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 and Intel GPUs. This 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". The drawback of this workaround is that a white instead of a black screen will be displayed when launching games. If using an Nvidia GPU, it should be safe to disable this option for a slightly better user experience. An alternative workaround is to enable the option "Run in background (while game is launched)".
* On macOS Big Sur (and possibly other OS versions) when connecting a DualShock 4 controller either via Bluetooth or using a USB cable, two separate controller devices are registered in parallel. This is a bug in either macOS or the DualShock driver and it makes it seem as if ES-DE is registering double button presses when actually two separate controller devices are generating identical input. A workaround if using Bluetooth mode is to plug in the USB cable just after connecting the controller, wait a second or two and then remove the cable again. This will remove the cabled device, leaving only the Bluetooth device active. Another workaround is to enable the setting "Only accept input from first controller" in the ES-DE input device settings. The reason why this bug may not be visible in some other games and applications is that ES-DE enables and auto-configures all connected controllers.
* Some screen tearing can be seen in the upper part of the screen when using the slide transitions with certain graphics drivers and resolutions. This problem will hopefully be resolved in ES-DE v1.2 when moving to the GLM library.
* 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 caused by a bug in SDL where the primary display scaling is always used for calculating the display bounds and as such it needs to be fixed in that library. If using the same scaling percentage across all monitors, or if not using high DPI monitors at all, then this issue will not occur.
