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Themes
SMS ships with a finished look out of the box — a full-screen desktop background, a set of device and file icons, and a boot splash — but the desktop background is skinnable. This page explains the desktop skin (a .smi background image), where SMS looks for it, and what this fork's refreshed artwork adds.
ℹ You don't need a skin to use SMS
Skinning is optional. A fresh install uses the built-in desktop and icons. A skin only replaces the appearance — it never changes which devices or formats SMS supports. If you never touch the skin settings, you simply keep the default look.
SMS has always had a lightweight skin engine. The one thing it lets you replace is the desktop background, by pointing SMS at a .smi skin file:
| File | Extension | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Desktop skin | .smi |
The full-screen background behind the device menu, file browser and status line — the "wallpaper". |
A .smi is an IPU-encoded image — a compact picture format the PlayStation 2's IPU hardware decodes directly, the same colour pipeline SMS uses to draw video. When a desktop skin is set and loads successfully, its picture is stretched to fill the screen and replaces the default background; if no skin is set (or a skin file fails to load), SMS falls back to its built-in desktop.
ℹ A note on .mbf files
Alongside the skin setting you may see a separate .mbf option. Despite living near the skin settings, .mbf is not a background image — it is an optional custom font used to draw text, most useful for subtitle scripts that need characters the built-in font doesn't cover. It changes how text looks, not the wallpaper. Subtitle rendering is covered on the Subtitles page.
ℹ Where skins are chosen
The desktop skin name is an ordinary SMS setting. You pick it from the on-screen menus alongside the other player options, and — like every other setting — it is written to your saved configuration so it persists across reboots. See Settings Reference for how the settings menu is laid out and how configuration is saved.
This build ships with a refreshed desktop and a full set of device icons on top of the classic skin engine. The default artwork is separate from skin loading; the October work also adds skin-input validation and a late-config repaint fix. Compared with older SMS builds you get:
- A redrawn full-screen desktop background and a matching boot splash shown while SMS starts up.
- A complete, consistent set of device icons — including a dedicated MX4SIO microSD icon (older builds reused another device's icon for it), plus icons for the internal HDD, MMCE, i.LINK and SMB.
- Redrawn file and status icons used throughout the browser and menus.
These are baked into the program itself, so they are the same on every device you boot from. Applying a custom .smi skin overrides the desktop background on top of them; the icons stay as the built-in set.
SMS looks for skin files in a Skins folder, and the location depends on how SMS was started:
On a remountable launch source, including a memory-card boot, SMS first tries Skins/MyTheme.smi beside the ELF. For mc1:/APPS/SMS.elf, that is mc1:/APPS/Skins/MyTheme.smi.
If the launch-folder skin cannot be read, SMS tries mc?:/SMS/Skins/MyTheme.smi on the configured card slot. See asset lookup order rather than assuming the presence of a memory card changes the primary path.
Put the .smi file in the appropriate Skins folder, choose it from the on-screen menu, and save your settings so it is remembered. On the next redraw the desktop background changes to your skin.
If a skin doesn't appear
Make sure the file has the exact .smi extension and sits directly in the Skins folder SMS is looking in (memory card or boot device, per above), and that the name you selected matches the file name. If a skin file can't be read or isn't a valid IPU image, SMS quietly falls back to its built-in desktop rather than showing an error — so a missing background usually means a wrong path, name or file format.
Because .smi is an IPU-encoded image and not a plain PNG or JPEG, you don't just rename a picture — the image has to be converted into the IPU format with a converter tool first. The workflow, conceptually, is:
Design your wallpaper at a normal screen resolution. SMS stretches the skin to fill the display, so a 4:3 image sized for standard-definition output gives the most predictable result.
Run the image through an IPU converter to produce the .smi file. This is the step that turns an ordinary picture into something SMS's IPU decoder can load.
Copy the finished .smi into the Skins folder as in Applying a skin, pick it on-screen, and save.
Why isn't a skin just a PNG or JPEG?
The desktop skin loads through the PS2's IPU hardware, which decodes a specific image format rather than PNG/JPEG. Converting your picture to .smi up front means SMS can load and display the background quickly using the same hardware path it uses for video, without doing a general-purpose image decode every time it draws the desktop. The device and file icons in this fork are handled by a separate artwork pipeline and are built into the program, so they aren't part of the .smi skin.
Every storage source in SMS has its own icon in the top device menu, so you can tell at a glance which device is selected. This fork ships a distinct icon for each:
| Device | Icon shows |
|---|---|
| USB | USB mass-storage drive |
| MX4SIO (microSD) | A dedicated microSD icon — new in this fork; older builds reused another device's icon |
| Internal HDD | Hard-disk drive |
| i.LINK | i.LINK / IEEE 1394 storage |
| MMCE (SD2PSX / MemCard PRO2) | Memory-card-slot storage device |
| SMB network share | Network share |
| CD / DVD | Optical disc — data CD or DVD |
| Audio CD (CDDA) | Audio disc |
The disc icon reflects the kind of disc in the drive — a data CD, a DVD and an audio CD are shown differently — so the device menu stays informative even when the same optical drive holds different media. See Devices Overview for how the device menu itself works.
720p / 1080i background behavior
In 720p and 1080i modes SMS uses a plain gradient instead of loading full-screen desktop artwork, because the HD framebuffer consumes the VRAM needed by that texture. Use an SD mode when checking a wallpaper. This deliberate fallback is separate from #27's skin-after-restart report.
On a remountable launch path, skins are tried in Skins/ beside the ELF first, even on memory-card boots; the configured card's SMS/Skins/ is a fallback. See asset lookup order. Test skin persistence after saving and relaunching.
- Settings Reference Where skin names live & how config saves
- Devices Overview The device menu & icons in context
- Troubleshooting When something looks wrong
- Credits & Sources Artwork & contributors