I have spent the past couple of days making my own game covers for PS1 and SNES games to display on my Miyoo Mini Plus, so I wrote about it.
Look, if you want to make your custom game covers in an easy, fast way. This is not a blog for you, and if you want to do them on your own, this is also not for you.
This time I just want to talk about the enjoyment I’ve gotten out of just, tidying my retro game collection and making each and every cover by hand, with various degrees of care put into them.
There are many online resources to scrape videogame art, usually the official cover art, or maybe some generated automatically with XML and similar things, a popular tool for this is Skraper and websites like ScreenScraper that facilitate this task.
But I wasn’t really that happy, not only would those covers not be exactly what I wanted (2D rectangles), but Skraper is a weird program that needs mono to work on Linux, and it is rather weird to install from the tutorials I saw.
So I just found a PS1 cover template online, made it fit inside a 250x360 resolution, and looked for covers, fanart and logos to fill the rest myself.
Most of the games for the PS1 are made to fit in CD style boxes, making their shape more like square rather than the vertical rectagle, made even thinner due to the PS1 logo on the side. For some games it was simple enough, to find cover art that came out for newer consoles, or just posters and similar things that had a more ideal shape.
I also looked for some transparent logos to use in case the included one wasn’t enough. This proved a surprisingly easy task, as well as finding the logos from Squaresoft and other game development companies.
Some of the games were harder than others. I wasn’t happy with any of the MediEvil covers, neither looked good and I ended up using completely different art on both, on Resident Evil 3, I couldn’t find a good sized cover, until I stumbled upon the GameCube release and managed to edit it as I wanted, for Chrono Cross, I literally used the cover from the newer release on Nintendo Switch, but removed the subtitle of “Radical Dreamers Edition”, and it was kind of funny.
I’ll leave them here in case you want to check them out!
.png)
 (SLUS00553).png)
.png)
 (v 1.2).png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
 (Rev 1).png)
 (SLUS00662).png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
 (SLUS00664).png)
I also decided to put some work on my SNES covers, and I went for the Super Famicom cover as a template.
These were not as difficult since I had more width to work with, so there were not as many complicated covers as with the PS1.
 (Near).png)
.png)
 (Fastrom).png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
(Aeon Genesis).png)
.png)
 Fastrom.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
 (Collection of Mana).png)
This is day of 46 #100DaysToOffload and post 14 of #WeblogPoMo2024.
If you have something to say, leave a comment, or contact me ✉️ instead
You can reply on any Fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) client by pasting this URL into the search field of your client:
https://fosstodon.org/@joel/112443506821583161
Done exploring? Why not more? Here's some more great content only for those who reach the bottom of this page. Suit yourself!
