What's new in ES-DE v1.2

These are the new features implemented in ES-DE (EmulationStation Desktop Edition) v1.2
ES-DE is an emulator frontend for Linux, macOS, Windows and Android. It allows you to browse and launch games from your library and it comes preconfigured for over a 100 different game systems.
Website:
es-de.org
Discord:
/ discord
Music: Smooth and Wonders by Vincenzo (László Vincze)
(Yes this is Commodore 64 SID music!)

[@MrSongib]

This is great, it's better to see more Frontend EmuStation these days. So more new people would jump in. and hopefully in the future will get easier to set it up, so people can get easily jump in and start their collection and nostalgia.

[@RetroCrisis]

Most of my videos are about RetroArch or RetroPie. I'll defo investigate this!

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

Great to hear! And if you have any questions you can send me an email or reach out to me on Discord :)

[@santosjg87]

Great job!! That's better than Launchbox!

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

Thank you! I really take that as a great compliment as I consider LaunchBox to be the gold standard of emulator frontends :)

[@bundangkorea]

No, it's not. Not even close. But it's certainly nice to have an alternative, and EmulationStation is a more than decent choice, especially for anyone who'd rather not buy the premium version of LB

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

@@bundangkorea As a LaunchBox user for quite some time prior to starting the ES-DE project I can certainly understand your point, and that's why I call LaunchBox the gold standard for emulator frontends. But you have to remember that this is a young project, the first 1.0.0 release was less than a year ago and with each release functionality and features are added that closes the gap to what LaunchBox offers. As well ES-DE has multiple benefits that LaunchBox doesn't, like running natively on Linux and macOS, running faster and requiring less resources, being free, and and perhaps most importantly, being open source. As well I dislike applications that have separate interfaces like LaunchBox has, I want a unified interface for everything including the scraper, which is why I started my project based on RetroPie EmulationStation. But this last point is a personal preference of course and some users may see it as a benefit with the dual interfaces of LaunchBox/BigBox.

[@kevinbernard9642]

@@ES-DE_Frontend The speed of this project alone makes it superior to launchbox/bigbox. I'm running Launchbox on a 5900x with a 3080ti and it is still laggy and annoying to use. EmulationStation is smooth as butter. I'm trying to set it up now to work with the Steam version of Retroarch. Just need to figure out how to make Steam detect that Retroarch is running so that things like cloud saves will work right.

[@Imgema]

@@ES-DE_Frontend Nah, Launchbox is "the gold standard" when it comes to how easy it is to setup. The end result is still a slow, janky frontend. ES is sleeker and faster but it's setup process is the stuff of nightmares if you want it to use the media assets you already have.

[@aussiejace8572]

I really love this programe. but can anyone help with setting up cemu on it using linux i have installed ceme on linux using lutris and works fine using the emulator but dose anyone know how to incorporate this with emulationstation at all?

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

I will add official support for running emulators via Wine/Proton/Lutris/Bottles in the future but unfortunately I have not investigated this yet. However the EmuDeck project has managed to add Cemu to ES-DE using Proton, maybe you can check how they did it?

[@ytbone9430]

I pulled all my hair with the old EmulationStation because of controller and game resources configuration! Now I found this, not tried yet, but looks very promising! o) Does it support loading of a game from an individual game folder, where a single game with its iso/rom file and corresponding video/cover files are located side by side in the same folder? So covers, videos and actual binary game data is not spread around and separated as in the old EmulationStation? My goal is to just copy existing game folders for a specific system into the right place and ES-DE will show them up without tinkering with gamelist.xml, mass-renames, specific scripting etc.. (no problem scanning again via GUI if folders have been updated of course). Now that would be nice.. o) I will surely try ES-DE, the list of changes I scrolled through is a must try. Thank you for doing this! o)

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

ES-DE does not rely on any media links in the gamelist.xml files like other forks so it's much easier to migrate and add images and videos. Media files are however not located next to the game ROMs as that would make it impossible to easily relocate the whole media directory which ES-DE supports using a menu option. You normally want to keep your game media on fast storage to avoid lag when using the application, but the game ROMs can usually be stored on slower storage, even on a NAS as long as you use the NFS protocol.

[@glovedcop69]

Why wouldn't it be reading my CPS folders and creating a section for them when I open the app?

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

I have responded to your question in the ES-DE subreddit.

[@vickveni]

I just wanted to put this comment, I found this software like 3 days ago and this is by far the best. Default theme is soo cool and even the EmulationStation (Blue one) classic theme works perfectly fine with this and the built-in scraper is also damn good. And lastly, This is my primary software now. And Thanks again.

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

Thanks, I'm very happy to hear that! And yes, ES-DE is compatible with most RetroPie EmulationStation themes :)

[@vickveni]

@@ES-DE_Frontend Oneday this is going to be one of the best Frontends ever made. I can say that cause this made me uninstall my LaunchBox software. So yeah keep up the good work :)

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

@@vickveni Wow, I really take that as a compliment! I was a LaunchBox user myself before starting to work on ES-DE. I'm definitely working hard on improving the application, I'll probably make the 1.2.3 release tomorrow with a number of improvements and for the 2.0 release in a few months or so I'm implementing a new theme engine that is the first step towards getting theming capabilities to a level like LaunchBox and similar frontends.

[@vickveni]

@@ES-DE_Frontend Wow, amazing can't wait. Specially for that new theme engine update. This software needs more attention. I think most people dont know about the existence of this frontend. If you can do some advertising, this frontend would get lot of attention :)

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

@@vickveni It will be a while before the release of 2.0 and the new theme engine though, but it will come eventually! ES-DE actually got a lot of attention lately due to being popular on the Steam Deck but you're right that on other platforms it's not so well-known yet :)

[@laurafreeman5278]

I have a question: is their a way of adding desktop applications to emulationstation?

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

Yes you can add desktop applications using shortcuts or scripts, if you need help then please join our Discord server or subreddit.

[@laurafreeman5278]

Ok

[@linuxstreamer8910]

on arch linux what is the citra version it accepts as a standalone edit already found it flatpak

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

Yes and I'm also adding the "citra" binary for ES-DE 1.2.4 so the AUR release of Citra could be used as well.

[@Anonymous-ye8id]

I have try Retrobat frontend and i also try the real (ES) Emulation Station and i dident like those 2 frontend so much both are almost same but (ES) so MUCH editing in es_system.cfg and retrobat you cant add custom emulator there is alreddy a handful of emulators and you cant edit retroarch so much... But yesterday i discover this one i download the portable version and i try it wow i like it much more its easyer add a game and just drag my retroarch folder in right place and i try one game it just work flowlesly no problem i can add custom emulator/emulators for a system no problems no editing or somthing error so far just drag the folder and add it in the emulators folder this frontend is so easy to use am verry imressed defently gonna use this one for sure and in future i will give it 5 stars keap it up and i will follow this channel! cheers

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

Thanks, I'm very happy to hear that you like ES-DE! And yes it's an important goal of this project to make it as easy as possible to install and use :)

[@Anonymous-ye8id]

@@ES-DE_Frontend great and best frontend of the year defently gonna love it and use it and i think i will make some video review about this frontend

[@GabriReviews]

Do you have a theme besides the two default ones?

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

Most RetroPie themes will work with ES-DE, you can search for those online. In the near future I also plan to create a list of officially recommended themes.

[@Marco-00]

Well done! I will check it out! Will be possible to use it portable (relatives paths)?

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

Thanks! On Windows it's fully supported to run portable, as on an external disk or flash drive etc. Not yet for macOS and Linux though.

[@Marco-00]

@@ES-DE_Frontend Great to hear that! for me portability is kind of an important feature, for sure I will try to set it up in the coming days! Peace

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

@@Marco-00 Check the user guide, it has a link to a detailed guide on how to configure the portable setup.

[@DrGorillaNuts]

This is the best frontend for the Steam Deck! Do you have a roadmap posted for future plans? I'd love to see RetroAchievement integration, playtime tracking, & a few customization options to allow for a modern TV/video streaming service type layout! Thanks for all your hard work!

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

Hi, I'm happy to hear that you like ES-DE! You can find the roadmap here: gitlab.com/es-de/emulationstation-de/-/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

[@PorkChopVII]

Any tips to get 3ds and ps2 to to show up in the front end? Steamdeck user

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

ES-DE uses the RetroPie naming conventions so the 3DS directory has to be named n3ds and not 3ds. PS2 is fully supported but if you use .chd files make sure to use the latest 1.2.2 release.

[@PorkChopVII]

@@ES-DE_Frontend ill mess with the naming for the 3ds, thanks! as far as the ps2 emulator, thats an issue with the emulator itself and the steam deck. after researching i have to revert back to a different version till they roll out a fix.

[@joeydelmarsjr.646]

so emustation uses retroarch for most emulators BUT can it be customed to run the stand alone pcsx2 or teknoparrot apps?

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

Yes it can run standalone emulators, many are already preconfigured and I'm making a release very soon (likely today) which adds support for even more. You can also customize it to add additional emulators if you like to!

[@Imgema]

Can this simply allow you to choose your own folders for media files you already have, without scrapping?

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

There is a section in the user guide on how to manually copy media files instead of scraping. Whether it's easy to accomplish or not depends on the structure and names of your current media files: gitlab.com/es-de/emulationstation-de/-/blob/master/USERGUIDE.md#manually-copying-game-media-files

[@Imgema]

@@ES-DE_Frontend Thanks, i didn't know DE fixes this huge problem.

[@napynap]

As a Q1 recipient of Steam Deck, I'm very interested in this!

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

Yes ES-DE should work fine on the Steam Deck :)

[@xXTobi296Xx]

I absolutely love this! Using it on my Steamdeck currently. Are there plans for adding RPCS3 to the default configuration at any point?

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

Very glad to hear that you like using ES-DE! Actually RPCS3 is already supported and part of the default configuration, but make sure to give the RPCS3 Flatpak the necessary permissions to access your memory card or it won't work. You can use Flatseal for that.

[@xXTobi296Xx]

@@ES-DE_Frontend Thank you very much! I got it working now :) You're a legend

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

@@xXTobi296Xx You're welcome, happy to hear that it works :)

[@sillyshitt]

Nice!

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

Thanks! :D

[@vickveni]

I started with Retroarch and then i was loking for a software with more fancy stuff like 3D box arts and 3D carts. So then i switched to LaunchBox it was good but, its kinda laggy. So today i found this software and this is by far the best. Its soo smooth and not laggy. Thank you soo much for this.

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

Thanks, I'm verry happy to hear that :)

[@bundangkorea]

This is a pretty decent update to EmulationStation, but with all of the retropi themes I've tried so far, they work fine by none of them will show box-art images. Screenshots, videos, and logos seem to be fine though. Any advice on how to fix this?

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

The traditional theme engine in EmulationStation is very basic and essentially has a fixed layout where it will try to always display a certain image type. I'm working on a new theme engine for the 2.0 release where you can specificy exactly which image type to display via the theme configuration. Until this is realeased I'm not sure if there is a solution other than renaming or removing your screnshots and miximages media directories as that will force ES-DE to display the box art.

[@bundangkorea]

@@ES-DE_Frontend Okay, thanks a lot for the quick response. What I should have also mentioned is that in other emulationstation builds, the box-cover images will appear within a particular retropi theme, but those box images (and same theme) will not appear in this build for some unknown reason. Also, I noticed that the naming configuration for the media downloaded from screenscraper is different than other emulationstation builds. Anyways, keep up the good work and I'll be looking forward to the new theme engine with the 2.0 release.

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

@@bundangkorea That's strange, could you please provide me with a name or link to such a theme? It should behave the same, except that miximages will be shown first in ES-DE and these don't exist in the same form in other ES forks. Apart from that, yes ES-DE is very different in many ways including how game media files are handled.

[@bundangkorea]

@@ES-DE_Frontend Not sure if you could see my previous post, because every time I posted here it gets deleted somehow? Anyways, the theme I use is RVGM. If you need the link please let me know

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

@@bundangkorea That's strange, I'm definitely not deleting any comments, maybe it's KZbin that gets creative with clearning up posts somehow! I found the theme and I've tried it in ES-DE. I will also try to compare it to RetroPie ES later on and see if there are any differences that could be caused by bugs in ES-DE.

[@Dexther2k1]

i change directory but ... system crash end not start.

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

Sorry, could you be more specific on exactly what went wrong?

[@Dexther2k1]

@@ES-DE_Frontend set directory d: are HD format in NTFS Windows. Star application end exit...

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

@@Dexther2k1 I'm not sure I understand, did you unpack the EmulationStation-DE directory from the portable installation ZIP file directly to your D: drive and when you try to run EmulationStation.exe the application doesn't start at all?

[@ES-DE_Frontend]

@@Dexther2k1 I'm not sure what your problem is, but it's possible that you're missing the OpenGL drivers required to run ES-DE. I've just added a new question (and solution) to the FAQ about this: gitlab.com/es-de/emulationstation-de/-/blob/master/FAQ.md

[@Dexther2k1]

Emm. At the request of Roms directory. I'm set d: After the program try to running application crash on exit.