Although there are multiple forks of EmulationStation in existence, the goal of this edition is to make the software as easy as possible to install and use as a standalone application, and to support the major desktop operating systems, i.e. Unix/Linux, macOS and Windows. Since it's intended to be used as a desktop application rather than as the primary interface for the computer, there are no plans to provide system administration utilities or control over emulator settings from within ES-DE.
***)** On Ubuntu 20.10, attempting to play videos crashes ES-DE due to a libVLC bug, refer to the Known issues section in [CHANGELOG.md](CHANGELOG.md#known-issues) for a workaround.
At the moment Raspberry Pi is not supported, but this is planned for future releases. It may still be possible to compile and run ES-DE on this device, but as of v1.0 it's not actively used during development and therefore not tested.
The software comes preconfigured for use primarily with [RetroArch](https://www.retroarch.com), although this can be changed as all emulator settings are fully configurable, even on a per-game basis.
A comprehensive theme set, **rbsimple-DE** (which is based on Recalbox Multi from the [Recalbox](https://www.recalbox.com) community) is bundled with the application.
**_The ES-DE repository was just opened for public access and there are no binary distributions available yet. But the plan is to have Beta 1 available in the near future when most of the known bugs have been fixed. Stay tuned._**
For some of the rarer operating systems listed at the top you need to build ES-DE from source. The plan is to have ES-DE available in the software repositories of all supported operating systems (where this is applicable), so in the long term building from source should not be required.
**Note:** The software is currently in beta status which means it's also beta quality and may contain bugs. The application should still hopefully be good enough for every day use and bugs will be fixed continuously.
If you would like to contribute to the development of ES-DE, then that's great! Please read how to participate [here](CONTRIBUTING.md). (You can also read about planned future releases and features there).
[CHANGELOG.md](CHANGELOG.md) contains information about the current release as well as previous releases. This covers the features, improvements, bug fixes and known issues.
[INSTALL.md](INSTALL.md) provides details on how to build the application from source code, and also discusses some more advanced configuration topics.
[THEMES.md](THEMES.md) is a guide on how theming works which is useful for those who would like to develop a new theme, or perhaps customize an existing theme.
Here are some highlights of what EmulationStation Desktop Edition provides, displayed using the default theme set rbsimple-DE. There are of course many more features available, as covered in the [User guide](USERGUIDE.md).
_The **Gamelist view**, it's here that you browse the games for a specific system. Note the support for mixing files and folders, and as well that favorite games are marked with stars. There is a game counter to the upper right, displaying the total number of games and the number of favorite games for this system._
_Another example of the gamelist view, displaying advanced folder support. You can scrape folders for game info and game media, sort folders as you would files, mark them as favorites etc. In this example ES-DE has been configured to sort favorite games above non-favorites._
_Games can be grouped into your own custom collections, in this example they're defined as game genres but you can name them anything you like. All gamelist views including the custom collections support both game images or game videos. By default the rbsimple-DE theme will display the game image for a short moment before starting to play the game video._
_This is a view of the built-in scraper which downloads game info and game media from either [screenscraper.fr](https://screenscraper.fr) or [thegamesdb.net](https://thegamesdb.net). It's possible to scrape a single game, or to run the multi-scraper which can scrape a complete game system or even your entire collection._
_There are many settings for the scraper including options to define which type of info and media to download. The above screenshot shows only a portion of these settings._
_In addition to the scraper there is a fully-featured metadata editor that can be used to modify information on a per-game basis. Here you can also toggle some additional flags which the scraper does not set, such as if the game is a favorite or if you have completed it. Some of these flags can then be filtered in the gamelist view, letting you for instance only display games that you have not played through._
_There are four types of built-in screensavers available, including a slideshow and the video screensaver showed in action above. These screensavers start after a configurable number of minutes of inactivity, and randomly display game media that you have previously scraped. If the corresponding option has been enabled, you can jump to the game from the screensaver, or even start it directly. There is shader support in ES-DE to render scanlines and screen blur on top of the videos (for the slideshow screensaver, scanline rendering is provided)._
_ES-DE is fully themeable, so if you prefer another look than what the default theme rbsimple-DE gives you, it's possible to apply another theme set. In the example above a modified version of the [Fundamental](https://github.com/G-rila/es-theme-fundamental) theme is used. Be aware though that although ES-DE is backwards compatible with older EmulationStation themes, some newer features which are specific to ES-DE will not work, at least not until the theme authors update their themes._
_A lot of effort has been spent on trying to make ES-DE easy to setup and use. The above screenshot shows the dialog if starting the application without any game files present in the default ROM directory. Also, ES-DE ships with a very comprehensive game systems configuration file that is automatically installed upon first startup._
