Saturday, January 21, 2006

Xbox360 Themes where the heck are they?

Okay so it's fairly obvious by the lack of posts, that I'm besotted with my new machine. Not being the most technologically advanced human on the planet, it took me a while to realise that you can apply themes (skins) to your xbox360 dashboard.

An hour later (see told ya) I discovered that a simple tap on the 360 controller guide button (the one with the pretty green lights) reveals a side panel.

So make sure your logged in under whatever profile you've chosen,
tap the guide button
select personal options,
select themes and voila!


From what I've read I beleive you can create your own themes and import them to the 360. But as yet I haven't investigated, if you know whether this is true and how it can be done, please drop us a comment or a link.

Update: Thanks to Luka Mirosevic
for taking the effort to scour Google for a means of applying skins to the 360 dashboard. It appears I may have got it this whole -make your own 360 theme- wrong, but he's included a link to xboxscene which has over 50 free, legal skinning tools for original xbox. You might also like to visit his blog Mad Humour Daily to read about a really weird xbox sale on ebay.

Update2: Following a good long trawl of googles innards it appears I have the whole design your own theme thing completely wrong. I'm sorry. Next time i'll wear my glasses when reading forum posts. The following little hint on using your own gamerpic (sometime in the future) is the only token I can offer in return. Why no custom pics on live from Joystiq

Update3: Stop Press! If you've connected your computer to the 360, have downloaded windows media connect and can view your pictures in a slideshow. Well you probably know already you can use any picture as a background for your xbox360. (well to my shame I hadn't spotted it) Simply select your favourite piccy thumnail, see the blue button bottom left of the dashboard? "Apply as background" hee hee happy old man. Ah redemption how sweet.

Update4: Anonymous was gracious enough to spend time on the following comment:
Here is some info regarding creating your own Themes. As mentioned already, there doesn't appear to be a way to create your own theme (yet). But you can customize the background of the dashboard with any image you like. You can also customize the background color of the guide to a custom color in addition fo any background colors/images supported by the various themes.

But there is another way to get pics on the 360 in case you don't have it networked to your PC. Just plug in a USB flash memory stick and you can copy files from it to your Xbox hard drive and set them as the background of your dashboard. You can't chose a different pic for each blade (which would make it more of a true "theme" but its still cool. I believe (though I don't have one to test) that you could also plug in a USB hard drive and do the same thing. Also digital camera's, iPods, etc will allow this.


More elderly pages tagged

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

After an extensive search on google, I couldn't find any way of creating custom Dashboard themes...
I found this interesting page though, it contains all the legal Xbox tools:
http://www.xbox-scene.com/tools/tools.php?page=skinconf

Anonymous said...

Here is some info regarding creating your own Themes. As mentioned already, there doesn't appear to be a way to create your own theme (yet). But you can customize the background of the dashboard with any image you like. You can also customize the background color of the guide to a custom color in addition fo any background colors/images supported by the various themes.

But there is another way to get pics on the 360 in case you don't have it networked to your PC. Just plug in a USB flash memory stick and you can copy files from it to your Xbox hard drive and set them as the background of your dashboard. You can't chose a different pic for each blade (which would make it more of a true "theme" but its still cool. I believe (though I don't have one to test) that you could also plug in a USB hard drive and do the same thing. Also digital camera's, iPods, etc will allow this.

Have fun.

Unknown said...

Thanks anonymous, now if I can get the grandkids to show me I'll be a happy bunny. Thanks for the time taken it's appreciated.