Article written by meepingsnesroms

Download here – http://buildbot.libretro.com/assets/cores/Utilities/OverlayEditor.zip

Since RetroArch was first running on touchscreen devices, it has been dependent on overlays for onscreen controls. But there has been no good way of editing them, for the last 6 years the only way to make overlays was to edit numbers in a text file, see if they looked good and if they didn’t edit them again until they did, I found this to be quite bizarre and when I made the Palm device overlay for Mu and I made a small buggy overlay editor with an incomprehesible fixed function GUI, it was a project I tried to make in a week as a challenge to myself and as a tool to make the Palm overlay because there was no way I would have the patience to edit the text file that many times.

At first I though no one really cared about it because whenever anyone talked about overlays it was just a border around the game screen and RetroArch wanted an excessive amount of work converting all the GUI files into text by hand, although recently I have gotten slightly bored with Palm stuff and someone was making an overlay and my editor was mentioned, since someone actually wanted an overlay editor I decided that it was worth it to finish it and make it user friendly so anyone can make a good RetroArch overlay.

There is no current plan to integrate the code with RetroArch itself but the source code will run on Windows, Mac and Linux and I will maintain a Win32 binary that can be run on all Windows versions and emulated elsewhere.

Here is a video of its current functionality, more will be added to allow easily making animated overlays from pictures and allowing advanced users to edit the text file directly for things that don’t have a GUI option.

It is in beta right now. If you choose to use it, submit all issues to https://github.com/meepingsnesroms/RetroArchOverlayEditor not the RetroArch repo.