Robert-
There are quite a few themes that should work for you. My suggestion for you is to look under themes and give some of them a try. Maybe try some that have less artwork etc..
I made a theme for the pi but my revamped uni-cade is meant to replace it. It uses wheel or vertical art right now but I'm going to add an option for text list as well. I haven't tested it on my rpi2 yet but it should work. One of the background options is animated stars but you can turn that off in layout options to save a little on performance but it really shouldn't affect it much.
FYI, I am going add an option for custom backgrounds this week. Of course, you can add your own if you have a basic understanding of scripting for AM. But, my plan is to make it where you can just drop a custom image in the layout folder for whatever systems you have. The image names just need to match the emulator names that are configured.