**Note:** This document is intended as a quick start guide as well as a reference for the user interface settings and functionality. For more in-depth information and details on how to compile ES-DE and perform more advanced configuration, please refer to [INSTALL.md](INSTALL.md).
2) Install and configure [RetroArch](https://www.retroarch.com)
3) _Windows only: add the RetroArch directory to your system path environmental variable_
4) Start RetroArch and install the emulator cores you want to use, see the [end](USERGUIDE.md#supported-game-systems) of this guide which ones are used by default by ES-DE
5) Put your game ROMs in separate directories per game system under ~/ROMs, again see the end of this guide which directory names should be used
6) Start ES-DE and follow the on-screen instructions to configure your controller
7) Scrape game media for your collection and play some games!
Getting started with ES-DE is easy, just make sure to install the software properly, either manually as built from source code or using one of the supplied packages. On Windows and macOS you'll use the installer instead of a package.
***)** For Ubuntu 20.10, the included VLC version 3.0.11.1-2 is broken so ES-DE will crash when attempting to play videos. This can be fixed by manually replacing the file /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libvlccore.so.9.0.0 with the corresponding file from version 3.0.9.2-1 from Ubuntu 20.04. Make sure that the /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libvlccore.so.9 symlink points to this file as well. Hopefully this issue will soon be patched so that this manual workaround is not required.
The installation procedure is just covered briefly here and may differ a bit for your specific operating system, so in case of problems refer to your system documentation.
Note that this requires the RPM Fusion repository as there's a dependency on VLC, which is not part of the standard operating system repo. See [INSTALL.md](INSTALL.md#building-on-unix) for details on how to add this.
There's not really much to say about these operating systems, just install ES-DE as you would any other application. On maCOS it's via the .dmg drag-and-drop installer, and on Windows it's just a normal application installer.
On Unix this means /home/\<username\>/.emulationstation/, on macOS /Users/\<username\>/.emulationstation/ and on Windows C:\Users\\<username\>\\.emulationstation\
**Note:** As of ES-DE v1.0 there is no internationalization support, so you would always need to supply the English directory name for your home directory, which is by the way always the real physical name on the file system. For instance in macOS, /Users/leon will be required instead of /Användare/leon which is what's shown inside the operating system for a Swedish localized installation. But using the tilde home symbol '~' is a workaround for this, and it's recommended to always use it for any ES-DE configuration settings that require a path to your home directory as it removes any confusion regarding localized home directory paths.
On first startup the configuration file `es_settings.cfg` will be generated in the ES-DE home directory, containing all the default settings. A file named `es_systems.cfg` will also be copied from the program resource folder. This file contains the game ROM paths and emulator settings and can be modified if needed. For information on how to do this, refer to the [INSTALL.md](INSTALL.md#es_systemscfg) document.
There's a log file in the ES-DE home directory named `es_log.txt`, please refer to this in case of any issues as it should hopefully provide information on what went wrong. Starting ES-DE with the --debug flag provides even more detailed information.
After ES-DE finds at least one game file, it will populate that game system and the application will start. If there are no game files, an error messsage will be shown, explaining that you need to install your game files into your ROM directory. You will also be given a choice to change the ROM directory if you don't want to use the default one.
_This is the error dialog shown if no game files were found. It also lets you configure the ROM directory if you don't want to use the default one. Note that the directory is the real physical path, and that your operating system may present this as a localized path if you are using a language other than English._
ES-DE is designed to be backwards compatible to a certain degree, that is, it should be able to read data from other/previous EmulationStation versions such as the RetroPie fork. But the opposite is not true and it's a one-way ticket for your gamelist.xml files and your custom collection files when migrating to ES-DE as they will be modified in ways that previous ES versions will see as data loss. For instance ES-DE does not use image tags inside the gamelist.xml files to find game media but instead matches the media to the names of the game/ROM files. So it will not save any such tags back to the gamelist files during updates, effectively removing the display of the game media if the files are opened in another ES fork.
Due to this, always make backups of at least the following data:
```
~/.emulationstation/gameslists/
~/.emulationstation/collections/
~/.emulationstation/es_settings.cfg
~/.emulationstation/es_systems.cfg
```
Actually as for `es_systems.cfg` you should probably rename or move it somewhere else as it's strongly recommended to use the es_systems.cfg template shipped with ES-DE (which will be automatically copied from the resources directory on startup as long as a file with this name does not already exist). It may still work to use an existing customized es_systems.cfg file, as again ES-DE should be backwards compatible, but if you have issues launching games this is the first thing to look at.
It's probably also a good idea to rename or move `es_settings.cfg` elsewhere as a huge amount of things have changed in the configuration files in ES-DE.
ES-DE fully supports 4K displays (as well as 1440p and other higher resolutions) but some emulators such as RetroArch will always run using the active screen resolution, meaning the emulation will also run in 4K. On slower computers and when resource intensive shaders are in use, the performance may be quite bad. Although it's possible to start ES-DE with the `--resolution` option (which also applies to any launched emulators), this is not really recommended. Full screen mode only works on Unix with this option and even then it's highly dependent on well-written graphics drivers for proper behavior. ES-DE uses the SDL library which insists on setting xrandr to panning mode when doing resolution changes, which is incredibly annoying especially when using Nvidia drivers.
A better approach is to use the custom event scripts functionality in ES-DE to set a temporary resolution upon launching a game that will be reverted when returning from the emulator. This is detailed as an example for Unix in [INSTALL.md](INSTALL.md#custom-event-scripts) but should be possible to implement similarly on other operating systems such as macOS and Windows.
When first starting ES-DE, the application will look for any attached controllers (joysticks and gamepads). If no devices are found, it will be assumed that only keyboard navigation is to be used and the default keyboard mappings will be applied. It's recommended to change these default values, and a message will be displayed describing just this. It's however possible to hide this notification permanently and continue to use the default keyboard mappings if you're happy with them.
If a controller is attached when starting ES-DE and no `es_input.cfg` input configuration file exists, you will be presented with the input configuration dialog. Just follow the steps as described to map the inputs.
If an es_input.cfg configuration file exists, you will not be presented with the input device configuration screen as that would normally just be annoying. If you need to configure a device to control the application (i.e. you've replaced your controller), you can do so by starting ES-DE with the command line argument `--force-input-config` or you can manually delete the es_input.cfg file prior to starting the application. Alternatively you can navigate to the menu using your keyboard and select **Configure input** to configure your new device.
Both new and old devices can be (re)configured at any time via the `Configure input` menu entry. New devices will be appended to the existing input configuration file, so your old devices will retain their configuration.
When starting EmulationStation with the default settings, you will see the main screen first. From here you can navigate your game systems and enter their respective gamelists.
Depending on the theme, the system navigation carousel can be either horizontal or vertical. The default theme rbsimple-DE provides horizontal navigation, i.e. you browse your systems be scrolling left or right.
Upon startup with the default settings, ES-DE is set to the gamelist view style **Automatic**. In this mode the application will look for any game media files (videos and images) and set the view style accordingly. If at least one image is found for any game, the view style **Detailed** will be shown, and if at least one video file is found, the view style **Video** will be selected (superceding the Detailed style). If no game media files are found for a system, the simple **Basic** view will be selected. Note that this automatic selection is applied per game system.
Also note that the Video view style requires that the theme supports it. If not, the Detailed style will be selected instead. (The default theme rbsimple-DE supports both of these view styles).
It's possible to manually set a specific gamelist view style in the UI settings entry of the main menu, but this is applied globally regardless of what media files are available per game system. The manual setting also overrides the theme-supported view styles which has the potential of making ES-DE very ugly indeed.
In addition to the styles just described, there is a **Grid** view style as well, but as of ES-DE version 1.0 this is very limited and not recommended. Future versions may update this style to a more useful state.
If the theme supports it, there's a gamelist information field displayed in the gamelist view, showing the number of games for the system (total and favorites) as well as a folder icon if a folder has been entered. When applying any filters to the gamelist, the game counter is replaced with the amount of games filtered, as in 'filtered / total games', e.g. '19 / 77'. If there are game entries in the filter result that are marked not to be counted as games, the number of such files will be indicated as 'filtered + filtered non-games / total games', for example '23 + 4 / 77' indicating 23 normal games, 4 non-games out of a total of 77. Due to this approach it's theoretically possible that the combined filtered game amount exceeds the number of counted games in the collection, for instance '69 + 11 / 77'. This is not considered a bug and is so by design. This gamelist information field functionality is specific to EmulationStation Desktop Edition so older themes will not support this.
* Kiosk - The main menu will be severely restricted, only displaying the entry to change the audio volume. The game options menu will be restricted as well, removing the metadata editor and the ability to modify custom game collections. And finally the ability to flag or unflag games as favorites will be removed. Apart from this all games will be playable.
* Kid - Only games marked as being suitable for children will be displayed (this flag is set manually per game using the metadata editor). Additionally, the game options menu is disabled, as well as the screensaver controls and the ability to flag and unflag games as favorites. There is also a separate option available to enable or disable the main menu when in Kid mode, see **Enable menu in kid mode** for additional information.
There is an unlock code available to revert to the Full mode from the Kiosk or Kid mode, as is described when changing this setting from the main menu. By default the button sequence is **Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A**. It works to use either a keyboard or a configured controller to input the passkey sequence, but it can't be entered when a menu is open.
The application can also be forced into any of the three modes via the command line options `-force-full`, `--force-kiosk` and `-force-kid`. Note that this is only temporary until the restart of the application, unless the settings menu is entered and the setting is saved to the configuration file (this assumes that the main menu is available in the selected UI mode of course).
There is a help system available throughout the application that provides an overview of the possible actions and buttons that can be used. Note though that some general button actions are never shown, such as the ability to quick jump in gamelists, menus and text input fields using the shoulder and trigger buttons. It's also possible to disable the help system using a menu option for a somewhat cleaner look.
_The help system is displayed at the bottom of the screen, showing the various actions currently available._
The built-in help system will provide a contextual summary of the available navigation options, but here's still a general overview. These are the inputs you mapped in the previous input device configuration step. Note that this is not an exhaustive list, but it covers most situations.
Navigate between gamelists (if _Quick system select_ has been activated in the options), or between systems in the system view (if the theme has a horizontal carousel).
Opens and closes the game options menu in the gamelist view, or toggles the screensaver in the system view (if the _Enable screensaver controls_ setting is activated).
For most systems, this is very straightforward, just put your game files into the folder corresponding to the platform name (these names can be found at the [end](USERGUIDE.md#supported-game-systems) of this guide.)
Let's start with the simple scenario of a single ROM game file per platform, which is the case for the majority of systems. In this example we're setting up ES-DE to play Nintendo Entertainment System games.
The supported file extensions are listed in [es_systems.cfg_unix](resources/templates/es_systems.cfg_unix), [es_systems.cfg_macos](resources/templates/es_systems.cfg_macos) and [es_systems.cfg_windows](resources/templates/es_systems.cfg_windows).
It's highly recommended to use filenames that are corresponding to the full name of the game, otherwise you will need to manually feed the scraper the game name when scraping which is very tedious.
The default game directory folder is ~/ROMs. On Unix this defaults to /home/\<username\>/ROMs, on macOS /Users/\<username\>/ROMs and on Windows C:\Users\\<username\>\ROMs\.
Assuming the default ROM directory is used, we need to create a directory corresponding to the \<path\> tag in es_systems.cfg, in this example it's `nes`.
That's it, start ES-DE and the NES game system should be populated. You can now scrape information and media for the games, and assuming you've setup RetroArch correctly with the Nestopia UE core, you can launch the games.
For some systems, there are sometimes (or always) multiple gamefiles per game. Such an example would be the Commodore 64 when multidisk games are being played. For such instances, simply group the files inside folders.
It's highly recommended to create `.m3u` playlist files for multi-disk images as this automates (well it should) disk swapping in the emulator. It's then this .m3u file that should be selected for launching the game.
It's recommended to have the exact same filename for the .m3u file as for the directory as the game media files will then be shared between the two. This saves some unnecessary scraping as well as some disk space.
It's of course also possible to skip this type of directory structure and put all the games in the root folder, but then there will be multiple entries for the same game which is not so tidy. Another approach would be to put all the files in the root folder and then hide the game files, showing only the .m3u playlist files. ES-DE is flexible so do whatever makes most sense for the situation.
When setting up games in this fashion, it's recommended to scrape the directory in addition to the .m3u file as it looks nicer to see the metadata for the games also when browsing the folders. ES fully supports scraping folders, although some metadata is not included for folders for logical reasons. If you only scrape the folders and not the actual game files, it may look somehow ok when browsing, but when a game is part of a collection, the metadata will be missing there. This includes the **Last played** and **All games** collections for instance. Also note that while it's possible to mark a folder as a favorite, it will never be part of a collection, such as **Favorites**.
As well it's recommended to set the flags **Exclude from game counter** and **Exclude from automatic scraper** for the actual game files so that they are not counted for the game statistics display and not scraped when running the multi-scraper. If you don't want to hide the individual game files but still want a cleaner look, it's also possible to set the flag **Hide metadata fields** for the game files.
Not all systems are as simple as described above, or sometimes there are multiple ways to configure the systems. So specifics to such systems will be covered here. Consider this a work in progress as there are many systems supported by ES-DE.
For all the supported MAME variants as well as Final Burn Alpha/FinalBurn Neo and Neo Geo, single file archives should be used. But these should retain the MAME names as filenames since ES-DE ships with MAME lookup tables, meaning the MAME names are expanded to the full game names.
This is used by the TheGamesDB scraper where the expanded file names are used for game searches. (Screenscraper natively supports searches using the MAME names). It's also quite nice to have the gamelist populated with the expanded game names even before any scraping has taken place.
There are multiple ways to run Amiga games, but the recommended approach is to use WHDLoad. The best way is to use hard disk images in `.hdf` or `.hdz` format, meaning there will be a single file per game. This makes it just as easy to play Amiga games as any console with game ROMs.
An alternative would be to use `.adf` images as not all games may be available with WHDLoad support. For this, you can either put single-disk images in the root folder or in a dedicated adf directory, or multiple-disk games in separate folders. It's highly recommended to create `.m3u` playlist files for multi-disk images as described above.
Advanced topics such as the need for the Amiga Kickstart ROMs to run Amiga games is beyond the scope of this guide, but the following page is recommended for reading more about how this setup can be achieved:
The DOS (and PC) platform uses the DOSBox emulator and the recommended approach here is to keep the directory structure intact, just as if running the game on a real DOS computer. So this means one folder per game in ES-DE. It's also recommended to set the metadata field **Count as game** to off for all files but the actual file used to launch the game, i.e. the binary or a .bat batch file. This is done so that the game counter correctly reflects the number of games you have installed. It's also possible to mark files and subdirectories as hidden to avoid seeing them in ES-DE. Both of these fields can be set using the metadata editor.
Apart from this, DOS games should work the same as any other system. The game folders can be scraped so that it looks nice when browsing the list of games, but make sure to also scrape the files used to launch the games or otherwise the entries in the collections **Last played**, **Favorites** and **All games** as well as any custom collections will miss the game metadata and game media. If you don't have these collections activated, then this can of course be skipped.
Ports are not really executed using emulators, but are rather applications running natively in the operating system. The easiest way to handle these is to add a simple shell script or batch file where you can customize the exact launch parameters for the game.
It's of course possible to add these as single files to the root folder, but normally it's recommended to setup a separate folder per game as there may be more than a single file available per game. You very often want to have easy access to the game setup utility for instance.
These games are executed via the Lutris binary (well it's actually a Python script), and you simply create a shell script per game using the syntax `lutris lutris:rungame/<game name>`
As an alternative, you can add the Lutris games to the Ports game system, if you prefer to not separate them. The instructions above are identical in this case except that the shell scripts should be located inside the `ports` directory rather than inside the `lutris` directory.
For steam, it's recommended to put shell scripts/batch files directly in the root folder, where the file names of these scripts correspond to the game names.
The game ID can be found by going to [https://store.steampowered.com](https://store.steampowered.com) and searching for a game. The Broforce example would have an URL such as this:
ES-DE is a game browsing frontend and does not provide any emulation by itself. It does however come preconfigured for use with emulators as setup in the `es_systems.cfg` file. By default it's primarily setup for use with [RetroArch](https://www.retroarch.com) but this can be modified if needed. If you're interested in customizing your es_systems.cfg file, please refer to the [INSTALL.md](INSTALL.md) document which goes into details on the structure of this file and more advanced configuration topics in general.
Installation and configuration of RetroArch and other emulators is beyond the scope of this guide, but many good resources can be found online on how to do this.
In order to use the default es_systems.cfg file, you need to make sure that the emulator binary directory is in the operating system's path. On Unix systems this is normally not an issue as a package manager has typically been used to install the emulator, and even if compiled from source there is a standardized directory structure which should have you covered. Likewise on macOS, it's assumed that the emulator is installed under the Applications folder so everything should just work. But for Windows you may need to add the emulator directory to your %PATH% variable manually (tip: open Settings from the Start menu and search for _path_).
As an alternative, if the emulator is not in your search path, you can either hardcode an absolute path in es_systems.cfg or use the %ESPATH% variable to set the emulator relative to the ES-DE binary location. Again, please refer to [INSTALL.md](INSTALL.md#es_systemscfg) for details regarding this.
In any instance, ES-DE will display an error notification if attempting to launch a game where the emulator binary is not found. Likewise it will notify if the defined emulator core is not installed. The es_log.txt file will also provide additional details.
ES-DE supports the two scrapers [ScreenScraper.fr](https://www.screenscraper.fr) and [TheGamesDB.net](https://thegamesdb.net). In general TheGamesDB supports less formats and less systems, but in some areas such PC gaming, the quality is better and sometimes ScreenScraper is missing some specific information such as release dates where TheGamesDB may be able to fill in the gaps.
_Here's an example of the multi-scraper running in interactive mode, asking the user to make a selection from the multiple matching games returned by the scraper service._
The single-game scraper is launched from the metadata editor. You navigate to a game, open the game options menu, choose **Edit this game's metadata** and then select the **Scrape** button.
The process of scraping games is basically identical between the single-game scraper and the multi-scraper. You're presented with the returned scraper results, and you're able to refine the search if the scraper could not find your game. Sometimes small changes like adding or removing a colon or a minus sign can yield better results. Note that the searching is handled entirely by the scraper service, ES-DE just presents the results returned from the service.
By default, ES-DE will search using the metadata name of the game. If no name has been defined via scraping or manually using the metadata editor, this name will correspond to the physical file name minus all text inside either normal brackets `()` or square brackets `[]`. So for example the physical filename `Mygame (U) [v2].zip` will be stripped to simply `Mygame` when performing the scraping.
Note that there is an exception to this behavior for arcade games (MAME and Neo Geo). For ScreenScraper the short MAME names are used by default as this scraper service fully supports that. For TheGamesDB the short names are instead expanded to the full games names using a lookup in the MAME name database supplied with the ES-DE installation. It's possible to override this automatic behavior by using the _Refine Search_ button in the scraper GUI if the search did not yield any results, or if the wrong game was returned. In general though, searching for arcade games is very reliable assuming the physical game files follow the MAME name standard.
**Note:** The miximages files are not generated by ES-DE as of v1.0, but if you have used something like [Skyscraper](https://github.com/muldjord/skyscraper) to generate this type of images for your game collection, then they can be displayed inside ES-DE by locating them in this directory.
Remember that on Unix files are case sensitive, and as well the file extensions must be in lower case, such as .png instead of .PNG or .Png or the file won't be found.
As an alternative, you can also locate your game media in the ROM directory. This is explained below when covering the option **Display game media from ROM directories**. This is however not recommended and the built-in scraper will never save any game media to this folder structure.
This menu can be accessed from both the system view and gamelist views. It contains the scraper, the input configuration tool and the application settings. Settings are saved when navigating back from any menu screen, assuming at least one setting was changed. Pressing F4 to quit the application will also save any pending changes.
Criteria for what games to include in the scraping. It can be set to _All games, Favorite games, No metadata, No game image, No game video_ or _Folders only_.
Whether to use the account that has been setup here. If this is disabled, the username and password configured on this screen will be ignored during scraping. This can be useful if you have scraping issues and want to check whether it's related to your account or if it's a general problem. Note that screenscraper.fr does not seem to return a proper error message regarding incorrect username and password, but starting ES-DE with the --debug flag will indicate in the log file whether the username was included in the server response.
The password as registered on screenscraper.fr. Note that the password is masked using asterisks on this screen, and the password input field will be blank when attempting to update an existing password. Entering a new password will of course work, and it will be saved accordingly. Be aware though that the es_settings.cfg file contains the password in clear text.
Whether to scrape the names of the games. This does not affect the actual files on the filesystem and is only used for viewing and sorting purposes. The downloaded media files are also matched against the physical game files on the filesystem, and not against this name.
With this setting enabled, if any media files returned by the scraper seem to be invalid, the scraping is halted and an error message is presented where it's possible to retry or cancel the scraping of the specific game. In the case of multi-scraping it's also possible to skip the game and proceed to the next one in the queue. With this setting disabled, all media files will always be accepted and saved to disk. As of ES-DE v1.0 the file verification is crude as it's just checking if the file is less than 350 bytes in size which should indicate a server error response rather than a real media file. In some exceedingly rare situations, proper media files may be smaller than 350 bytes, and for those rare instances, simply disabling this setting temporarily allows these files to be scraped. Future versions of ES-DE will implement proper CRC/checksum verifications for ScreenScraper and possibly media file integrity checks for TheGamesDB (as this scraper service does not provide file checksums).
By default ES-DE will perform scraper searches based on the game name that has been manually set in the metadata editor, or that has been previously scraped. If you prefer to search using the physical name regardless of such data being available, then turn off this option.
Note that when using TheGamesDB as scraper service for arcade games (MAME/Neo Geo), the short MAME name will always be expanded to the full game name as this scraper does not properly support searches using MAME names. Also note that you need to save the game name in the metadata editor before you can use it for scraping.
It's possible to set a flag per game file or directory to indicate that it should be excluded from the multi-scraper. This setting makes it possible to override that restriction and scrape all entries anyway.
If this setting is enabled and a folder has its flag set to be excluded from the scraper, then the entire folder contents are skipped when running the multi-scraper.
Enabling this option causes folders themselves to be included by the scraper. This is useful for DOS games or any multi-disk games where there is a folder for each individual game.
Sets the view style to _Automatic, Basic, Detailed, Video_ or _Grid_. See the description [above](USERGUIDE.md#gamelist-view) in this document for more information regarding view styles.
Sets the user interface mode for the application to _Full, Kiosk_ or _Kid_. See the description [above](USERGUIDE.md#ui-modes) in this document for additional information.
The order in which to sort your gamelists. This can be overriden per game system using the game options menu, but that override will only be persistent during the application session. The _System_ sorting can not be selected here as it's only applicable to collection systems.
With this option enabled, there are black pillarboxes (and to a lesser extent letterboxes) displayed around videos with non-standard aspect ratios. This will probably be most commonly used for vertical arcade shooters, or for game systems that has a screen in portrait orientation. For wider than normal videos, letterboxes are added, but this is quite rare compared to videos in portrait orientation. This option looks good with some theme sets such as rbsimple-DE, but on others it may be more visually pleasing to disable it. On less wide displays such as those in 4:3 aspect ratio this option should probably be disabled as it may otherwise add quite excessive letterboxing.
Whether to use a shader to render scanlines for videos in the gamelist view. The effect is usually pretty subtle as the video is normally renderered in a limited size in the GUI, and the scanlines are sized relative to the video window size.
Whether to place all folders on top of the gamelists. If enabled the folders will not be part of the quick selector index, meaning they can no longer be quick-jumped to. That is, unless there are only folders in the gamelist in which case the folders will be handled like files.
With this setting enabled, there is a star symbol added at the beginning of the game name in the gamelist views. It's strongly recommended to keep this setting enabled if the option to sort favorite games above non-favorites has been enabled. If not, favorite games would be sorted on top of the gamelist with no visual indication that they are favorites, which would be very confusing.
With this option enabled, there will be an overlay displayed when scrolling the gamelists quickly, i.e. when holding down the _Up_, _Down_, _Left shoulder_ or _Right shoulder_ buttons for some time. The overlay will darken the background slightly and display the first two characters of the game name. If the game is a favorite and the setting to sort favorites above non-favorites has been enabled, a star will be shown instead.
This setting enables the _Y_ button for quickly toggling a game as favorite. Although this may be convenient at times, it's also quite easy to accidentally remove a favorite tagging of a game when using the application more casually. As such it could sometimes make sense to disable this functionality. It's of course still possible to mark a game as favorite using the metadata editor when this setting is disabled. For additional restrictions, the application can be set to Kid or Kiosk mode as is explained [elsewhere](USERGUIDE.md#ui-modes) in this guide. Note that this setting does not affect the functionality to use the _Y_ button to add games to custom collections.
Some themes (including rbsimple-DE) display the game images briefly before playing the game videos. This setting forces the videos to be played immediately, regardless of the configuration in the theme. Note though that if there is a video available for a game, but no images, the video will always start to play immediately no matter the theme configuration or whether this settings has been enabled or not.
After how many minutes to start the screensaver. If set to 0 minutes, the timer will be deactivated and the screensaver will never start automatically. It's however still possible to start the screensaver manually in this case, assuming the _Enable screensaver controls_ setting is enabled. Note that while any menu is open, the screensaver will not start regardless of how this timer setting is configured.
This includes the ability to start the screensaver manually using the _Select_ button from the system view, but also while the screensaver is running to jump to a new random game using the _Left_ and _Right_ buttons, to launch the game currently shown using the _A_ button and to jump to the game in its gamelist using the _Y_ button. If this setting is disabled, any key or button press will stop the screensaver.
For how long to display images before changing to the next game. Allowed range is between 2 and 120 seconds in 2-second increments. The default value is 10 seconds.
This will display an overlay in the upper left corner, showing the game name and the game system name. A star following the game name indicates that it's a favorite.
Using this option, it's possible to use custom images instead of random images from the game library. As is the case with the rest of ES-DE, the supported file formats are JPG and PNG.
For how long to play videos before changing to the next game. Allowed range is between 0 and 120 seconds in 2-second increments. If set to 0 (which is the default setting), the next game will be selected after the entire video has finished playing.
This will display an overlay in the upper left corner, showing the game name and the game system name. A star following the game name indicates that it's a favorite.
As the name implies, this sets the overall system volume and not the volume specifically for ES-DE. Be aware that the volume change is applied only after leaving the sound settings menu.
Enable or disable navigation sounds throughout the application. Sounds are played when browsing systems and lists, starting games, adding and removing games as favorites etc. The sounds can be customized per theme, but if the theme does not support navigation sounds, ES-DE will fall back to its built-in sounds.
Handles collections, which are built using the games already present in your game systems. See the [collections](USERGUIDE.md#game-collections) section below in this document for more information.
If the theme set in use provides themes for custom collections, then this entry can be selected here. For example, there could be themes for _"Fighting games"_ or _"Driving games"_ etc. The default rbsimple-DE theme set does not provide such themes for custom collections and in general it's not recommended to use this approach, as is explained [later](USERGUIDE.md#custom-collections) in this guide.
This permanently deletes a custom collection, including its configuration file on the file system. A list of available collections is shown, and a confirmation dialog is displayed before committing the actual deletion. Only one collection at a time can be deleted.
Whether to sort your favorite games above your other games. This is disabled by default, as for collections you probably want to be able to mix all games regardless of whether they are favorites or not.
With this option enabled, there is a star marking added to each favorite game name. It works identically to the setting _Add star markings to favorite games_ under the _UI settings_ but is applied specifically to custom collections. It's disabled by default.
With this enabled, if you have created custom collections and there is no theme support for the names you've selected, the collections will be grouped in a general collection which is correctly themed. It's strongly recommended to keep this option enabled as otherwise your collections would be completely unthemed which doesn't make much sense. This option is provided mostly for testing and theme development purposes.
Enables the system name to be shown in square brackets after the game name, for example _CONTRA [NES]_ or _DOOM [DOS]_. This is applied to both automatic and custom collections. It's recommended to keep this option enabled.
The amount of video RAM to use for the application. Defaults to 256 MiB which seems to work fine most of the time. The allowed range is 80 to 1024 MiB. If you try to set it lower or higher than this by passing such values as command line parameters or edit the es_settings.cfg file manually, ES-DE will log a warning and automatically adjust the value within the allowable range.
This option sets the display to use for ES-DE for multi-monitor setups. The possible values are the monitor index numbers 1, 2, 3 or 4. If a value is set here for a display that does not actually exist, then ES-DE will set it to 1 upon startup. Index 1 is the primary display of the computer. It's also possible to override the setting by passing the --display command line argument. Doing so will also overwrite the display index setting in es_settings.cfg. Be aware that the Display/monitor index option only changes the display used by ES-DE; the emulators need to be configured separately (which can easily be done globally if using RetroArch).
This gives you a choice between _Normal_ and _Borderless_ modes. With the borderless being more seamless as the ES-DE window will always stay on top of other windows so the taskbar will not be visible when launching and returning from games. It will however break the alt-tab application switching of your window manager. For normal fullscreen mode, if a lower resolution than the screen resolution has been set via the --resolution command line argument, ES-DE will render in full screen at the lower resolution. If a higher resolution than the screen resolution has been set, ES-DE will run in a window. For the borderless mode, any changes to the resolution will make ES-DE run in a window.
The metadata for a game is updated by scraping and by manual editing (using the metadata editor), but also when launching it as this updates the _Times played_ counter and the _Last played_ date. This setting enables you to define when to write such metadata changes to the gamelist.xml files. Setting the option to _Never_ will disable writing to these files altogether, except for some special conditions such as when a game is manually deleted using the metadata editor, or when scraping using the multi-scraper (the multi-scraper will always save any updates immediately to the gamelist.xml files). In theory _On exit_ will give some performance gains, but it's normally recommended to leave the setting at its default value which is _Always_. Note that with the settings set to _Never_, any updates such as the _Last played_ date will still be shown on screen, but during the next application startup, any values previously saved to the gamelist.xml files will be read in again. As well, when changing this setting to _Always_ from either of the two other options, any pending changes will be immediately written to the gamelist.xml files.
This setting defines the path for which to search for emulator cores. This is used by the variable %COREPATH% which can be included in the systems configuration file es_systems.cfg. By default this variable and corresponding setting is only used on Unix. For macOS and Windows the %COREPATH% variable is not included in the es_systems.cfg template and the default core path value is therefore set to blank. If required for special setups it can be used for these operating systems, but the primary use is on Unix where the core path may vary depending on the operating system, how the emulator was packaged etc. For example the default RetroArch core directory is ~/.config/retroarch/cores if compiled from source code but if installed as a Snap package or as part of the OS repository the cores could be stored elsewhere. The setting is primarily intended for RetroArch but it can be used for any emulator that utilizes discrete emulator cores. When attempting to launch a game, the core for the game system will be searched in each of the defined directories until the first match occurs. Multiple directories can be defined by separating them using colons on Unix and macOS and by semicolons on Windows. Please see [INSTALL.md](INSTALL.md#es_systemscfg) for more information about this.
With this setting enabled, the taskbar will be hidden when launching ES-DE, and it will be restored when the application exits. This can make for a more seamless experience as the taskbar could otherwise flash by briefly when launching games and when returning from games. It could potentially cause some issues on some Windows installations though, so the option is disabled by default.
**Run in background (while game is launched)** _(Windows only)_
This is really a last-resort setting if ES-DE freezes when launching games. This issue seems to only occur on Windows 8.1 and older but that's not fully confirmed. ES-DE will behave a bit strange with this option enabled so keep it disabled unless you absolutely need it.
If enabled, you can override the launch command defined in es_systems.cfg on a per-game basis. It's only recommended to disable this option for testing purposes, such as when a game won't start and you're unsure if it's your custom launch command that causes the problem.
If this option is disabled, hidden files and folders within the ROM directory tree are excluded from ES-DE. On Unix this means those starting with a dot, and on Windows it's those set as hidden by using an NTFS attribute. This setting is probably mostly useful for special situations and is not to be confused with the next option which hides files based on metadata configuration within ES-DE.
You can mark games as hidden in the metadata editor, which is useful for instance for DOS games where you may not want to see some batch files and executables inside ES-DE, or for multi-disk games where you may only want to show the .m3u playlists and not the individual game files, as is discussed [here](USERGUIDE.md#multiple-gamefiles-installation). By disabling this option these files will not be processed at all when ES-dE starts up. If you enable the setting you will see the files, but their name entries will be almost transparent in the gamelist view to visually indicate that they are hidden.
It's possible to trigger custom scripts for a number of actions in ES-DE, as is discussed [below](USERGUIDE.md#custom-event-scripts), and this setting decides whether this functionality is enabled. It's recommended to leave it at its default off value unless you need it as it generates unnecessary debug logging.
If enabled, only ROMs that have metadata saved to the gamelist.xml files will be shown in ES-DE. This option is intended primarily for testing and debugging purposes so it should normally not be enabled.
Using this option, you can place game images and videos in the ROM directory tree. The media files are searched inside the directory _\<ROM directory\>/\<system name\>/images/_ and _\<ROM directory\>/\<system name\>/videos/_ and the filenames must match the ROM names, followed by a dash and the media type. For example _~/ROMs/nes/images/Contra-screenshot.jpg, ~/ROMs/nes/images/Contra-marquee.jpg_ and _~/ROMs/nes/videos/Contra-video.jpg_. This option is mostly intended for legacy purposes, if you have an existing game collection with this media setup that you would like to open in ES-DE. The scraper will never save files to this directory structure and will instead use the standard media directory logic. It's recommended to keep this option disabled unless you really need it since it slows down the application somewhat.
Displays the framerate and VRAM statistics as an overlay. You normally never need to use this unless you're debugging a performance problem or similar. **Note:** As of ES-DE version 1.0 the VRAM usage statistics is not accurate. This will be addressed in a future version.
With this setting enabled, there is a Quit menu shown as the last entry on the main menu which provides options to quit ES-DE, to reboot the computer or to power off the computer. With this setting disabled, there will simply be an entry shown to quit the application instead of the complete quit menu.
The menu where you quit ES-DE, or reboot or power off your computer. This menu can be disabled using an option, and in this case it's replaced with a _Quit EmulationStation_ entry.
This menu is opened from the gamelist views, and can't be accessed from the system view. The menu changes slightly depending on the context, for example if a game file or a folder is selected, or whether the current system is a collection or a normal game platform.
You open the menu using the **Select** button, and by pressing **B** or selecting the **Apply** button any settings such as letter jumping using the quick selector or sorting changes are applied. If you instead press the Select button again, the menu is closed without applying any changes.
_The game options menu as laid out when opening it from within a custom collection, which adds the menu entry to add or remove games from the collection._
This provides the ability to jump to a certain letter using a quick selector. If the setting to sort favorite games above non-favorites has been selected (it is enabled by default), then it's also possible to jump to the favorites games by choosing the star symbol. If there are only folders or only favorite games in a certain game list, these games and folders will be indexed as well, making it possible to jump betwen them using the quick selector.
This is the sort order for the gamelist. The default sorting shown here is taken from the setting **Default sort order** under **UI settings** in the main menu. Any sorting that is applied via the game options menu will be persistent throughout the program session, and it can be set individually per game system and per collection.
Sorting can be applied using the following metadata, in either ascending or descending order:
Choosing this entry opens a separate screen where it's possible to apply a filter to the gamelist. The filter is persistent throughout the program session, or until it's manually reset. The option to reset all filters is also shown on the same screen.
With the exception of the text filter, all available filter values are assembled from metadata from the actual gamelist, so if there for instance are no games marked as completed, the Completed filter will only have the selectable option False, i.e. True will be missing.
Be aware that although folders can have most of the metadata values set, the filters are only applied to files (this is also true for the text/game name filter). So if you for example set a filter to only display your favorite games, any folder that contains a favorite game will be displayed, and other folders which are themselves marked as favorites but that do not contain any favorite games will be hidden.
This entry is only shown if the system is a custom collection. The way this works is described in more detail [below](USERGUIDE.md#custom-collections).
In the metadata editor, you can modify the metadata for a game, scrape for game info and media files, delete media files and gamelist entries, or delete the entire game. When manually modifying a value, it will change color from gray to blue, and if the scraper has changed a value, it will change to red. When leaving the metadata editor you will be asked whether you want to save any settings done manually or by the scraper.
This entry makes it possible to change the sorting of a game without having to change its name. For instance it can be used to sort _Mille Miglia_ as _1000 Miglia_ or _The Punisher_ as _Punisher, The_. Be aware though that the _Jump to..._ quick selector on the game options menu will base its index on the first character of the sortname if it exists for a game, which could be slightly confusing in some instances when quick jumping in the gamelist.
Rating in half-star increments. This can be set as such manually or it can be scraped, assuming the scraper service provides ratings (currently only ScreenScraper does). If an external scraper application such as [Skyscraper](https://github.com/muldjord/skyscraper) has been used that may set the ratings in fractional values such as three-quarter stars, then ES-DE will round them to the nearest half-star. When this happens, the rating stars will be colored green to notify that a rounding has taken place and a question will be asked whether to save the changes even if no other manual changes were performed.
A flag to indicate whether this is a favorite. Can also be set directly from the gamelist view by using the _Y_ button (unless this has been disabled in the main menu settings).
A flag to indicate that the game is hidden. If the corresponding option has been set in the main menu, the game will not be shown. Useful for example for DOS games to hide batch scripts and unnecessary binaries or to hide the actual game files for multi-disk games. If a file or folder is flagged as hidden but the correponding option to hide hidden games has not been enabled, then the opacity of the text will be lowered significantly to make it clear that it's a hidden game.
A flag to indicate whether the game should be excluded from being counted. If this is set for a game, it will not be included in the game counter shown per system on the system view, and it will not be included in the system information field in the gamelist view. As well, it will be excluded from all automatic and custom collections. This option is quite useful for multi-file games such as multi-disk Amiga or Commodore 64 games, or for DOS games where you want to exclude setup programs and similar but still need them available in ES-DE and therefore can't hide them. Files that have this flag set will have a lower opacity in the gamelists, making them easy to spot.
Whether to exclude the file from the multi-scraper. This is quite useful in order to avoid scraping all the disks for multi-disk games for example. There is an option in the scraper settings to ignore this flag, but by default the scraper will respect it. Note that the manual single-file scraper will work regardless of whether this flag is set or not.
This option will hide most metadata fields in the gamelist view. The intention is to be able to hide the fields for situations such as general folders (Multi-disk, Cartridges etc.) and for setup programs and similar (e.g. SETUP.EXE or INSTALL.BAT for DOS games). It could also be used on the game files for multi-disk games where perhaps only the .m3u playlist should have any metadata values. The only fields shown with this option enabled are the game name and description. Using the description it's possible to write some comments regarding the file or folder, should you want to. It's also possible to display game images and videos with this setting enabled.
Here you can override the launch command for the game, for example to use a different emulator than the default one for the game system. Very useful for MAME/arcade games.
A statistics counter that tracks how many times you have played the game. You normally don't need to touch this, but if you want to, the possibility is there.
For game files, there will be five buttons displayed on the bottom of the metadata editor window, and for folders there will be four. These are their functions:
Opens the single-game scraper, which is explained [above](USERGUIDE.md#single-game-scraper) in this guide. The _Y_ button can also be used as a shortcut to start the scraper without having to navigate to this button.
This will remove any media files for the file or folder and also remove its entry from the gamelist.xml file. The actual game file or folder will however _not_ be deleted. A prompt will be shown asking for confirmation.
This will remove the actual game file, its gamelist.xml entry, its entry in any custom collections and its media files. A prompt will be shown asking for confirmation. The deletion of folders is not supported as that would potentially be a bit dangerous, instead use the appropriate operating system tools to handle deletion of folders.
The Dim screensaver simply dims and desaturates the current view and Black will show a black screen. The Slideshow and Video screensavers are more interesting as they can display images and videos from your game collection. In addition to this, the Slideshow screensaver can be configured to only show images from a specified directory.
If the option **Enable screensaver controls** has been activated, you can manually toggle the screensaver from the system view by pressing the **Select** key. In addition to this, for the Slideshow and Video screensavers, the controls will allow you to jump to a new random image or video using the **Left** and **Right** buttons on your keyboard or controller. It's also possible to launch the game currently displayed using the **A** button, and the **Y** button will jump to the game in its gamelist without starting it.
ES-DE provides two types of collections, **Automatic collections** and **Custom collections**, the latter being defined by the user. Collections are as the name implies only collections of games already present in your actual game systems, so they're basically grouping your games together into convenient views. As such the use of collections is entirely optional, but it is a very nice feature and it's worth some effort to setup.
The automatic collections are named **All games**, **Favorites** and **Last played**. The 'All games' collection simply groups all your game systems into one big list, 'Favorites' combines all your games marked as favorites from all your game systems, and 'Last played' is a list of the 50 last games you have launched.
These automatic collections can be individually enabled or disabled by going to the main menu, selecting **Game collection settings** and then **Automatic game collections**.
Note that you should only enable these collections if you really need them as they slow down the application quite a bit. By default these collections are therefore disabled.
These are collections that you create yourself. Examples could be grouping in genres like `Shoot em up`, `Fighting games` etc. or perhaps a time period like `1980s`, `1990s` and so on.
If the theme set supports it, you can create a custom collection directly from a theme. However, rbsimple-DE does not provide such themes as it's believed that grouping them together in a dedicated Collections system is a more elegant solution. Especially since the theme set would need to ship with an almost endless amount of collection themes for whatever categories the users would like to use for their game collections.
So if you have enabled the option **Group unthemed custom collections** (it's enabled by default), any collections you add will show up in the special Collections system. Here you can access them just as you would access folders inside a regular gamelist. The amount of games per collection is shown in the description, and a random game is displayed each time you browse through the list (you can quick jump to this game by pressing the **Y** button).
The collection will now be created and the collection edit mode will be entered. You can now add games to the collection by navigating to any gamelist and pressing the **Y** button. Any number of games from any of your game systems can be added. A game can also be part of multiple collections, there is no real limit for this in ES-DE.
Removing games works the same way, just press **Y** to remove it if it's already present in your collection. You can do this either from the gamelist where the game was added, or from the collection itself.
When you are done adding games, you can either open the main menu and go to **Game collection settings** and select the **Finish editing 'Platform' collection** or you can open the game options menu and select the same option there. The latter works from within any game system, so you don't need to first navigate back to the collection that you're editing.
You can later add additional games to the collection by navigating to it, bringing up the game options menu and choosing **Add/remove games to this game collection**.
The way that custom collections are implemented is very simple. There is a single configuration file per collection inside the folder `~/.emulationstation/collections`
Any changes to custom collections (for example adding or removing a game) will be immediately written to the corresponding collection configuration file.
Note that if you copy or migrate a collection from a previous version of EmulationStation or if you're setting up ES-DE on a new computer, even though you copy the files into the collections directory, they will not show up inside the application as you always need to enable the collections from the menu. ES-DE looks inside the es_settings.cfg file during startup to see which collections should be enabled.
If you're migrating from a previous version of EmulationStation that has absolute paths in the collection files, these will be rewritten with the %ROMPATH% variable the first time you make a change to the collection.
ES-DE is fully themeable, and although the application ships with the comprehensive rbsimple-DE theme set, you can replace it with a number of themes available from various locations on the Internet.
Somewhat confusingly the terms _theme_ and _theme set_ are used to refer to the same thing. The technically correct term for what you apply to the application to achieve a different look is actually _theme set_ as it's a collection of a number of themes for a number of game systems. The bundled rbsimple-DE is an example of such a theme set. But in this guide and in other EmulationStation resources on the Internet, the term theme is often used to refer to the same thing as a theme set.
Note that this Desktop Edition fork adds additional features to the themes and more still will be added in future versions. This means that you may not get the full benefits of the application if you're using a different theme set. But effort is spent trying to make ES-DE backwards compatible with the available themes used by other EmulationStation versions. The exception to this are some themes made for the Recalbox and Batocera forks of EmulationStation as they have added a lot of additional theme functionality that ES-DE has no intention to replicate.
Themes are most easily installed in your ES-DE home directory, i.e. `~/.emulationstation/themes`. By just adding the theme sets there, one folder each, they will be found by ES-DE during startup and you can then choose between them via UI Settings on the main menu.
Note that although you can put additional themes in your ES-DE home directory, the default rbsimple-DE theme is located in your installation folder. For example this could be `/usr/local/share/emulationstation/themes` on Unix, `/Applications/EmulationStation Desktop Edition.app/Contents/Resources/themes` on macOS or `C:\Program Files\EmulationStation-DE\themes` on Windows.
If you would like to customize the rbsimple-DE theme, simply make a copy of the complete rbsimple-DE directory to ~/.emulationstation/themes and then that copy of the theme will take precedence over the one in the application installation directory.
In this example, we've downloaded the [Carbon](https://github.com/RetroPie/es-theme-carbon) and [Fundamental](https://github.com/G-rila/es-theme-fundamental) themes and uncompressed them to the ES-DE home folder:
There are numerous locations throughout ES-DE where custom scripts will be executed if the option to do so has been enabled in the settings. By default it's deactivated so be sure to enable it to use this feature.
The setup for event scripts is a bit technical, so please refer to the [INSTALL.md](INSTALL.md#custom-event-scripts) document to see how it's configured.
On Windows, ES-DE can be installed to and run from a removable media device such as a USB memory stick. Together with games and emulators this makes for a fully portable retro gaming solution. The setup is somewhat technical, please refer to the [INSTALL.md](INSTALL.md#building-on-windows) document to see how it's done.
**Note:** The following list is what the default es_systems.cfg files and the rbsimple-DE theme supports. This theme set is very comprehensive, so if you're using another theme, it may be that some or many of these systems are not supported. ES-DE will still work but the game system will not be themed which looks very ugly.
Note as well that the list and corresponding es_systems.cfg templates may not match what's actually available for all supported operating systems. For example, in some instances you may need to compile the RetroArch cores from source code as they may not come pre-built for your OS, and in some instances they may not work at all. Linux is the reference as most RetroArch cores and other emulators are supported on this class of operating systems. But entries are still retained in all es_systems.cfg templates as more emulators may be supported in the future. The exception is entries that are definitely not going to be available (such as Lutris on non-Unix platforms), and in those instances a placeholder is used in order to maintain the file structure across the template files. Finally, if the preferred emulator or core is not available for a certain OS but there is a feasible alternative, then this is used instead. Such an example is for Nintendo 64, where ParaLLEl N64 is defined on Windows and Mupen64Plus-Next is defined on Unix and macOS.
Regional differences are handled by simply using the game system name corresponding to your region. For example for Sega Mega Drive, _megadrive_ would be used by most people in the world, although persons from North America would use _genesis_ instead. The same is true for _pcengine_ vs _tg16_ etc. This only affects the theme selection and the corresponding theme graphics, the same emulator and scraper settings are still used for the regional variants although that can of course be modified in the es_systems.cfg file if you wish to.
Sometimes the name of the console is (more or less) the same for multiple regions, and in those circumstances the region has been added as a suffix to the game system name. For instance `na` for North America has been added to `snes` (Super Nintendo) giving the system name `snesna`. The same goes for Japan, as in `megacd` and `megacdjp`. Again, this only affects the theme and theme graphics.
The **Default emulator** column shows the emulator configured in es_systems.cfg, and for emulators that support multiple cores, the configured core is shown inside brackets.
For additional details regarding which game file extensions are supported per system, refer to the es_systems.cfg templates [es_systems.cfg_unix](resources/templates/es_systems.cfg_unix), [es_systems.cfg_macos](resources/templates/es_systems.cfg_macos) and [es_systems.cfg_windows](resources/templates/es_systems.cfg_windows). Normally the extensions setup in these files should cover everything that the emulators support.
| amiga | Commodore Amiga | RetroArch (P-UAE) | WHDLoad hard disk image in .hdf or .hdz format in root folder, or diskette image in .adf format in root folder if single-disk, or in separate folder with .m3u playlist if multi-disk |
| amiga600 | Commodore Amiga 600 | RetroArch (P-UAE) | WHDLoad hard disk image in .hdf or .hdz format in root folder, or diskette image in .adf format in root folder if single-disk, or in separate folder with .m3u playlist if multi-disk |
| amiga1200 | Commodore Amiga 1200 | RetroArch (P-UAE) | WHDLoad hard disk image in .hdf or .hdz format in root folder, or diskette image in .adf format in root folder if single-disk, or in separate folder with .m3u playlist if multi-disk |
