I am looking for nice UnleashX skins. Links and images in pinned topic are dead...
A have skins installed by AID, but most of them aren't interesting.

LMGTFY

lol silky smooth

Nice post ^ but if you go to that most obvious source now because of their site problem last year everything, and I mean everything XBMC, UnleashX, EvoX skins and who knows what else, they're just lumped in together. If you don't know what you're looking for you can't find out, there is no preview now. You could spend days downloading stuff hoping to find what you're looking for.

UnleashX and XBMC skins are found elsewhere in large sets helpfully uploaded by other users but try finding Avalaunch skins now anywhere. I posted about this in the appropriate forum here a month ago to no avail.

I have the added problem that still being on dial-up lucky dip downloading is pretty much wasted time and those large sets are way too big for me to download. I'm sure that must apply to others worldwide too.

TBH many of the UnleashX skins posted on that site weren't worth the effort. There were a hell of a lot of poorly or half finished skins and very few that took my fancy. Most were simply a striking main menu background picture with often a poorly chosen text layout/colour choice on top. You can do better yourself just skin editing on the Xbox. But there were exceptions.

True, but as well as the www.xbox-skins.net link there are other links for packs of UnleashX skins.

You could also try using The Wayback Machine with www.xbox-skins.net......

oooh its magic

http://web.archive.org/web/20051122174327/...hp?dlcategory=5

but unfortunatly not all pages are there..

you can google this.
142 UnleashX Skins
and
69 UnleashX Skins

No idea what they are. But they are unleashx skins.

Yes, but what you can do is use the Wayback Machine to see which skins are for which dash, and see the descriptions of the skins and their filenames, then use the current version of www.xbox-skins.net to find the file with that name and download it.

You might need to look at a few versions of the archived pages at the Wayback Machine to find what you need, but it's better than nothing.....

I definitely agree with you. xbox-skins.net was down for a while without the ability to download anything... at least now the files are still there, but of course they are really all over the place.

I have the names of a few really good skins that you can start with. These are attempts to recreate the look of the M$ Dashboard. They look good in my opinion, and I use one of them.


(not sure which of these 4 links is newer/better, I'm guessing final is better, but anything is possible)
http://www.xbox-skins.net/downloads/Blue_Athloni_Final.zip
http://www.xbox-skins.net/downloads/%5b159...MsDash_Blue.zip
http://www.xbox-skins.net/downloads/%5b168..._Athloni_v2.zip
http://www.xbox-skins.net/downloads/%5b525...hloni_Final.zip

(5 of the same, not sure if they are duplicates or different)
http://www.xbox-skins.net/downloads/%5b157...sDash_Green.zip
http://www.xbox-skins.net/downloads/%5b159...sDash_Green.zip
http://www.xbox-skins.net/downloads/%5b171..._Athloni_v2.zip
http://www.xbox-skins.net/downloads/%5b198...oni_Kyro_v4.zip
http://www.xbox-skins.net/downloads/%5b653...een_Athloni.zip
(not sure if this is next one is for UnleashX)
http://www.xbox-skins.net/downloads/%5b219...lackbolt_v5.zip

(two, not sure if they are the same)
http://www.xbox-skins.net/downloads/%5b165..._MsDash_Red.zip
http://www.xbox-skins.net/downloads/%5b700%5dRed_Athloni.zip

I had another one from that site (Before it was hacked or whatever) which was a more recently created bios where you could save your avatar image from your Xbox Live Gamertag profile page on xboxlive.com (it's in png format), along with your avatar image, and it would mimic the look of Xbox 360. You could replace the background with anything you wanted. The only one I remember was a gears of war themed one, so you can search for that, but I'm pretty sure the page had seperate download links for the dashboard sounds, ect (maybe they were in the description?). archive.org might help. I think I still have it with all the template files so I'll see if I can upload it.

Very helpful posts everyone.

That Blue.Athloni.FINAL skin was the one that older SID used and its installer dash too. I've seen several versions of it, probably edited ones. A good basic dash.

I've just looked through my small collection of UnleashX skins some of which I may have got from the site in question. Might help to identify them:-

Atlas_Blue - don't like it much, the text positioning is particuarly messed up.

marrbelized_V2 - very good monochrome skin but with one text positioning issue. Font choice a bit basic but both matters easily to change.

Pudd_Metal - another good monochrome skin but Game Save Manager is displayed poorly due to transparency matters. That may be improved with editing but haven't tried it yet.

FlighTs XBoxpro - good, well finished skin, a bit 1980s in its neon/sci-fi graphical design theme but some real effort went into it.

Shattered Cube Blue - decent design if odd choice of main image. Certain elements could be better positioned.

TrueMSdash 2 Green - I used this as the basis for my main UnleashX edited skin. Basically the default blue skin in Xbox green but with
more thoughful text positioning and background/text colour selection.

VM VIEW2 - one of those 'striking' main image skins. The orange alien, cat's eyes theme soon annoys and the image isn't that high resolution either ie. looks a bit soft. Still, apart from that and the odd 1970s style UnleashX graphic, an above average design.

Neither are perfect but marrebelized_V2 and Pudd_Metal are the two standout skins I've found, The graphics look very clean and professional in both cases. When you get that mix of colour from the icon/preview window and the metal monochome theme the whole concept really works.

Thank you very much for links and info.

Athloni Blue is nice, but there are no info about console, I tried another versions, but there are owful fonts...

MS Dash is perfect for me, I would use THC Lite, but I need FTP and I want games folder on the first screen...

But by accident, I found very nice skin! It's a default skin of UnleashX It's blue, clear, lots of info, almost ideal for me (might be more impresive).

With skin editing you can quite easily change the fonts, colours, positioning and have all the text info options on any skin that you're ever likely to want. It's usually a matter of writing an the appropriate command line of text in the skin.xml. Sometimes it's even simpler just changing a 'False' to 'True' or merely deleting an asterisk to enable a disabled feature.

I'm not sure if it is possible to alter the main or sub menu order (never tried it myself). The "ItemPos" (item position) command line in all the skins I've looked at do not specify the actual item ie. Launch, Games, Applications etc so it is likely fixed. But it is possible to have all the main menu options display at once on the start screen in a straight up and down list or curved list rather than the five option rotating menu as it is on the Default Blue skin.

There are a whole load of what are called valid UnleashX tags ie. commands you can add to a skin.xml to enable extra text displays or functions eg. "VideoMode" will show whether the console is set to NTSC or PAL. Unfortunately there's no definitive list although Heimdall did find me an old thread which listed around forty.

If you're interested I can probably find that link for you.

Here.

Thank you; helpful as always.

Whilst we're here one thing in regard to UnleashX skins: some have video/game preview windows. I understand how to get this to work but what I've never found the answer to is this: is is possible to add such a preview window to a skin that doesn't have one already?

Is there some simple command line you can add to the skin to enable a specified area to become a preview window or is it a feature that had to be designated during the original skin build?

If that is the case is it possible to build a new UnleashX skin or manipulate an existing skin to alter the positioning/size of the preview window? Are the tools/information about how to do it still available and, if so, where?

A skin is just an xml file. You need to find a skin that has the video preview capability, and look for the lines that play the preview. It will look something like:

I must have just been looking at some of those half finished skin.xmls I mentioned earlier because the two I checked do have the <ImageSource="GamePreview"/> line but not the image positioning part. That's what made me think it might be some pre-determined fixed feature.

Excellent, that now gives me a good excuse for messing about with some UnleashX skin editing again.

In UnleashX you can also edit the icon for each menu item, and there is a pack of icons that are fitting for certain things like shutdown, eject tray, ect.

I'm pretty sure this is the collection, since I have them on my PC in a folder with the same name as the zip:

http://www.xbox-skins.net/downloads/%5b218...ashXIconPak.zip

Here are what some of them look like:






Also, instead of using the icons embedded in the .xbe for some emulators, I grabbed .png images of the consoles themselves, plus renamed the emulators to the actual name of the console (For example, I renamed PCSXbox to Playstation 1, ect.).

The skin I mentioned before that mimics the dashboard of the Xbox 360 (NXE, not blades) is called NXE Reloaded. There were about 3 versions of it uploaded which all seemed to be the same, the only difference was the background image.

The link to one here: http://www.xbox-skins.net/downloads/6282-1...r_of_war_ii.zip

You can change the background image to anything you want. I even looked in the skin.xml file, found where it was referencing the background image, and I was able to change it to load a .xmv (Xbox video file) instead, which worked out pretty cool. Getting an XMV is kind of a hassle though because you need the .wmv -> .xmv converter and the .wmv you use needs to be Windows Media 8 (newer versions don't work). I used either adobe after effects or Sony Vegas to convert to WMV8.

awesome thank you

More useful information ^^ - thanks.

When I first became interested in UnleashX skinning ago I was playing Rayman 3 so what I did in my first attempt at producing a significantly edited skin was to make it Rayman themed. Basically I just extracted every image, font and .xmv I could find in the game folder.

I, rather crudely, replaced in fact, more accurately. covered up the Xbox menu item icons with smiley Rayman faces.

Xbox games seem to me to be the very obvious resource to use particularly with the FMV being all in the required .xmv format. I do find animated backgrounds, particularly in File Explorer, distracting and, in my admittedly limited experience using them, don't loop smoothly. But in Rayman 3 I did find a very appropriate 8 second sequence which was used as the loading screen.

For some reason there are comparatively few game themed UnleashX skins published, Halo and a few obscure Japanese RPGs excepted. Copyright matters I'd guess.

Yea, I guess you could use an .xmv from an Xbox game (might've even seen that done before actually). I can't stand when an .xmv takes up the entire screen and it's deemed a skin, but the NXE one that I mentioned before has a layer above the background... since I made the background a video, the video doesn't stand out/annoy as much. I'll have to show you a video of it, I've got a capture device but I'll have to transfer the skin to my Xbox, I designed it for a friend to go with a custom xbox I made (check it out http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=732240 ).

I'll probably upload the skin too. I think it's a good template skin, since it has a few .pngs (small avatar image plus full avatar picture) and a string of text placed at a specific location (the fake "gamerscore" you can set next to the small avatar image) on the screen, and it already has the background image switched for a .xmv in the xml. It's not as hard as it seems to get the .xmv going --- it's really just getting the file converted to wmv8. I'm pretty sure someone even made a gui for the wmv->xmv converter.




Nah, lol. It's not like they were being sold to anyone.

Here are some of those emulator icons that I mentioned before. I found them on my computer. I'm pretty sure I just google searched and saved the good ones with transparancy + resized them.

Right click -> "Save as" to keep

No there's no money exchanging hands but what they're doing unarguably is publishing and making available to download material to which they don't own the copyright. Using it yourself there is no problem but putting part of a game ie. even just a short FMV sequence online for download as part of a skin, in UK law, that is still piracy.

As it is many of those skins use copyrighted pictures I'd bet the skin creators don't own. Some skins use celebrity publicity shots (Jennifer Aniston, Jessica Alba, Pamela Anderson etc) and I'm sure they're not going to mind if their pictures are used and distributed in this way. But unless the copyright owners have given specific permission it could still be considered a breach of copyright. I'd suspect this applies to the preview .wmv files there too.

That said I've been downloading quite a few skins in the last few days thanks to Heimdall's archive web site link helping the identification of specific skins. Very useful, I've now found a few better Avalaunch ones to try out to replace the dull default skin.

But as others have said the web site in question wasn't fully archived. There were something like 200 pages of EvoX and UnleashX skins but only a few dozen pages are now available and on many of them the skin preview pictures are missing. So much of the download material there still is a lucky dip.

Nice icons also hello again people been gone for a bit.