What is a theme?

What a theme changes, and what it does not.

A Recalbox theme dresses the interface: the list of your systems at startup, your game lists, the menus, the screensaver.

What a theme decides

• where elements are placed on screen, and how big;
• which images are shown: backgrounds, logos, frames, artwork;
• the colors and the fonts, including those of the menus;
• what shows up depending on the context: the screen resolution, the kind of machine, the highlighted game.

What a theme does not decide

• the content of the menus: Recalbox builds them itself. A theme only styles them;
• the games, their metadata, the emulators;
• what the buttons do.

The principle, in one sentence

Recalbox reads XML files that declare components — an image, a text, a list — each with its position, its size and its look.

<image name="fond">
  <pos>0 0</pos>
  <size>1 1</size>
  <path>./data/fond.jpg</path>
</image>

The studio writes these files for you. This documentation explains the full syntax: it should let you write a theme entirely by hand if you wish.