New games every week!
Lazy Man's 3DS Theme Generator Blog
18th December 2018
You can Download Lazy Man's 3DS Theme Generator here, but you'll need a couple more utilities on your system to make full use of it.


Editing Themes


To edit 3DS Homebrew Themes, you'll need a decent editor. I use the editor "Usagi"
You can download that here
For reference, the version I use is v1.0.12.1 - I'm not sure if there are other (better or worse) editors available, as I found this one and was comfortable using it.

-=-=-

Once installed you can open the app, create a new theme, give it a name, give it a desciption, load in an image or two for the different screen's backgrounds, edit the colours and change settings.
It has quite a complex set of options to play through, but everything should be more or less obvious enough.
Don't forget to keep hitting Ctrl-S because if it crashes (doesn't happen often), or you close it accidentally (happens FAR too often), you'll lose your changes.

Converting Music


To convert music, you'll need Looping Audio Converter
You can download that here
For reference, the version I use is v1.3.3. There are newer versions, but whenever I try the newer ones, I can't seem to find the correct settings to export the audio in a way that works.
Instead, I stick to 1.3.3, which seems to work well with themes.

Be sure to set the Output Format to BCSTM (ADCMP), keep the sample rate to 32000 or 22050, and whatever you do, don't set it to Mono (The audio will literally only come out of one channel)
There's options for looping, but nothing I've personally used. My tunes tend to "end", and that's ok with me. After all, the player isn't supposed to be hanging around in the menu for that length of time!

Once you find the right set of options for yourself, be sure to save them for future reuse.

Copy the resulting .bcstm file over to your theme's folder and rename it to bgm.bcstm
You'll also want to use an .ogg compatible wave app to generate a bgm.ogg file for previewing.

Using the "Lazy Man's 3DS Theme Generator"


To lazily put a theme together, grab the Lazy Man's 3DS Theme Generator.
You can Download that here

For reference, this tool is fairly new, so may not work 100%, but should be ... .. OK!

Open the tool, select a .png image, choose from one of the pre-determined colourschemes, then hit "Ready".. That's pretty much it!
The tool tends to work best with 16:9 images, but will try to work with whatever you throw at it. If it can't find a nice way to scale the image to fit the 3DS, then it'll freak out and quit!

Once the tool is finished doing its bit, you'll find the exported theme in the Themes folder, where you'll want to add your own music.
Copy the music over, rename to bgm.bcstm and don't forget the bgm.ogg for previews.

Next, open the theme using Usagi, where you can add a name, tweak anything that doesn't seem quite right, change the images if you need to, and then (Ctrl-S) save it, which will also generate the preview.
Also, don't forget to use the "Export Icon" function of Usagi, too.
From there, zip all the files (except for the ext/ folder) into a neat little "MyTheme.zip" pack, and copy that over to your 3DS for testing.
If anything's broken, start again! And if it's still broken, ask on the ThemePlaza Discord channel for help.

If all goes well, you can head to ThemePlaza to upload the results.
You can visit the site here

If you're new to the site, your themes will need to be approved before they show up. Do be patient.

Good luck with your themes, and try to be as imaginative and as creative as you can.


You can Download Lazy Man's 3DS Theme Generator here.
Views 2169, Upvotes 67  
Dev Tools
New games every week!
Site credits : Jayenkai
(c) Jayenkai 2023 and onwards, RSS feed

Blog - Lazy Man's 3DS Theme Generator - AGameAWeek