MSPaint

 

[4saken]

I should be getting an R4 soon, so I started to experiment with skinning.
Well, I'm a fan of Korean music so I'm just messing around with pictures that I have, and resizing them to DS resolution. Here are previews, I think they came out well using MSPaint

There is a reason there is a screen separation template available. Most people prefer that the images are not split by the hinge, but continue under it.

 

[rice151]

aww, that was one question I had...I saw the template but I decided not to use it, I'll try it again right now
thanks for the tip!

EDIT Got a bigger NDS Template and followed through the first picture

>

 

[brn]

@brn

There's no way to fix the image gradient problem. It has to do with the DS's display. You can check out some games which use that (ie Game&Watch) and you'll see what I mean. The best way to do it is to use gradients similar to something like the battle background for FFTA. You'll still be unable to avoid the jaggies though.

BTW great icons.bmp! IMO I'd look nicer without the DS lite on the left, though...

I've been thinking about this since last night and I've come to the conclusion the R4 (and some games*) displays images in 16 bit (no matter what bit they actually are, and lower 8 bit-images gets corrupt) to save CPU, so if I save the image in 16 bit it should look somewhat like how it displays on the DS. I'm gonna be searching for an app that can convert images into 16 bit BMP with dithering so that I can control the loss of colours. It's either that or the R4 team gives us 32 bit skinning.

*Some apps like Moonshell does not seem to have this problem, I'm not sure but I can try this theory next week.

 

[myclock]

after so many good skins i thought that i'd have a go at this. this is my first skin that ive made. hope you corolla fans like it.

i call it.... corolla DS

download here

 

[CodeName_88]

Here's my Kimi Raikkonen (Ferrari Formula 1 Driver) skin, which I based on GCTonyHawk7's awesome Plasma skin (if you want this skin to be removed, that will be done):

Download link: http://www.filefactory.com/file/63928e/