EmulationStation Desktop Edition (ES-DE)

EmulationStation Desktop Edition is a front-end for browsing and launching games from your multi-platform game collection.

Web site:
https://es-de.org

YouTube channel with installation instruction videos:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCosLuC9yIMQPKFBJXgDpvVQ

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.

The current version 1.0 has been tested on the following operating systems (all for the x86 architecture unless otherwise stated):

• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
• Ubuntu 20.10
• Ubuntu 21.04
• Linux Mint 20
• Manjaro
• Fedora 33 Workstation
• FreeBSD 12.2
• NetBSD 9.1
• OpenBSD 6.8
• macOS 11 "Big Sur" (x86 and ARM via Rosetta 2)
• macOS 10.15 "Catalina"
• macOS 10.14 "Mojave"
• macOS 10.11 "El Capitan"
• Windows 10
• Windows 8.1

Note: If using a Mac with an ARM CPU (e.g. M1) you need to use the x86 version of RetroArch or otherwise you won't be able to launch any games. This will be fixed whenever a native macOS ARM build of ES-DE will become available.

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 type of 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, 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 community is bundled with the application. (Only assets created by them prior to their change to a more restrictive license in 2018 are included).

Download

The latest available release is v1.0.1 from 2021-05-01.

Package	Operating systems	Architecture	Download link
Debian DEB package	Ubuntu 20.04 and 20.10, Linux Mint 20, possibly others	x64 (x86)	emulationstation-de-1.0.1-x64.deb
Fedora RPM package	Fedora Workstation 33, possibly others	x64 (x86)	emulationstation-de-1.0.1-x64.rpm
macOS DMG installer	macOS 10.14 "Mojave" to 11 "Big Sur"	x64 (x86)	EmulationStation-DE-1.0.1-x64.dmg
macOS DMG installer	Legacy macOS 10.11 "El Capitan" to 10.13 "High Sierra"	x64 (x86)	EmulationStation-DE-1.0.1-x64_legacy.dmg
Windows installer	Windows 10 and 8.1	x64 (x86)	EmulationStation-DE-1.0.1-x64.exe

Please refer to CHANGELOG.md for more information about this release, including known issues.

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 everyday use and bugs are fixed continuously. Speaking of bugs, please report these on the project Kanban board, where you can also track the overall ES-DE development.

Contributing

If you would like to contribute to the development of ES-DE, then that's great! Please read how to participate here. (You can also read about planned future releases and features there).

Additional information

USERGUIDE.md is a comprehensive guide on how to use ES-DE and it also contains a complete reference to all application settings.

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 provides details on how to build the application from source code, and also discusses some more advanced configuration topics.

CREDITS.md is an attempt to credit the individuals and projects which made ES-DE possible.

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.

Some feature highlights

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.

The System view, which is the default starting point for the application, it's here that you browse through your game systems.

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 or 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 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.