This document contains information specific to the Android release, for more general ES-DE documentation refer to the [User guide](USERGUIDE.md) as well as the general [FAQ](FAQ.md).
It's also generally recommended to read the [Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for Android](FAQ-ANDROID.md) document prior to diving into the information in this document.
When you first start ES-DE you will be greeted by a welcome screen, this is part of the _configurator_, the ES-DE onboarding interface. The configurator is easy to use and will guide you through the necessary setup steps.
As a first step you need to give ES-DE the required storage access permission or it will not be able to function. Just enable the setting and the configurator will proceed to the next step. Next you will need to define a application data directory where your settings, scraped media, custom collections and so on will be stored. By default this will be placed in the _ES-DE_ directory in the root of your device's internal storage, and this directory will be created for you automatically.
After this step you need to select a ROMs directory where your game files will be stored, by default this will be named _ROMs_ and will be located in the root of you device's internal storage. You can however choose to place this on an SD card if you want to, just change the path using the Android file selector GUI. If you do change the path to the SD card you will however need to manually create the ROMs directory as well as to delete the empty directory that was created for you in the built-in storage.
The next step is optional, and it's whether to create the game systems directory structure inside your ROMs folder. Performing this will also create _systeminfo.txt_ files in each system directory. These files contain information about the system such as what file extensions and emulators that are supported. They are not mandatory for the app to function, they are only there for your convenience. In general it's recommended to create the system directories, although you could remove the ones you don't need afterwards for a slightly faster app startup speed.
This is basically the onboarding process, and ES-DE should now start up. Just be aware that you need to place at least one game with a supported file extension in the ROMs directory tree or ES-DE will only show an information dialog about missing games.
Also note that ES-DE does not install any emulators, you need to install those separately. There is more information about that topic later in this document.
If you need to re-run the configurator for some reason then the easiest way is to go into the Android Apps setting screen and revoke the storage access permissions under _Special app access_. This will make the configurator run automatically next time you start ES-DE. Another way to force it to start is to clear the app's storage under _Storage & cache_ but this is normally not recommended as it also deletes all themes you have downloaded using the theme downloader. A third option would be to rename either the ES-DE or ROMs directory as this will also trigger the configurator on next app startup.
By default the touch input overlay will be enabled which makes it possible to use ES-DE without a controller or physical keyboard by overlaying virtual buttons on top of the ES-DE interface. If you are using a device which has a built-in controller you may however want to disable this feature. That is done via the _Enable touch overlay_ option in the _Input device settings_ menu on the main menu. Just be aware that disabling this option on a device where you have no other input method than touch will lock you out of the application.
If you accidentally disable the touch overlay you can force the configurator to run as explained in the previous section above, this will always reset the touch overlay setting. Another option would of course be to temporarily plug in a controller or keyboard to enable the setting via its menu entry. A third option would be to manually edit the es_settings.xml file in the ES-DE application data directory. The setting you are after is named _InputTouchOverlay_ which should be changed from _false_ to _true_.
Apart from this there are numerous options for the touch overlay, like the ability to change its size, opacity and fade-out time. Setting the fade-out to zero will make it permanently visible. See the [User guide](USERGUIDE-DEV.md) for a complete reference of all app settings and features.
Almost all files saved and used by ES-DE are kept in the shared storage on either the device's built-in storage or on the SD card. This means that uninstalling the ES-DE app will not remove any of that data. The only thing that will be deleted are themes that have been downloaded using the built-in theme downloader, as it's not possible to store these in the ES-DE application data directory for technical reasons.
There are a few challenges with emulation on Android. Some emulators on the Google Play store have not been updated for a long time, and some emulators are not available on the Play store at all. For these reasons you will need to sideload some manually downloaded APKs for a good emulation setup. There is a section later in this document describing the best place to get hold of each supported emulator.
Thankfully sideloading emulators is easy to do, the exact producedure for how to install APKs manually is not covered here but there are many resources available online on how to accomplish this.
There is also the [F-Droid](https://f-droid.org/) app store as an alternative to Google Play, and this service contains a couple of emulators that are not present on the Play store, or that are present there but haven't been updated for a very long time.
A number of emulators support the [FileProvider](https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/core/content/FileProvider) API which makes it possible for ES-DE to temporarily provide storage access to the game file on launch. This means that most of the time no access permission needs to be setup in the emulator upfront. Access can however only be passed for single files, so for systems that support multi-file games such as disc-based games in .bin/.cue format SAF URIs are often used instead. For those emulators you will therefore generally need to manually provide scoped storage access to each game system directory. Note that it's not supported to give access to the root of the entire ROM directory for emulators that use scoped storage, it has to be for the specific system. For instance `/storage/emulated/0/ROMs/n64` rather than `/storage/emulated/0/ROMs`.
Adding to the FileProvider API confusion is the fact that some emulators will only launch games when using this API even though they need to have scoped storage access setup within the emulator upfront. FPseNG and FPse are two examples of this. So there is unfortunately no definitive rule regarding the use of the FileProvider API, it all depends on how the emulator has implemented the functionality.
While it's possible to split the game system directories across multiple storage devices this is not recommended. First it's tedious to setup, but more importantly it breaks portability for the installation. For instance you can't easily migrate between the different operating systems that ES-DE support and your custom collections will not be portable at all, as they will instead contain absolute paths to your games.
The way ES-DE works is that you have a defined ROMs directory which corresponds to the %ROMPATH% variable that is used throughout the es_systems.xml file and the custom collections files. For example this is the system configuration for the samcoupe system:
Here the path tag is using the %ROMPATH% variable to keep it relative to the base ROMs directory as selected via the onboarding configurator when you first installed ES-DE. If you relocate your ROMs directory to a different storage device, or copy it to another device altogether or if you synchronize your games across Android and Linux, macOS or Windows then everything will still work correctly.
Similarly custom collection files contain the %ROMPATH% variable too, such as this:
```
%ROMPATH%/amiga/OoopsUp.lha
%ROMPATH%/amiga/PacMania.lha
%ROMPATH%/samcoupe/Manic Miner.zip
%ROMPATH%/samcoupe/Prince of Persia.zip
```
This makes your custom collections portable if you move your ROMs directory and you can also transfer the collections between various devices and operating systems while keeping everything working seamlessly.
If you still insist on relocating some game system directories to another storage device then you need to make custom system configuration entries for them. See the _Game system customization_ section of the [User guide](USERGUIDE.md#game-system-customizations) for details on how this is accomplished. In short you need to create an es_systems.xml file in the ES-DE/custom_systems directory and replace the %ROMPATH% variable with an absolute path for the specific systems you want to relocate.
You can find the bundled es_systems.xml file for Android here (which contains configuration for all supported systems):\
This example points the samcoupe directory to the external storage device /storage/719F-3A7F which may for instance be an SD card.
Note that doing the opposite, i.e. placing your primary ROMs directory on external storage and relocating a specific system to internal storage requires you to use the /storage/emulated/0 path, you can't use /sdcard in the path tag.
As of ES-DE 3.0.2 there is experimental support for launching native Android apps and games from inside ES-DE. For the time being it does however require that you use a separate app to import your apps and games into ES-DE. But following this initial setup launching native apps and games works just like launching games for any other system.
First head to this GitHub repository and download the ES Applauncher APK:\
Many thanks to Alex Pferdmenges for developing this app!
After installing the APK on your device and giving it the necessary permissions you'll see a list of your apps and you can classify the ones you want as games, and you can disable the ones you want to skip via the _Game_ and _Disable_ checkboxes on the right side of the screen. You can also choose to extract the icons for these apps and store them into one of the media folders inside the ES-DE/downloaded_media directory. The _Media dir_ dropdown at the top of the screen lets you select the media type. It's generally recommended to use _screenshots_ or _covers_ or you can skip this step altogether as most of these icons are pretty low resolution anyway.
To populate the _androidapps_ and _androidgames_ system directories press the save icon in the upper right corner of the screen and select your ROMs directory from the selector interface. For example this could be _ROMs_ directly on internal storage, or on your SD card. Just press the _Use this folder_ button and the directories and files will be generated for you. Now you can start ES-DE and launch these apps and games directly.
Note that it seems like ES Applauncher has issues working correctly on some Android 10 devices.
It's also possible to scrape Android apps and games using ScreenScraper, but at the time of writing the amount of entries in their database is somehow limited. It's therefore encouraged to participate in improving this situation by contributing metadata and media to their database, this will benefit everyone in the long run.
A built-in import tool for native Android apps and games is also planned for a future ES-DE release.
* Poor performance/low frame rate after startup on some devices, which seems to happen randomly and is usually resolved by itself within 10 to 30 seconds.
* The Android soft keyboard causes rendering issues when navigating using a controller or physical keyboard, as such the ES-DE built-in keyboard is enabled by default for the time being. For testing purposes the Android soft keyboard can be enabled via the _Enable virtual keyboard_ option in the _UI settings_ menu. If only using touch input the issue is not present. This problem is believed to be caused by a bug in the SDL library so it probably needs to be resolved there.
* Using a mounted USB storage device for the ES-DE and/or ROMs directories will lead to the configurator exiting after finishing the setup instead of launching ES-DE. Restarting ES-DE manually will lead to a successful startup. If the option to create the system directories was selected in the configurator then this will have to be executed again from inside ES-DE. Note that using a mounted USB storage device leads to a very crippled setup anyway, as for example RetroArch can't read any games from such devices (i.e. from the /mnt/media_rw/ directory tree). Only emulators supporting scoped storage will be usable in such a setup.
The RetroArch release from the Google Play store is problematic. It does not contain all emulator cores and a number of people have reported issues launching games from ES-DE (apparently it doesn't work at all on some devices). For these reasons it's strongly recommended to use the 64-bit release from the RetroArch website instead, or to install it from the Samsung Galaxy Store, Amazon Appstore or the F-Droid store.
Be aware that you need to manually install every core you want to use from inside the RetroArch user interface, and you also need to install all necessary BIOS files. The Android release of RetroArch is pretty unforgiving and will usually just present a black screen on game launch if the core file or the BIOS file is missing, and it will hang there until Android realizes the app is not responding and displays a popup where you can choose to kill the process.
Although the emulator entry is named AetherSX2 the recommended release of this emulator is actually the NetherSX2 patched version as the AetherSX2 release on the Google Play store doesn't work correctly and probably can't be used with ES-DE at all. You'll need to search for this APK online, the filename you'll want is `15210-v1.5-4248-noads.apk`
The original Citra emulator project is no longer alive, but there is a fork that should work as a drop-in replacement. The Citra MMJ fork is also a viable alternative. Both of these emulators are available for download from their GitHub sites.
This emulator can be installed from the Play store. There is a paid version as well named ColEm Deluxe (ColEm+ ColecoVision Emulator is the store listing name).
Although this emulator supports both the Adam and ColecoVision systems it can unfortunately not do both interchangeably. In order to play Adam games you need to go into the Emulation settings in ColEm and tick the _Coleco Adam_ box. And likewise you'll need to untick it any time you want to play a ColecoVision game. This is true for launching games from ES-DE as well as starting them from inside the emulator GUI.
The Play store version is somehow up to date and could be used, otherwise the F-Droid store version is up to date, or you could download the latest release directly from their website.
Although it's not normally recommended to use the unofficial Dolphin forks because they are mostly ancient and have been surpassed by the mainline Dolphin releases, there could still be situations where it's useful. For example on weaker devices where the older release would work better.
There are multiple MMJR forks in existence, but the ones supported by ES-DE are `Dolphin.MMJR.v11505.apk` and `MMJR.v2.0-17878.apk` which can be downloaded from here:
There does not seem to be a way to launch individual EKA2L1 games from a frontend application on Android, instead ES-DE will simply launch the EKA2L1 user interface and you'll have to manually start your game from there.
These set of emulators also known as the "Robert Broglia" emulators consist of 2600.emu, C64.emu, GBA.emu, GBC.emu, Lynx.emu, NEO.emu, NES.emu, NGP.emu, MD.emu, MSX.emu, PCE.emu, Snes9x EX+, Saturn.emu and Swan.emu
This RetroArch core is a good port of the official PICO-8 game engine which does not exist on Android. It's not shipped with RetroArch by default though so you need to manually install it. After downloading it you'll need to place the core inside's RetroArch's downloads directory and then install it from the RetroArch app.
You must use the 64-bit version with the filename `libfake08-arm64.so` and it has to be renamed to `fake08_libretro_android.so` before you install it into RetroArch. Details on how to manually install cores in RetroArch can be found on the Internet, but the short version is to use the _Install or Restore a Core_ entry in the _Load Core_ menu. Fake-08 can be downloaded from their GitHub site.
This emulator can be installed from the Play store. There is a paid version as well named fMSX Deluxe (fMSX+ MSX/MSX2 Emulator is the store listing name).
These emulators can be installed from the Play store as a paid apps. FPseNG is the more modern version so it's probably best to go for that. Note that these emulators do not support .chd files.
These emulators can be installed from the Play store. It's strongly recommended to go for the _MAME4droid 2024_ version as this is updated with a recent MAME release while the older _MAME4droid_ is using an ancient MAME release.
This emulator can be installed from the Play store but it's quite buggy. Every time you add a new game to the ROM directory you need to start the emulator and manually refresh the game list or you won't be able to launch the game from ES-DE.
These emulators can be installed from the Play store as paid apps. There are also free/Lite versions available for these emulators but they have not been updated in years and don't run on modern devices. As such they are not supported by ES-DE.
Although OpenBOR is working fine on Android it's not possible to properly integrate it with a frontend, you'll instead need to install your game PAKs into the `/sdcard/OpenBOR/Paks` directory and create dummy .openbor files for your games in `ROMs/openbor` and after launching a game from ES-DE you need to manually start it from inside the OpenBOR GUI. There are more detailed setup instructions in the _OpenBOR_ section of the [User guide](USERGUIDE-DEV.md#openbor).
This emulator is in early development and there currently seems to be no way to run a game directly from ES-DE. Instead the emulator GUI will be displayed on game launch and you will need to manually select the game from there. Note that the Android build of this emulator is named _pandroid_, but as the overall project name is Panda3DS it will be referred to as such in ES-DE. This emulator can be downloaded from their GitHub site.
The Pizza Boy GBA and Pizza Boy GBC emulators can be installed from the Play store. There are Basic (free) versions and Pro (paid) versions available.
As of writing this, the Basic version of the GBA emulator does not seem to be able to launch games from ES-DE, but the Pro version is working fine. Both the Basic and Pro versions of the GBC emulator are working correctly.
The Play store version of this emulator is getting frequent updates and is therefore recommended. There is a paid Gold version as well which is functionally identical to the free version.
Make sure that you press the _Browse_ button in PPSSPP when you're adding scoped storage access to your games directory or you will not be able to launch any games from ES-DE.
This 3DO Interactive Multiplayer emulator can be downloaded from their website. Just be aware that it's very old and has not been updated for modern Android releases, so it may be finicky on some devices or it may not work at all.
You need to place the BIOS file in the game system directory, i.e. in the ROMs/3do folder. The file panafz10.bin with MD5 checksum 51f2f43ae2f3508a14d9f56597e2d3ce has been proven to work.
After installing the emulator, open it and go to the settings tab, then choose "Select ISO and BIOS directory" and navigate to the ROMs/3do folder. It seems like you also need to start the game from inside the emulator before you can run it from ES-DE. Starting a game will create a savestate file. If you now exit the emulator and run the game from ES-DE you'll see a list of savestate files, just select the correct one to start the game.
This emulator can be installed from the Play store. There is a paid version as well named Speccy Deluxe (Speccy+ ZX Spectrum Emulator is the store listing name).
Although this emulator supports both the Sinclar ZX Spectrum and MGT SAM Coupé systems it can unfortunately not do both interchangeably. In order to play SAM Coupé games you need to go into the Emulation settings in Speccy and select _Sam Coupe_ from the _Computer Model_ selection screen. And likewise you'll need to change it back any time you want to play a ZX Spectrum game. This is true for launching games from ES-DE as well as starting them from inside the emulator GUI.
This emulator can be installed from the Play store, there is a paid Pro version as well. At the time of writing only the Pro version works when launching games from ES-DE. Also note that .bin/.cue files can't be launched for the time being, only .chd files seem to work. This needs to be fixed in the emulator so nothing can be done in ES-DE to work around that limitation.
| Nvidia | Shield Pro (2015/2019) | 11 (TV) | Yes | None | Limited RAM capacity for this device makes it unsuitable for demanding themes and large game collections |
| atarist | Atari ST [also STE and Falcon] | Hatari | | Yes | Single archive or image file for single-diskette games, .m3u playlist for multi-diskette games |
| c64 | Commodore 64 | VICE x64sc Accurate | VICE x64 Fast,<br>VICE x64 SuperCPU,<br>VICE x128,<br>C64.emu **(Standalone)** | No | Single archive or image file for tape, cartridge or single-diskette games, .m3u playlist for multi-diskette games |
| dreamcast | Sega Dreamcast | Flycast | Flycast **(Standalone)**,<br>Redream **(Standalone)** | No | In separate folder interpreted as a file, with .m3u playlist if multi-disc game |
| easyrpg | EasyRPG Game Engine | EasyRPG | | No | |
| electron | Acorn Electron | _Placeholder_ | | | |
| famicom | Nintendo Family Computer | Mesen | Nestopia UE,<br>FCEUmm,<br>QuickNES,<br>NES.emu **(Standalone)**,<br>iNES **(Standalone)**,<br>Nesoid **(Standalone)** | No | Single archive or ROM file |
| fds | Nintendo Famicom Disk System | Mesen | Nestopia UE,<br>FCEUmm,<br>NES.emu **(Standalone)**,<br>iNES **(Standalone)**,<br>Nesoid **(Standalone)** | Yes | Single archive or ROM file |
| gameandwatch | Nintendo Game and Watch | Multi (MESS) | MAME4droid 2024 **(Standalone)**,<br>Handheld Electronic (GW) | No | Single archive or ROM file |
| gamegear | Sega Game Gear | Genesis Plus GX | Genesis Plus GX Wide,<br>Gearsystem,<br>SMS Plus GX,<br>PicoDrive,<br>MasterGear **(Standalone)** | No | Single archive or ROM file |
| gb | Nintendo Game Boy | Gambatte | SameBoy,<br>Gearboy,<br>TGB Dual,<br>DoubleCherryGB,<br>Mesen-S,<br>bsnes,<br>mGBA,<br>VBA-M,<br>GBC.emu **(Standalone)**,<br>My OldBoy! **(Standalone**),<br>Pizza Boy GBC **(Standalone)** | No | Single archive or ROM file |
| gba | Nintendo Game Boy Advance | mGBA | VBA-M,<br>VBA Next,<br>gpSP,<br>GBA.emu **(Standalone)**,<br>My Boy! **(Standalone)**,<br>Pizza Boy GBA **(Standalone)** | No | Single archive or ROM file |
| gbc | Nintendo Game Boy Color | Gambatte | SameBoy,<br>Gearboy,<br>TGB Dual,<br>DoubleCherryGB,<br>Mesen-S,<br>bsnes,<br>mGBA,<br>VBA-M,<br>GBC.emu **(Standalone)**,<br>My OldBoy! **(Standalone**),<br>Pizza Boy GBC **(Standalone)** | No | Single archive or ROM file |
| mastersystem | Sega Master System | Genesis Plus GX | Genesis Plus GX Wide,<br>SMS Plus GX,<br>Gearsystem,<br>PicoDrive,<br>MD.emu **(Standalone)**,<br>MasterGear **(Standalone)** | No | Single archive or ROM file |
| megacd | Sega Mega-CD | Genesis Plus GX | Genesis Plus GX Wide,<br>PicoDrive,<br>MD.emu **(Standalone)** | Yes | |
| megacdjp | Sega Mega-CD [Japan] | Genesis Plus GX | Genesis Plus GX Wide,<br>PicoDrive,<br>MD.emu **(Standalone)** | Yes | |
| megadrive | Sega Mega Drive | Genesis Plus GX | Genesis Plus GX Wide,<br>PicoDrive,<br>MD.emu **(Standalone)** | No | Single archive or ROM file |
| megadrivejp | Sega Mega Drive [Japan] | Genesis Plus GX | Genesis Plus GX Wide,<br>PicoDrive,<br>MD.emu **(Standalone)** | No | Single archive or ROM file |
| n64 | Nintendo 64 | Mupen64Plus-Next | M64Plus FZ **(Standalone)**,<br>Mupen64Plus AE **(Standalone)**,<br>ParaLLEl N64 | No | Single archive or ROM file |
| nds | Nintendo DS | melonDS DS | melonDS **(Standalone)**,<br>melonDS Nightly **(Standalone)**,<br>DeSmuME,<br>DeSmuME 2015,<br>DraStic **(Standalone)** | No | Single archive or ROM file |
| nes | Nintendo Entertainment System | Mesen | Nestopia UE,<br>FCEUmm,<br>QuickNES,<br>NES.emu **(Standalone)**,<br>iNES **(Standalone)**,<br>Nesoid **(Standalone)** | No | Single archive or ROM file |
| plus4 | Commodore Plus/4 | VICE xplus4 | | No | Single archive or image file for tape, cartridge or single-diskette games, .m3u playlist for multi-diskette games |
| pokemini | Nintendo Pokémon Mini | PokeMini | | No | |
| sfc | Nintendo SFC (Super Famicom) | Snes9x - Current | Snes9x 2010,<br>Snes9x 2005 Plus,<br>Snes9x EX+ **(Standalone)**,<br>bsnes,<br>bsnes-hd,<br>bsnes-mercury Accuracy,<br>Beetle Supafaust,<br>Mesen-S | No | Single archive or ROM file |
| sg-1000 | Sega SG-1000 | Genesis Plus GX | Genesis Plus GX Wide,<br>Gearsystem,<br>blueMSX,<br>MasterGear **(Standalone)** | No | Single archive or ROM file |
| snes | Nintendo SNES (Super Nintendo) | Snes9x - Current | Snes9x 2010,<br>Snes9x 2005 Plus,<br>Snes9x EX+ **(Standalone)**,<br>bsnes,<br>bsnes-hd,<br>bsnes-mercury Accuracy,<br>Beetle Supafaust,<br>Mesen-S | No | Single archive or ROM file |
| snesna | Nintendo SNES (Super Nintendo) [North America] | Snes9x - Current | Snes9x 2010,<br>Snes9x 2005 Plus,<br>Snes9x EX+ **(Standalone)**,<br>bsnes,<br>bsnes-hd,<br>bsnes-mercury Accuracy,<br>Beetle Supafaust,<br>Mesen-S | No | Single archive or ROM file |
