The 1.2 release introduces multiple new features and brings extensive bug fixing and lots of other small improvements. Support for alternative emulators has been added which can be selected system-wide or per game. These alternative emulators are added to the es_systems.xml file, making it easy to expand or customize the configuration. For this release, most of the available RetroArch cores have been preconfigured.
A virtual keyboard has been added (some code borrowed from Batocera.linux) which is fully integrated and can be used to input text via a game controller. By introducing this feature, a keyboard should now be completely optional for day-to-day use.
Another new feature is support for badges that display icons in the gamelist view indicating favorite games, completed games, game-specific controllers etc. Note that these badges require support from the theme set. And on the topic of theme sets, a new theme named modern-DE has been included with the installation as an alternative to the default rbsimple-DE theme.
The scraper has been improved and expanded, and in addition to the previously supported media it can now scrape box back covers, title screens and physical media images (cartridges, diskettes, tapes, CD-ROMs etc.). These physical media images are also included in the generated miximages, although that can be disabled using a menu option.
As for supported platforms, v1.2 brings official support for the Raspberry Pi 4/400, both for the 32-bit (armv7l) and 64-bit (aarch64) versions of Raspberry Pi OS.
Apart from all the above, a huge amount of work has gone into fixing bugs, refactoring the code and optimizing for performance. The language standard has been increased from C++14 to C++17 and the built-in vector and matrix data types and functions have been replaced with the GLM (OpenGL Mathematics) library equivalents.
* Added alternative emulators support where additional emulators can be defined in es_systems.xml and be selected system-wide or per game via the user interface
* Improved the gamelist filter GUI to not allow filtering of values where there is no actual data to filter, e.g. Favorites for a system with no favorite games
* Grayed out all fields in the gamelist filter GUI where there is no data to filter, previously some fields were removed entirely and some could still be used
* Lowered the minimum supported screen resolution from 640x480 to 224x224 to support arcade cabinet displays such as those running at 384x224 and 224x384
* Added support for the Commodore VIC-20, Epic Games Store, Google Android, Java 2 Micro Edition, Philips CD-i and Symbian systems
* Added support for a more advanced system view carousel logo placeholder (for unthemed systems) by allowing the combination of text and graphics
* Expanded the themeable options for "helpsystem" to support custom button graphics, dimmed text and dimmed icon colors, upper/lower/camel case and custom spacing
* Made the game name and description stop scrolling when running the media viewer, the screensaver or when running in the background while a game is launched
* When scraping in interactive mode, any refining done using the "Y" button shortcut would not be shown when doing another refine using the "Refine search" button
* When scraping in interactive mode, the first result row would get focused after the search completed even if the cursor was moved to a button beneath the list
* Under some circumstances and at some screen resolutions, the last menu separator line would not get rendered (still an issue at extreme resolutions like 320x240)
* With the menu scale-up effect enabled and entering a submenu before the parent menu was completely scaled up, the parent would get stuck at a semi-scaled size
* If there was an abbreviated full system name for the "Gamelist on startup" option, that abbreviation would also get displayed when opening the selector window
* Really long theme set names would not get abbreviated in the UI settings menu, leading to a garbled "Theme set" setting row
* When marking a game to not be counted in the metadata editor and the game was part of a custom collection, no collection disabling notification was displayed
* There was a tiny and randomly occuring gap between the system carousel and systemInfo bar during slide transitions between the System and Gamelist views
The 1.1 release brings many large changes including a fullscreen media viewer, a game launch screen, a miximage generator, a new video player and a new controller API featuring automatic controller configuration and controller profiles.
A much better mechanism to find emulators and emulator cores has been implemented as well, which among other things removes the need to manually modify the Path variable on Windows to find RetroArch. It also eliminates the requirement for a separate Flatpak-specific es_systems.xml file on Linux.
There are also several changes under the hood, such as the addition of the CImg image processing library, automatic code formatting of the entire codebase using clang-format, change of language standard from C++11 to C++14 and lots of general code refactoring.
* Added a 60 FPS frame rate upscaler option to the video player which results in slightly smoother playback for low frame rate videos (e.g. 24 and 30 FPS)
* Implemented a new mechanism for locating emulators and cores, with configurable find rules (this eliminates some hacks such as the separate Flatpak es_systems.cfg file)
* Added a Windows-specific find rule that searches the Registry for the App Paths keys, which eliminates the need to modify the Path manually to find RetroArch
* Default controller configuration is now automatically applied, input configuration should rarely if ever be required any longer except for deliberate button customization
* Added support for selecting the controller type (Xbox, Xbox 360, PS4, PS5 and SNES), which changes the help icons, help text and the input configuration tool icons and text
* Switched the order of the "Back" and "Start" buttons (or equivalents) in the input configurator to align with the other button entries which go from left to right
* Removed the startup notification regarding default keyboard mappings being in use, instead default mappings are now considered the recommended input configuration
* The controller input configuration is not automatically started any longer if there is no es_input.cfg file or if there are no applicable configuration entries in the file
* Added an option to use plain ASCII characters for the favorite, folder and tickmark symbols, which makes some themes with very pixelated fonts look coherent
* Renamed es_systems.cfg, es_settings.cfg and es_input.cfg to es_systems.xml, es_settings.xml and es_input.xml
* Changed the es_systems.xml logic so it loads from the program resources directory by default (a customized file can be placed in ~/.emulationstation/custom_systems)
* Added a %HIDEWINDOW% variable which can be used in the es_systems.xml file on Windows, primarily intended for hiding console windows when launching scripts
First release, a major update to the application compared to the RetroPie version on which it is based. This includes new gamelist sorting logic, new game media handling and an updated Windows port as well as a macOS port. The menu system has also been completely overhauled and the scraper has been expanded to support multiple media types as well as providing detailed scraping configuration options.
Full navigation sound support has been implemented, and the metadata editor has seen a lot of updates including color coding of all changes done by the user and by the scraper. Favorite games can now also be sorted on top of the gamelists and game collections.
OpenGL GLSL shader support has been added (not for the OpenGL ES renderer though) and there are multiple effects implemented such as scanlines for videos, blurred background when opening menus etc.
A new default theme rbsimple-DE (based on Recalbox Multi) is bundled with the application and is part of the installation package/installer. Theme sets created for the RetroPie EmulationStation fork will still work.
Many bugs have been fixed, and numerous features that were only partially implemented or broken have been updated to a fully working state. The application runs much faster as well due to lots of optimizations.
* Improved input device configuration and default keyboard mappings are now applied if the keyboard has not been configured by the user
* Reorganization and general overhaul of the menu system, hopefully making it more intuitive to navigate and easier to understand the menu entries
* New game media file logic using a media directory with files matching the ROM names instead of explicitly pointing to the media files from the gamelist.xml files
* GUI-configurable option to sort favorite games above non-favorite games
* GUI-configurable option to flag favorite games with star symbols
* GUI-configurable option to sort folders on top of the gamelists
* Added volume sliders for navigation sounds and game videos to the sound settings menu
* Added support for OpenGL GLSL shaders (OpenGL 2.1 renderer only, no support for OpenGL ES 1.0 renderer)
* Added multiple animations and shader effects, such as when opening menus, playing videos in the gamelists and via the screensaver etc.
* Added a "Clear" button to the metadata editor to delete the media files and gamelist.xml entry for a game or folder while still retaining the game file
* Added a gamelist info text field displaying the game count, any applied filters as well as an icon if a folder has been entered (requires theme support)
* The emulator core location can now be defined relative to the emulator binary using the %EMUPATH% variable in es_systems.cfg (used extensively on macOS and Windows)
* Core locations can be searched from a configurable list of directories if defined in the es_systems.cfg file using the %COREPATH% variable (mostly useful on Unix where there are no standardized core directories)
* No more attempts to open files directly under /etc, instead only the install prefix directory, the ES-DE executable directory and the home directory are used
* Speed improvements and optimizations, the application now starts faster and feels more responsive
* Added new component GuiComplexTextEditPopup to handle changes to configuration file entries and similar
* Added full UTF-16 (Unicode) support on Windows
* Removed the PowerSaver
* Game counting is now done during sorting instead of every time a system is selected. This should make the UI more responsive in case of large game libraries
* Updated the CMake/CPack install and package configuration files to work as expected (can now generate DEB, RPM, DMG and NSIS installation packages with correct dependencies)
* Large text sizes at higher resolutions (such as 4K) would crash the application as fixed-size texture buffers were used which weren't big enough to hold the larger font textures
* There is an issue with launching games on Windows when using AMD or Intel GPUs which causes the emulator to just output a blank screen. There is a workaround available for this which is enabled by default and that can be disabled via the menu option "AMD and Intel GPU game launch workaround" if using an Nvidia GPU. The workaround has the slight drawback that the screen may flicker slightly when launching a game, and there will be a single-pixel transparent line at the bottom of the screen while the emulator is loading.
* On Windows when using high DPI displays, if not running ES-DE on the primary monitor and the display where it runs does not have the same scaling percentage as the primary monitor, then the ES-DE resolution will not be properly set. The application will still work and if running in fullscreen mode it may not even be noticeable. This issue is probably caused by a bug in SDL where the primary display scaling is always used for calculating the display bounds. If using the same scaling percentage across all monitors, or if not using high DPI monitors at all, then this issue is not relevant.
* On macOS, the RetroArch setting "Start in Fullscreen mode" must be enabled or ES-DE will not be able to switch to the emulator window when a game is launched. Possibly it's the same issue with other emulators as well.
* On Raspberry Pi OS 10, Sony DualShock 4 controllers have problems with some button presses that don't register correctly. The issue appears resolved in Raspberry Pi OS 11.
* On Raspberry Pi OS 11 there are various graphics issues and sometimes the application or emulator completely freezes which requires a power cycle of the machine. This is seemingly due to GPU driver bugs and we can only wait for OS updates to address these problems. These issues have not been encountered on Raspberry Pi OS 10.
* On Fedora 35 a problem has been observed where the screen turns completely black or flickers intensely when starting ES-DE for the first time. A workaround for this is to simply exit the application with F4 or Alt+F4 and starting it again. Everything should then render correctly, and any subsequent startups will work fine including after suspending/resuming the computer. It's currently unclear if this is limited to only Intel GPU drivers or if it's a general issue under Fedora and/or Wayland. At least Wayland on Ubuntu 21.10 does not trigger the same issue.
* There is some screen tearing present on Unix/Linux which is especially visible during horizontal slide transitions. The problem exists on both x86 and ARM as well as on Intel, AMD and Nvidia GPUs and on the Broadcom VideoCore. The problem seems to be Xorg-related as tearing has not been observed when using Wayland, and it's not present on macOS or Windows either.
* Sometimes when RetroArch has been upgraded to a newer version, it apparently requires a startup to get properly initialized. When ES-DE starts RetroArch it always does so by passing some specific emulator core parameters, which does not seem to initialize RetroArch after such an upgrade. What happens in this case is that the RetroArch loading screen will be shown and then it will quit right back to ES-DE. If confirmed to be the case, this is not an ES-DE issue but a RetroArch issue and starting RetroArch separately once should fix the problem (at least until the next upgrade).
