A cool guy named petrockblog made a script which automatically installs many emulators and ES. It also includes options for configuring your RPi and setting it up to boot directly into ES. You can find it here: https://github.com/petrockblog/RetroPie-Setup
- First, try to check the [issue list](https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation/issues?state=open) for some entries that might match your problem. Make sure to check closed issues too!
- If you're running EmulationStation on a on Raspberry Pi and have problems with config file changes not taking effect, content missing after editing, etc., check if your SD card is corrupted (see issues [#78](https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation/issues/78) and [#107](https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation/issues/107)). You can do this with free tools like [h2testw](http://www.heise.de/download/h2testw.html) or [F3](http://oss.digirati.com.br/f3/).
- Try to update to the latest version of EmulationStation using git (you might need to delete your `es_input.cfg` and `es_settings.cfg` after that to reset them to default values):
- If your problem still isn't gone, the best way to report a bug is to post an issue on GitHub. Try to post the simplest steps possible to reproduce the bug. Include files you think might be related (except for ROMs, of course). If you haven't re-run ES since the crash, the log file `~/.emulationstation/es_log.txt` is also helpful.
EmulationStation uses some C++11 code, which means you'll need to install at least g++-4.7 on Linux, or VS2010 on Windows.
For installing and switching to g++-4.7 see [here](http://lektiondestages.blogspot.de/2013/05/installing-and-switching-gccg-versions.html). You can also just use `export CXX=g++-4.7` to explicitly specify the compiler for CMake (make sure you delete your CMake cache files if it's not working).
EmulationStation has a few dependencies. For building, you'll need SDL2, Boost (System, Filesystem, Regex, DateTime), FreeImage, FreeType, Eigen3, and cURL. You'll also need the DejaVu TrueType font on Linux to run ES.
On the Raspberry Pi, there are also a few special libraries, located in /opt/vc/: the Broadcom libraries, libEGL, and GLES. You shouldn't need to install them; they are used by the Raspberry Pi port of SDL 2.
(If you don't know how to use CMake, here are some hints: run cmake-gui and point it at your EmulationStation folder. Point the "build" directory somewhere - I use EmulationStation/build. Click configure, choose "Visual Studio [year] Project", fill in red fields as they appear and keep clicking Configure, then click Generate.)
When first run, an example systems configuration file will be created at $HOME/.emulationstation/es_systems.cfg. This example has some comments explaining how to write the configuration file, and an example RetroArch launch command. See the "Writing an es_systems.cfg" section for more information.
1. Press a button on any device you wish to use. *This includes the keyboard.* Once you have selected all the devices you wish to configure, hold a button on the first device to continue to step 2.
2. Press the displayed input for each device in sequence. You will be prompted for Up, Down, Left, Right, A (Select), B (Back), Menu, Select (fast select), PageUp, and PageDown. If your controller doesn't have enough buttons for everything, you can press A to skip the remaining inputs.
*NOTE: If `~/.emulationstation/es_input.cfg` is present but does not contain any available joysticks or a keyboard, an emergency default keyboard mapping will be used.*
I am currently also working on a stand-alone tool, [ES-config](https://github.com/Aloshi/ES-config), that should help make configuring emulators easier.
`%BASENAME%` - Replaced with the "base" name of the path to the selected ROM. For example, a path of "/foo/bar.rom", this tag would be "bar". This tag is useful for setting up AdvanceMAME.
`%ROM_RAW%` - Replaced with the unescaped absolute path to the selected ROM. If your emulator is picky about paths, you might want to use this instead of %ROM%, but enclosed in quotes.
The gamelist.xml for a system defines metadata for a system's games, such as a name, image (like a screenshot or box art), description, release date, and rating.
If a file named gamelist.xml is found in the root of a system's search directory OR within `~/.emulationstation/%NAME%/`, game metadata will be loaded from it. This allows you to define images, descriptions, and different names for files. Note that only standard ASCII characters are supported for text (if you see a weird [X] symbol, you're probably using unicode!).
The path element should be the absolute path of the ROM. Special characters SHOULD NOT be escaped. The image element is the path to an image to display above the description (like a screenshot or boxart). Most formats can be used (including png, jpg, gif, etc.). Not all elements need to be used.
*You can use ES's [scraping](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping) tools to avoid creating a gamelist.xml by hand.* A command-line version is also provided - just run emulationstation with `--scrape`.
By default, EmulationStation looks pretty ugly. You can fix that. If you want to know more about making your own themes (or editing existing ones), read THEMES.md!
