ES-DE/USERGUIDE-DEV.md

EmulationStation Desktop Edition (ES-DE) v1.2 (development version) - User guide

This document is intended as a quick start guide and as a reference for the application settings and general functionality. For details on how to build ES-DE from source code and to perform more advanced configuration, please refer to INSTALL-DEV.md.

This version of the user guide is only relevant for the current ES-DE development version, if you are using the latest stable release, refer to USERGUIDE.md instead.

Table of contents:

[[TOC]]

Quick start guide

If you just want to get started as quickly as possible, simply follow these steps:

1. Install ES-DE
2. Start the application and press the Create directories button to generate the ROMs directory structure
3. Put your game ROMs in the directories created by the previous step, or see here for additional details
4. Install RetroArch
5. Start RetroArch and install the required emulator cores
6. Start ES-DE, scrape game media for your collection and play some games!

You can always close the application immediately by using the keyboard, by default the exit key is mapped to F4 but this can be changed to Alt + F4, Alt + Q or Command Q (on macOS) using the Exit button combo menu option.

For additional details, read on below.

There are also installation videos available at the ES-DE YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCosLuC9yIMQPKFBJXgDpvVQ

Installation and first startup

To install ES-DE, just download the package or installer from https://es-de.org and follow the brief instructions below.

The following operating systems have been tested (all for the x86 architecture unless otherwise stated):

• Ubuntu 20.04 to 21.10
• Linux Mint 20.2
• Manjaro 21.1
• Fedora 35 Workstation
• Raspberry Pi OS 10 (armv7l and aarch64)
• FreeBSD 13.0
• NetBSD 9.1
• OpenBSD 6.8
• macOS 10.14 "Mojave" to 12 "Monterey" (the M1 processor via Rosetta 2 is supported)
• macOS 10.11 "El Capitan" (v1.0 release only)
• Windows 10
• Windows 8.1

If using a Mac with an M1 processor you need to install the x86 version of RetroArch and any other emulators, or you won't be able to launch any games. This will be fixed whenever a native macOS ARM build of ES-DE is released.

If using macOS Monterey, there has been a quite serious OpenGL bug introduced by Apple which causes problems for ES-DE. A workaround for this issue is discussed below.

As for display resolutions, the minimum pixel value is 224 and the maximum is 7680. This means that you can run ES-DE at for instance 320x224 all the way up to 7680x4320 (8K UHD). Vertical screen orientation is also supported, as well as ultra-wide resolutions like 3840x1440. Note that there could be some minor visual glitches when running in vertical orientation (this will be fixed in future ES-DE releases) and for the best experience you will probably need to use a customized theme set when running at extreme or unusual resolutions.

The installation procedure is just covered briefly here and may differ a bit for your specific operating system, so in case of problems refer to your system documentation.

Installing a Linux .deb package

The .deb package is intended for Linux distributions based on Debian, such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Raspberry Pi OS etc. Your distribution should include a graphical package installer, but if you prefer to use the command line, run the following which will install ES-DE and resolve any dependencies:

sudo apt install ./emulationstation-de-1.2.0-x64.deb

Installing a Linux .rpm package

On Fedora the RPM Fusion repository is a prerequisite for the installation, it can be installed like this:

sudo dnf install \
https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm \
https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

Then you can use the graphical package installer or run this command, either method should automatically resolve the dependencies:

sudo dnf install ./emulationstation-de-1.2.0-x64.rpm

Of course the file name will differ slightly depending on the architecture, the example above is for the x64/x86 platform.

Installing on macOS and Windows

There's not really much to say about these operating systems, just install ES-DE as you would any other application. On macOS it's via the .dmg drag-and-drop installer, and on Windows via the normal application installer.

On first application startup

Upon first startup, ES-DE will create its ~/.emulationstation home directory.

On Unix this means /home/<username>/.emulationstation/, on macOS /Users/<username>/.emulationstation/ and on Windows C:\Users\<username>\.emulationstation\

Note: As of ES-DE v1.2 there is no internationalization support, which means that the application will always require the physical rather than the localized path to your home directory. For instance on macOS configured for the Swedish language /Users/myusername will be the physical path but /Användare/myusername is the localized path that is actually shown in the user interface. The same is true on Windows where the directories would be C:\Users\myusername and C:\Användare\myusername respectively. If attempting to enter the localized path for any directory-related setting, ES-DE will not be able to find it. But it's always possible to use the tilde ~ symbol when referring to your home directory, which ES-DE will expand to the physical location regardless of what language you have configured for your operating system. If you're using an English-localized system, this whole point is irrelevant as the physical and localized paths are then identical.

It's possible to override the home directory path using the --home command line option, but this is normally required only for very special situations so we can safely ignore that option for now.

Also on first startup the configuration file es_settings.xml will be generated in the ES-DE home directory, containing all the application settings at their default values. Following this, a file named es_systems.xml will be loaded from the resources directory (which is part of the ES-DE installation). This file contains the game system definitions including which emulator to use per platform. For some systems there are also alternative emulators defined which can be applied system-wide or per game. How that works is explained later in this guide. A customized systems configuration file can also be used, as described in the next section.

There's an application log file created in the ES-DE home directory named es_log.txt, please refer to this in case of any issues as it should hopefully provide information on what went wrong. Starting ES-DE with the --debug flag provides even more detailed information.

After ES-DE finds at least one game file, it will populate that game system and the application will start. If there are no game files, a dialog will be shown explaining that you need to install your game files into your ROMs directory. You will also be given a choice to change that ROMs directory path if you don't want to use the default one. As well you have the option to generate the complete game systems directory structure based on information in es_systems.xml.

When generating the directory structure, a file named systeminfo.txt will be created in each game system folder which will provide you with some information about the system. Here's an example for the gc system as seen on macOS:

System name:
gc

Full system name:
Nintendo GameCube

Supported file extensions:
.gcm .GCM .iso .ISO .wbfs .WBFS .ciso .CISO .gcz .GCZ .elf .ELF .dol .DOL .dff .DFF .tgc .TGC .wad .WAD .7z .7Z .zip .ZIP

Launch command:
%EMULATOR_RETROARCH% -L %CORE_RETROARCH%/dolphin_libretro.dylib %ROM%

Platform (for scraping):
gc

Theme folder:
gc

The primary use of this file is to see which RetroArch core the system needs, which you will have to install manually from inside the RetroArch user interface. Also the supported file extensions can be quite useful to know.

In addition to this, a file named systems.txt will be created in the root of the ROMs directory which shows the mapping between the directory names and the full system names.

For example:

gc: Nintendo GameCube
genesis: Sega Genesis
gx4000: Amstrad GX4000

If a custom es_systems.xml file is present in ~/.emulationstation/custom_systems/ any entries from this file will have their names trailed by the text (custom system). So if the GameCube system in the example above would be present in the custom systems configuration file, the system would be shown as gc (custom system) instead of simply gc. This is only applicable for the systems.txt and systeminfo.txt files, the trailing text is not applied or used anywhere else in the application.

Note that neither the systeminfo.txt files or the systems.txt file are needed to run ES-DE, they're only generated as a convenience to help with the setup.

There will be a lot of directories created if using the es_systems.xml file bundled with the installation, so it may be a good idea to remove the ones you don't need. It's recommended to move them to another location to be able to use them later if more systems should be added. For example a directory named _DISABLED could be created inside the ROMs folder (i.e. ~/ROMs/_DISABLED) and all game system directories you don't need could be moved there. Doing this reduces the application startup time as ES-DE would otherwise need to scan for game files for all these systems.

This is the dialog shown if no game files were found. It lets you configure the ROM directory if you don't want to use the default one, and you can also generate the game systems directory structure. Note that the directory is the physical path, and that your operating system may present this as a localized path if you are using a language other than English.

Using the Steam release of RetroArch

On Windows it's no problem to use the Steam release of RetroArch although you may have to add the location manually to your Path environment variable. By default the following locations will be searched:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\RetroArch\retroarch.exe
D:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\RetroArch\retroarch.exe
C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\RetroArch\retroarch.exe
D:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\RetroArch\retroarch.exe

If you have installed RetroArch at another location, simply start the Settings application, search for path in the Find a setting field and choose Edit environment variables for your account. Edit the Path variable and add the directory where RetroArch is installed. This is required as there is no apparent way for ES-DE to find where RetroArch has been installed by the Steam application.

Unfortunately on Linux it's at the moment not possible to run the Steam release of RetroArch due to technical reasons. This RetroArch release runs as a type of container which can't be executed from ES-DE while correctly passing the necessary core and game options. Similarly it's not possible to launch RetroArch via the Steam application either as there seems to be a bug in Steam or RetroArch that prevents blankspaces from being present in game ROM files when passed as arguments (this works fine on Windows so it's definitely a Linux-specific issue and as well the same problem occurs if attempting to manually enter the launch command from a terminal window).

Specific notes for macOS

On macOS, the first time you launch a game from within ES-DE, the operating system will present you with a security option with the following description:

"EmulationStation Desktop Edition" would like to access files in your Documents folder.

If you don't allow this, you will not be able to place system BIOS ROMs in the RetroArch default system directory ~/Documents/RetroArch/system even if you've already given RetroArch access to this folder. This is so because RetroArch runs as a subprocess to ES-DE and therefore inherits the security settings from the parent application. Attempting to launch a game without enabling the access will simply display an error message in the emulator that the BIOS files are missing. This of course only applies to emulators that require BIOS ROMs, all other games should work fine regardless of this security setting.

If you accidentally refused ES-DE the folder access, you can fix this by opening System Preferences, selecting Security & Privacy and within the GUI choose Files and Folders. The option you need to enable is Documents Folder under EmulationStation Desktop Edition.

Another issue on macOS 11 Big Sur (and possibly other OS versions) is that when connecting a Sony 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.

In macOS 12 Monterey there has been a quite serious OpenGL driver bug introduced by Apple which disables VSync, making the operating system always try to render as many frames as it can. This slows down ES-DE quite a lot and consumes lots of machine resources. The issue is discussed here. There is a temporary workaround available which can be enabled via the macOS Monterey VSync bug workaround setting in the Other settings menu. This will add a short 10 millisecond delay after each frame if the last frame was swapped in less than 3 milliseconds. It's not a proper fix but it should at least make ES-DE usable on Monterey until Apple releases a patch for the bug.

Specific notes for Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi 4/400 is the minimum recommended version and earlier boards have not been tested. The GPU memory should be set to at least 256 MiB using raspi-config and the GL driver must be set to GL (Fake KMS) or the performance will be horrible.

In general, 720p works fine with the RPi 4, and 1080p is tolerable but not really a nice and smooth experience. Due to the relative weakness of the Rasperry Pi GPU, the video scanline rendering options for the screensaver and media viewer have been disabled (they're enabled by default on all other platforms). These options can be re-enabled via the menu if you don't mind lower video framerates.

Both the 32-bit (armv7l) and 64-bit (aarch64) versions of Raspberry Pi OS are supported. Although the 64-bit version of ES-DE actually runs much better than the 32-bit version (likely due to better GPU drivers for aarch64) it's still generally recommended to go for the 32-bit OS for now. The reason is that the Raspberry Pi Foundation still has not released the 64-bit version officially so it's somewhat of a beta with some functionality apparently broken. As well there seems to be issues with installing RetroArch cores on aarch64 so you would probably need to compile them from source code.

At the time of writing the Snap version of RetroArch appears broken and won't start on the 32-bit OS, so the Flatpak version would have to be installed. That is accomplished using these commands:

sudo apt install flatpak
sudo flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Following this you need to reboot, and then run this command:

sudo flatpak install retroarch

This will download and install a few hundred megabytes of data as there are some dependencies. Unfortunately the Flatpak environment does not seem to be properly setup either so you will have to launch RetroArch like this to install your emulator cores:

/var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/org.libretro.RetroArch

ES-DE will however detect and launch RetroArch correctly.

If the Snap version of RetroArch will be fixed in the future, it can be installed like this:

sudo apt-get install snapd
sudo snap install retroarch

Another issue on Raspberry Pi OS is that Sony DualShock 4 controllers have problems with some button presses that don't register correctly. This has not been seen on other Linux operating systems and will hopefully be patched out in the future via an OS update.

Game system customizations

The game systems configuration file es_systems.xml is located in the ES-DE resources directory which is part of the application installation. As such this file is not intended to be modified directly. If system customizations are required, a separate es_systems.xml file should instead be placed in the custom_systems folder in the ES-DE home directory, i.e. ~/.emulationstation/custom_systems/es_systems.xml.

Although it's possible to make a copy of the bundled configuration file, to modify it and then place it in this directory, that is not how the system customization is designed to be done. Instead the intention is that the file in custom_systems complements the bundled configuration, meaning only systems that are to be customized should be included.

For example you may want to replace the emulator launch command, modify the full name or change the supported file extensions for a single system. In this case it wouldn't make sense to copy the complete bundled file and just apply these minor modifications, instead an es_systems.xml file only containing the configuration for that single system should be placed in the custom_systems directory.

The instructions for how to customize the es_systems.xml file can be found in INSTALL-DEV.md. There you can also find some examples of custom files that you can copy into ~/.emulationstation/custom_systems/ and modify as required.

Migrating from other EmulationStation forks

IMPORTANT!!! IMPORTANT!!! IMPORTANT!!!

ES-DE is designed to be backward compatible to a certain degree. That is, it should be able to read data from other/previous EmulationStation versions such as the RetroPie fork. But the opposite is not true and it's a one-way ticket for your gamelist.xml files and your custom collection files when migrating to ES-DE as they will be modified in ways that previous ES versions will see as data loss. For instance ES-DE does not use image tags inside the gamelist.xml files to find game media but instead matches the media to the names of the game/ROM files. So it will not save any such tags back to the gamelist files during updates, effectively disabling the game media if the files are opened in another ES fork.

Due to this, always make backups of at least the following directories before testing ES-DE for the first time:

~/.emulationstation/gameslists/
~/.emulationstation/collections/

It's also strongly adviced to not rename an old es_settings.cfg file to es_settings.xml for use in ES-DE. Although this has been tested to some extent, it may cause undefined behavior.

If migrating from Batocera or Recalbox, be aware that ES-DE follows the RetroPie naming conventions for game systems. This means that your game files may not be found unless the folders are renamed accordingly. Such an example is the Sega SG-1000 system which in Batocera and Recalbox has the sg1000 system name, but is sg-1000 in RetroPie and ES-DE. See the Supported game systems table at the bottom of this guide for the correct system names in ES-DE. This issue also means that theme sets that were written or adapted specifically for Batocera or Recalbox may display unthemed systems in ES-DE. All RetroPie theme sets should however work fine (of course assuming that all your systems are actually supported by the theme set).

Running on high resolution displays

ES-DE fully supports high resolution displays such as 1440p, 4K, 6K, 8K, ultrawide monitors etc. But some emulators such as RetroArch will also run using the same resolution which may cause performance problems on slower machines or when using resource intensive shaders. Although some emulator cores will have options to set their internal resolution, they still need to be scaled up to the screen resolution. On Unix it's possible to start ES-DE with the --resolution option to set a lower screen resolution, which will also affect the emulators. But this is not really recommended as it's highly dependent on well-written graphics drivers for proper behavior.

A better approach is to use the custom event scripts functionality to set a temporary resolution upon launching a game that will be reverted when returning to ES-DE. Such a setup is detailed in INSTALL-DEV.md for Unix, but should hopefully be possible to implement similarly on macOS and Windows.

Input device configuration

ES-DE automatically configures the keyboard and any connected controllers using default button mappings, and normally no additional setup is required. But if you would like to apply custom button mappings for your devices or if you have an unusual device which isn't automatically configured, you can run the Configure keyboard and controllers tool from the Input device settings entry on the main menu.

You can also force a run of this tool directly on startup via the command line argument --force-input-config.

The actual procedure to map the inputs should be self-explanatory, just follow the on-screen instructions. Note that custom button mappings will not change the help prompts.

Any custom configuration is applied per unique device ID (GUID). So if two identical controllers are used with ES-DE, both will have the same configuration applied. If connecting controllers of the same type but of different revisions, the GUID may differ and therefore the custom configuration would need to be applied to each device individually.

If you have issues with your input configuration, as a last resort you can reset all the mappings by deleting or renaming the file ~/.emulationstation/es_input.xml.

System view (main screen)

When starting ES-DE with the default settings, you will see the System view first. From here you can navigate your game systems and enter their respective gamelists.

Depending on the theme, the system navigation carousel can be horizontal, vertical or displayed as a wheel. The default theme rbsimple-DE provides horizontal navigation, i.e. you browse your systems by scrolling left or right.

The game systems are sorted by their full names by default, as defined in the es_systems.xml file. It's however possible to set a custom sortname per system, as explained in the INSTALL-DEV.md document.

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

Gamelist view

The gamelist view is where you browse and start your games, and it's where you will spend most of your time using ES-DE.

Upon startup with the default settings, ES-DE is set to the gamelist view style Automatic. In this mode the application will look for any game media files (videos and images) and set the view style accordingly. If at least one image is found for any game, the view style Detailed will be shown, and if at least one video file is found, the view style Video will be selected (superceding the Detailed style). If no game media files are found for a system, the simple Basic view style will be selected. This automatic selection is applied per game system.

Note that the Video view style requires that the theme supports it. If not, the Detailed style will be selected instead. The default theme rbsimple-DE supports both of these view styles.

It's possible to manually set a specific gamelist view style in the UI settings entry of the main menu, but this is applied globally regardless of what media files are available per game system. The manual setting also overrides the theme-supported view styles which has the potential of making ES-DE very ugly indeed if the theme does not support the selected view style.

In addition to the styles just described, there is a Grid view style as well, but as of ES-DE version 1.2 this does not work correctly and is set as deprecated. Future ES-DE releases will remove this style entirely.

If the theme supports it, there's a gamelist information field displayed in the gamelist view, showing the number of games for the system (total and favorites) as well as a folder icon if a folder has been entered. When applying any filters to the gamelist, the game counter is replaced with the amount of games filtered, as in 'filtered / total games', e.g. '19 / 77'. If there are game entries in the filter result that are marked not to be counted as games, the number of such files will be indicated as 'filtered + filtered non-games / total games', for example '23 + 4 / 77' indicating 23 normal games, 4 non-games out of a total of 77. Due to this approach it's theoretically possible that the combined filtered game amount exceeds the number of counted games in the collection, for instance '69 + 11 / 77'. This is not considered a bug and is so by design. This gamelist information field functionality is specific to ES-DE so older themes will not support this.

Another feature which requires theme support is Badges, which is a set of icons displaying the status for various metadata fields. The currently supported badge types are favorite, completed, kidgame, broken, controller and alternative emulator. If any of the first four metadata fields have been set for a game, their corresponding badges will be displayed. If a game-specific controller has been selected via the metadata editor, the corresponding controller badge will be shown, and if an alternative emulator has been selected for the specific game, that badge will be displayed. Setting an alternative emulator system-wide will not display this badge as it's only intended to indicate game-specific overrides. As well, disabling the option Enable alternative emulators per game will also hide the alternative emulator badges.

The Gamelist view is where you browse the games for a specific system.

Here's an example of what the Basic view style looks like. Needless to say, ES-DE is not intended to be used like this. After scraping some game media for the system, the view style will automatically change to Detailed or Video (assuming the Automatic view style option has been selected).

UI modes

ES-DE supports three separate modes, Full, Kiosk and Kid.

These modes mandate the functionalty provided by the application in the following way:

• Full - This is the default mode which enables all functionality.
• Kiosk - The main menu will be severely restricted, only displaying the entry to change the audio volume. The game options menu will be restricted as well, removing the metadata editor and the ability to modify custom game collections. And finally the ability to flag or unflag games as favorites will be removed. Apart from this all games will be playable.
• Kid - Only games marked as being suitable for children will be displayed (this flag is set manually per game using the metadata editor). Additionally, the game options menu is disabled, as well as the screensaver controls and the ability to flag and unflag games as favorites. There is also a separate option available to enable or disable the main menu when in Kid mode, see Enable menu in kid mode for additional information.

There is an unlock code available to revert to the Full mode from the Kiosk or Kid mode, as is described when changing this setting from the main menu. By default the button sequence is Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A (or equivalent buttons if an Xbox controller is not used). Either the keyboard or a controller can be used to input the passkey sequence, but it can't be entered when a menu is open.

The application can also be forced into any of the three modes via the command line options --force-full, --force-kiosk and --force-kid. This is only temporary until the restart of the application, unless the settings menu is entered and the setting is saved to the configuration file (this assumes that the main menu is available in the selected UI mode of course).

Help system

There is a help system available throughout the application that provides an overview of the possible actions and buttons that can be used. But some general actions are never shown, such as the ability to quick jump in gamelists, menus and text input fields using the shoulder and trigger buttons. It's also possible to disable the help system using a menu option for a somewhat cleaner look.

The help system is displayed at the bottom of the screen, showing the various actions currently available.

General navigation

The built-in help system will provide a contextual summary of the available navigation options, but here's still a general overview. These are the buttons mappings automatically applied by ES-DE, but they can be customized using the input configurator as described earlier in this document. It's not an exhaustive list, but it covers most situations. The button names are based on the Xbox 360 controller as that is the naming convention used by the SDL library which handles the controller input in ES-DE.

The default keyboard mappings are shown in brackets.

Up and down
(Arrow up / Arrow down)

Navigate up and down in gamelists, between systems in the system view (if the theme has a vertical carousel) and in menus.

Left and right
(Arrow left / Arrow right)

Navigate between gamelists (if the Quick system select option has been enabled), between systems in the system view (if the theme has a horizontal carousel) and between media files in the media viewer. If the Enable screensaver controls option has been enabled, either button also randomly selects a new game when using the Video or Slideshow screensavers.

Start button
(Escape)

Opens and closes the main menu.

Back button
(F1)

Opens and closes the game options menu in the gamelist view, or toggles the screensaver in the system view (if the Enable screensaver controls setting is enabled).

Left and right shoulder buttons
(Page up / Page down)

Provides quick jumping in gamelists and menus, jumps 10 games in the gamelists and 6 entries in the menus. Also jumps forward in text edit dialogs.

Left and right trigger buttons
(Home / End)

Jumps to the first and last entry of the gamelists, menus and text edit dialogs.

Left and right thumbstick click
(F2 / F3)

Jumps to a random game or system depending on whether pressed when in the system view or gamelist view. Only available if the Enable random system or game button option has been enabled.

A button
(Enter)

Opens gamelists from the system view, launches games, enters folders, selects menu entries etc.

B button
(Back key)

Back button, self explanatory.

X button
(Delete)

Starts the game media viewer (which is accessible from the gamelist views). Used by some other minor functions as explained by the help system and/or this guide.

Y button
(Insert on Unix and Windows, F13 on macOS)

Marks games as favorites in the gamelist view (if the Enable toggle favorites button option has been enabled). Used by some other minor functions as explained by the help system and/or this guide.

F4 (keyboard only) Could alternatively be Alt + F4, Alt + Q or Command + Q

Quits the application. This key combination can be changed using the Exit button combo menu option described later in this document.

Getting your games into ES-DE

For most systems this is straightforward, just put your game files into the folder corresponding to the platform name (these names can be found at the end of this guide.)

But for some systems a more elaborate setup is required, and we will attempt to cover such situations in this guide as well.

Single game file installation

Let's start with the simple scenario of a single ROM file per game, which is the case for the majority of platforms. In this example we're setting up ES-DE to play Nintendo Entertainment System games.

The supported file extensions are listed in unix/es_systems.xml, macos/es_systems.xml and windows/es_systems.xml but if you generated the game system directories on first application startup, there will be a file named systeminfo.txt in each game system directory that includes the list of supported file extensions.

Here is a snippet from unix/es_systems.xml:

<system>
    <name>nes</name>
    <fullname>Nintendo Entertainment System</fullname>
    <path>%ROMPATH%/nes</path>
    <extension>.nes .NES .unf .UNF .unif .UNIF .7z .7Z .zip .ZIP</extension>
    <command label="Nestopia UE">%EMULATOR_RETROARCH% -L %CORE_RETROARCH%/nestopia_libretro.so %ROM%</command>
    <command label="FCEUmm">%EMULATOR_RETROARCH% -L %CORE_RETROARCH%/fceumm_libretro.so %ROM%</command>
    <command label="Mesen">%EMULATOR_RETROARCH% -L %CORE_RETROARCH%/mesen_libretro.so %ROM%</command>
    <command label="QuickNES">%EMULATOR_RETROARCH% -L %CORE_RETROARCH%/quicknes_libretro.so %ROM%</command>
    <platform>nes</platform>
    <theme>nes</theme>
</system>

The ROM files must named using one of the supported file extensions, or ES-DE won't find them.

It's highly recommended to use filenames that are corresponding to the full name of the game, otherwise you will need to manually feed the scraper the game name when scraping which is very tedious.

Note: Symlinks are supported for both ROM directories and individual game files, but make sure to not symlink between files within the same system directory or there may be undefined application behavior when scraping, launching games etc.

The default game folder is ~/ROMs. On Unix this defaults to /home/<username>/ROMs, on macOS /Users/<username>/ROMs and on Windows C:\Users\<username>\ROMs. If the --home command line option was used to start ES-DE, the tilde ~ symbol will resolve to whatever directory was passed as an argument to this option.

Assuming the default ROM directory is used, we need to create a subdirectory corresponding to the <path> tag in es_systems.xml, for this example it's nes.

So this would look something like the following:

/home/myusername/ROMs/nes     # On Unix
/Users/myusername/ROMs/nes    # On macOS
C:\Users\myusername\ROMs\nes  # On Windows

Then simply copy your game ROMs into this folder, and you should end up with something like this (example for Unix):

~/ROMs/nes/Legend of Zelda, the.zip
~/ROMs/nes/Metal Gear.zip
~/ROMs/nes/Super Mario Bros. 3.zip

Note: These directories are case sensitive on Unix, so creating a directory named Nes instead of nes won't work.

That's it, start ES-DE and the NES game system should be populated. You can now scrape information and media for the games, and assuming you've setup RetroArch correctly with the Nestopia UE core, you can launch the games. If you instead prefer to use any of the three alternative emulators listed above (FCEUmm, Mesen or QuickNES) you can install one of these cores instead and change your emulator preference using the Alternative emulators interface in the Other settings menu. Note that alternative emulators are only available for some game systems.

Multiple game files installation

For some systems, there are sometimes (or always) multiple gamefiles per game. Such an example would be the Commodore 64 when multidisk games are being played. For such instances, simply group the files inside folders.

The platform name for the Commodore 64 is c64, so the following structure would be a possible approach:

~/ROMs/c64/Cartridge
~/ROMs/c64/Tape
~/ROMs/c64/Disk
~/ROMs/c64/Multidisk
~/ROMs/c64/Multidisk/Last Ninja 2/LNINJA2A.D64
~/ROMs/c64/Multidisk/Last Ninja 2/LNINJA2B.D64
~/ROMs/c64/Multidisk/Last Ninja 2/Last Ninja 2.m3u
~/ROMs/c64/Multidisk/Pirates/PIRAT-E0.d64
~/ROMs/c64/Multidisk/Pirates/PIRAT-E1.d64
~/ROMs/c64/Multidisk/Pirates/PIRAT-E2.d64
~/ROMs/c64/Multidisk/Pirates/Pirates!.m3u

It's highly recommended to create .m3u playlist files for multi-disc images as this normally automates disk swapping in the emulator. It's then this .m3u file that should be selected for launching the game.

The .m3u file simply contains a list of the game files, for example in the case of Last Ninja 2.m3u:

LNINJA2A.D64
LNINJA2B.D64

It's of course also possible to skip this type of directory structure and put all the games in the root folder, but then there will be multiple entries for the same game which is not so tidy. Another approach would be to put all the files in the root folder and then hide the game files, showing only the .m3u playlist files. ES-DE is flexible so do whatever makes most sense for the situation.

When setting up games in this fashion, it's recommended to scrape the directory in addition to the .m3u file as it looks nicer to see the metadata for the games also when browsing the folders. ES-DE fully supports scraping folders, although some metadata is not included for logical reasons (and while it's possible to mark a folder as favorite, it will not be part of the Favorites collection as only files can be part of collections). If you only scrape the folders and not the actual game files, it may look somehow ok when browsing the gamelist, but when such a game is part of a collection, the metadata will be missing there. This includes the All games, Favorites and Last played collections but also any custom collection where the game has been added.

It's also recommended to use the metadata editor to set the flags Exclude from game counter and Exclude from automatic scraper for the actual game files so that they are not counted for the game statistics display and not scraped when running the multi-scraper. If you don't want to hide the individual game files but still want a cleaner look, it's also possible to set the flag Hide metadata fields for the game files.

Special game installation considerations

Not all systems are as simple as described above, or there may be multiple ways to do the configuration. Specifics for such systems will be covered here. Consider this a work in progress as there are many platforms supported by ES-DE.

Arcade and Neo Geo

For all the supported MAME variants as well as Final Burn Alpha/FinalBurn Neo and Neo Geo, single file archives should be used. But these should retain the MAME names as filenames since ES-DE ships with MAME lookup tables, meaning the MAME names are expanded to the full game names.

For instance topgunnr.7z will be expanded to Top Gunner.

This is required by the TheGamesDB scraper where the expanded file names are used for game searches. (Screenscraper natively supports searches using the MAME names). It's also quite nice to have the gamelist populated with the expanded game names even before any scraping has taken place.

Nintendo Switch

The emulator for Nintendo Switch is Yuzu, which is distributed as a Snap package, Flatpak package or AppImage on Linux and as a regular installer on Windows. At the moment there is unfortunately no macOS release of this emulator and it's unclear if it can run on BSD Unix.

If installed as a Snap or Flatpak package or if built from source code, ES-DE should be able to easily locate the emulator binary.

But if using the AppImage it's a bit more complicated as there is no real standardized directory for storing these images.

What ES-DE will do is to look for yuzu.AppImage in the system PATH as well as in the following locations:

~/Applications/yuzu.AppImage
~/.local/bin/yuzu.AppImage
~/bin/yuzu.AppImage

When downloading the AppImage from https://yuzu-emu.org it will be named something like yuzu-20210621-45d9504ea.AppImage, just rename this to yuzu.AppImage and everything should work correctly.

Note that the name is case sensitive, so yuzu.appimage will not be found by ES-DE.

For Windows, ES-DE will look for yuzu.exe in the system Path as well as in the default installation directory ~\AppData\Local\yuzu\yuzu-windows-msvc\

Apart from the potential difficulty in locating the emulator binary, there are some special configuration steps required for the emulator, refer to the Yuzu website for more information about this.

Commodore Amiga

There are multiple ways to run Amiga games, but the recommended approach is to use WHDLoad. The best way is to use hard disk images in .hdf or .hdz format, meaning there will be a single file per game. This makes it just as easy to play Amiga games as any console with game ROMs.

An alternative would be to use .adf images as not all games may be available with WHDLoad support. For this, you can either put single-disc images in the root folder or in a dedicated adf directory, or multiple-disk games in separate folders. It's highly recommended to create .m3u playlist files for multi-disc images as described earlier.

Here's an example of what the file structure could look like:

~/ROMs/amiga/Multidisk/ZakMcKracken/ZakMcKracken (Disk 1 of 2).adf
~/ROMs/amiga/Multidisk/ZakMcKracken/ZakMcKracken (Disk 2 of 2).adf
~/ROMs/amiga/Multidisk/ZakMcKracken/ZakMcKracken.m3u
~/ROMs/amiga/Robbeary.adf
~/ROMs/amiga/Dungeon Master.hdf

Advanced topics such as the need for the Amiga Kickstart ROMs to run Amiga games is beyond the scope of this guide, but the following page is recommended for reading more about how this setup can be achieved:

https://github.com/libretro/libretro-uae/blob/master/README.md

DOS / PC

The DOS (and PC) platform uses the DOSBox emulator and the recommended approach here is to keep the directory structure intact, just as if running the game on a real DOS PC. So this means one folder per game in ES-DE. It's also recommended to set the metadata field Count as game to off for all files but the actual file used to launch the game, i.e. the binary or the .bat batch file. This is done so that the game counter correctly reflects the number of games you have installed. It's also possible to mark files and subdirectories as hidden to avoid seeing them in ES-DE. Both of these fields can be set using the metadata editor.

Apart from this, DOS games should work the same as any other system. The game folders can be scraped so that it looks nice when browsing the list of games, but make sure to also scrape the files used to launch the games or otherwise the entries in the collections All games, Favorites and Last played as well as any custom collections will miss the game metadata and game media. If you don't have these collections activated, then this can of course be skipped.

Ports

Ports are not really executed using emulators, but are rather applications running natively on the operating system. The easiest way to handle these is to add a simple shell script or batch file where you can customize the exact launch parameters for the game.

It's possible to add these files directly to the root folder, but normally it's recommended to setup a separate directory per game as there may be more than a single file required. For instance you often want to have easy access to the game setup utility which may have to be executed separately from the actual game.

Here's an example for setting up Chocolate-Doom, GZDoom and DarkPlaces on Unix:

~/ROMs/ports/Chocolate-Doom/chocolate-doom.sh
~/ROMs/ports/Chocolate-Doom/chocolate-doom-setup.sh
~/ROMs/ports/GZDoom/gzdoom.sh
~/ROMs/ports/DarkPlaces/darkplaces.sh

chocolate-doom.sh:

#!/bin/bash
chocolate-doom

chocolate-doom-setup.sh:

#!/bin/bash
chocolate-doom-setup

gzdoom.sh:

#!/bin/bash
GZ_dir=/home/myusername/Games/Ports/GZDoom

gzdoom -iwad /home/myusername/Games/Ports/GameData/Doom/doom.wad -config $GZ_dir/gzdoom.ini -savedir $GZ_dir/Savegames \
-file $GZ_dir/Mods/DoomMetalVol4_44100.wad \
-file $GZ_dir/Mods/brutalv21.pk3 \
-file $GZ_dir/Mods/DHTP-2019_11_17.pk3

darkplaces.sh:

#!/bin/bash
darkplaces -basedir ~/Games/Ports/GameData/Quake

You don't need to set execution permissions for these scripts, ES-DE will run them anyway.

Lutris

Lutris runs only on Unix so it's only present as a placeholder in the es_systems.xml files for macOS and Windows.

These games are executed via the Lutris binary (well it's actually a Python script) and you simply create a shell script per game inside the lutris system directory.

Add the game information to each shell script using the syntax lutris lutris:rungame/<game name>

You can see the list of installed games by running this command:

lutris --list-games

Here's an example for adding Diablo and Fallout:

~/ROMs/lutris/Diablo.sh
~/ROMs/lutris/Fallout.sh

Diablo.sh:

lutris lutris:rungame/diablo

Fallout.sh:

lutris lutris:rungame/fallout

You don't need to set execution permissions for these scripts, ES-DE will run them anyway.

As an alternative, you can add the Lutris games to the Ports game system, if you prefer to not separate them. The instructions above are identical in this case except that the shell scripts should be located inside the ports directory rather than inside the lutris directory.

Steam

Note: Launching Steam games currently has some limitations such as missing error messages when a game fails to start as well as missing game output logging. ES-DE also needs to keep running in the background for technical reasons, which has some minor side effects.

As for the setup, it's recommended to place shell scripts/batch files directly in the steam system directory, with the filenames of these scripts corresponding to the game names.

Add the game information to each shell script using the syntax <steam binary> steam://rungameid/<game ID>

Here's an example for the game Broforce, first on Unix with the filename Broforce.sh:

steam steam://rungameid/274190

And on macOS with the filename Broforce.sh:

/Applications/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/steam_osx steam://rungameid/274190

And finally on Windows with the filename Broforce.bat:

"c:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steam.exe" steam://rungameid/26800

The game ID can be found by going to https://store.steampowered.com and searching for a game. The Broforce example would have an URL such as this:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/274190/Broforce

On Linux it's very easy to find all your game ID's by looking in the desktop entries.

grep steam ~/.local/share/applications/*desktop | grep rungameid
/home/myusername/.local/share/applications/Broforce.desktop:Exec=steam steam://rungameid/274190
/home/myusername/.local/share/applications/FEZ.desktop:Exec=steam steam://rungameid/224760
/home/myusername/.local/share/applications/INSIDE.desktop:Exec=steam steam://rungameid/304430
/home/myusername/.local/share/applications/Subnautica.desktop:Exec=steam steam://rungameid/264710

This of course assumes that you have menu entries setup for your Steam games.

To greatly simplify this setup, automatic Steam library import is planned for a future ES-DE release.

RetroArch setup

ES-DE is a game browsing frontend and does not provide any emulation by itself. It does however come preconfigured for use with emulators as setup in the es_systems.xml file. By default it's primarily setup for use with RetroArch but this can be modified if needed. If you're interested in customizing your es_systems.xml file, please refer to the INSTALL-DEV.md document which goes into detail on the structure of this file and more advanced configuration topics in general.

Installation and configuration of RetroArch and other emulators is beyond the scope of this guide, but many good resources can be found online on how to do this.

Keep in mind that ES-DE will not install any RetroArch cores, you need to do this manually from within the RetroArch user interface.

A general recommendation regarding installation on Linux is to try to avoid the RetroArch releases included in the OS repositories as they're usually quite limited with regards to the number of available cores, and they're usually older versions. Instead go for either the Snap, Flatpak or AppImage distributions or build from source.

The default es_systems.xml file is paired with a file named es_find_rules.xml which tries to find the emulators and cores using some predefined rules. For Windows this should normally just work, and for macOS too as long as RetroArch is installed at the default location /Applications/RetroArch.app. For Unix/Linux there is one exception that is problematic which is AppImages as there is no standardized directory for storing these images. ES-DE will look for the RetroArch AppImage in the following locations in addition to searching the PATH variable:

~/Applications/RetroArch-Linux-x86_64.AppImage
~/.local/bin/RetroArch-Linux-x86_64.AppImage
~/bin/RetroArch-Linux-x86_64.AppImage

In any instance, an error notification will be displayed if attempting to launch a game where the emulator binary is not found. Likewise a notification will be shown if the defined emulator core is not installed. The es_log.txt file will also provide additional details.

Scraping

Scraping means downloading metadata and game media files (images and videos) for the games in your collection.

ES-DE supports the two scraper services ScreenScraper.fr and TheGamesDB.net. In general TheGamesDB supports less formats and less systems, but in some areas such PC gaming, the quality is better and sometimes ScreenScraper is missing some specific information such as release dates where TheGamesDB may be able to fill in the gaps.

Here's an overview of what's supported when using these scrapers:

Media type or option	ScreenScraper	TheGamesDB
Region (EU/JP/US/WOR)	Yes	No
Multi-language	Yes	No
Game names	Yes	Yes
Ratings	Yes	No
Controllers (arcade systems only)	Yes	No
Other game metadata	Yes	Yes
Videos	Yes	No
Screenshots	Yes	Yes
Title screens	Yes	Yes
Box covers	Yes	Yes
Box back covers	Yes	No
Marquees/wheels	Yes	Yes
3D boxes	Yes	No
Physical media	Yes	No

The category Other game metadata includes Description, Release date, Developer, Publisher, Genre and Players.

The Multi-language support includes translated game genres and game descriptions for a number of languages.

Controllers is metadata indicating the controller type (it's not images of controllers).

Physical media means images of cartridges, diskettes, tapes, CD-ROMs etc. that were used to distribute the games.

There are two approaches to scraping, either for a single game from the metadata editor, or for multiple games and systems using the multi-scraper.

Here's an example of the multi-scraper running in interactive mode, asking the user to make a selection from the multiple matching games returned by the scraper service.

Single-game scraper

The single-game scraper is launched from the metadata editor. You navigate to a game, open the game options menu, choose Edit this game's metadata and then select the Scrape button (alternatively the "Y" button shortcut can be used to start the scraper).

Multi-scraper

The multi-scraper is accessed from the main menu by entering the Scraper menu and then selecting the Start button (or the "Y" button shortcut can be used).

Scraping process

Assuming the default Interactive mode option is enabled, the process of scraping games is basically identical between the single-game scraper and the multi-scraper. You're presented with the returned scraper results, and you're able to refine the search if the scraper could not find your game. Sometimes small changes like adding or removing a colon or a minus sign can yield better results. Note that searches are handled entirely by the scraper service, ES-DE just presents the results returned from the service.

It's generally recommended to keep the Auto-accept single game matches option enabled as it will run the scraper in semi-automatic mode, only stopping to ask for user input if there are multiple results returned or if no game was found. If this option is disabled, the scraper will stop and ask for confirmation for every game.

But by disabling the Interactive mode option, the multi-scraper will run in a fully automatic mode, selecting the first game in case of multiple results and skipping to the next game if no results were returned. This is quite convenient for large game libraries but if the correct game is not the first one returned by the scraper service, the wrong game data will be scraped which will require manual correction using the single-game scraper.

By default, ES-DE will search using the metadata name of the game. If no name has previously been defined via scraping or via manually entering it using the metadata editor, the name used for searching will correspond to the physical file name minus all text inside either normal brackets () or square brackets []. So for example the physical filename Mygame (U) [v2].zip will be stripped to simply Mygame when performing the scraper search.

By disabling the option Search using metadata name, the physical file name will be used even if there is a scraped or manually entered name for the game.

There is however an exception to this for arcade games (MAME and Neo Geo) when using the TheGamesDB scraper. As this service does not support searches using the short MAME names, these will be expanded to the full game names via a lookup in the MAME name database supplied with the ES-DE installation. But if using ScreenScraper the Search using metadata name option is always respected as this service fully support scraping based on the short MAME names.

Apart from this, hopefully the scraping process should be self-explanatory.

Manually copying game media files

If you already have a library of game media (images and videos) you can manually copy these files into ES-DE.

The default media directory is ~/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/<game system>/<media type>

For example on Unix:

/home/myusername/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/c64/screenshots/

For example on macOS:

/Users/myusername/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/c64/screenshots/

For example on Windows:

C:\Users\Myusername\.emulationstation\downloaded_media\c64\screenshots\

The media directories per game system are:

• 3dboxes
• backcovers
• covers
• marquees
• miximages
• physicalmedia
• screenshots
• titlescreens
• videos

The miximages are generated by ES-DE. Normally that takes place automatically when scraping, but in this example of manually copying existing media files, the miximage offline generator should be used instead. This tool can generate the miximages for the complete game collection in one go. How that works is explained elsewhere in this guide.

The media files must correspond exactly to the game files. For example the following game:

~/ROMs/c64/Multidisk/Last Ninja 2/Last Ninja 2.m3u

Must have corresponding filenames for its media files in this fashion:

~/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/c64/screenshots/Multidisk/Last Ninja 2/Last Ninja 2.jpg
~/.emulationstation/downloaded_media/c64/videos/Multidisk/Last Ninja 2/Last Ninja 2.mp4

For images .jpg and .png file extensions are supported and for videos .avi, .mkv, .mov, .mp4 and .wmv are supported.

Remember that on Unix filenames are case sensitive, and as well the file extensions must be in lower case, such as .png instead of .PNG or .Png or the file won't be found.

It's possible to change the game media directory location from within ES-DE, for this see the option Game media directory.

Main menu

This menu can be accessed from both the system view and gamelist view. It contains the scraper, application settings and various tools such as the input configurator and the miximage generator. Settings are saved when navigating back from any menu screen, assuming at least one setting was changed. Pressing the application exit key (F4 by default) will also save any pending changes.

The ES-DE main menu.

Following is a breakdown of the main menu entries.

Scraper

Contains the various options for the scraper, which is used to download metadata, images and videos for your games.

Some of the scraper settings.

Scrape from

Scraper service selection, currently ScreenScraper.fr and TheGamesDB.net are supported.

Scrape these games

Criteria for what games to include. It can be set to All games, Favorite games, No metadata, No game image, No game video or Folders only.

Scrape these systems

A selection of which systems to scrape for. It's possible to automatically scrape several or all systems in one go.

Account settings

Setup of ScreenScraper account.

Use this account for ScreenScraper

Whether to use the account that has been configured. If this is disabled, the username and password setup on this screen will be ignored during scraping. This can be useful if you have scraping issues and want to check whether it's related to your account or if it's a general problem. Note that screenscraper.fr does not seem to return a proper error message regarding incorrect username and password, but starting ES-DE with the --debug flag will indicate in the log file whether the username was included in the server response.

ScreenScraper username

Username as registered on screenscraper.fr.

ScreenScraper password

The password as registered on screenscraper.fr. This is masked using asterisks on the screen, and the password input field will be blank when attempting to update an existing password. This is by design and not a bug. Be aware that the es_settings.xml file contains the password in clear text.

Content settings

Describes the content types to include in the scraping.

Game names

Whether to scrape the names of the games. This does not affect the actual files on the filesystem and the game name is primarily used for appearance and sorting purposes. The downloaded media files are matched against the physical game files on the filesystem, and not against this metadata. See the comments under Overwrite files and data below to understand some additional implications regarding game names.

Ratings (ScreenScraper only)

Downloads game ratings.

Controllers (arcade systems only) (ScreenScraper only)

Scrapes controller metadata which is used to set the correct controller badge. This is only available for MAME arcade games, for systems such as arcade, mame, neogeo, fba etc. This is so because ScreenScraper does not seem to provide controller information for other platforms. The type of controllers that are scraped are joystick (separated into entries from no buttons up to 6 buttons), steering wheel, flight stick, spinner, trackball and lightgun.

Other metadata

This includes the game description, release date, developer, publisher, genre and the number of players.

Videos (ScreenScraper only)

Videos of actual gameplay.

Screenshot images

Screenshot images of actual gameplay.

Title screen images

Screenshot images of the title screen.

Box cover images

Cover art, front of box/case.

Box back cover images (ScreenScraper only)

Back of box/case.

Marquee (wheel) images

Logotype for the game.

3D box images (ScreenScraper only)

These are only used for generating miximages.

Physical media images (ScreenScraper only)

Images of cartridges, diskettes, tapes, CD-ROMs etc. that were used to distribute the games. These are only used for generating miximages.

Miximage settings

These are the settings for the miximage generator, which can either be run from the scraper (single-game scraper or multi-scraper) or from the offline generator. The miximage combines the screenshot, marquee, box/cover and physical media images to make a composite picture that is displayed in the gamelist view. There are various settings for the generator.

Miximage resolution

It's possible to select betweeen the 1280x960, 1920x1440 and 640x480 resolutions for the generated miximages. It's normally recommended to use the default option 1280x960 which gives good image quality without slowing down ES-DE too much. But for very weak machines, 640x480 may be a better option. The 1920x1440 resolution is normally not recommended as it brings little quality improvements over 1280x960 and slows down the gamelist browsing.

Screenshot scaling method

The sharp scaling method uses nearest-neighbor interpolation which retains sharp pixels and looks better for most low-resolution retro games. The smooth scaling method uses the Lanczos algorithm and produces smoother pixels. This may look better on some more modern games at higher resolutions. If unsure, use the sharp method.

Box size

The size of the 3D game box, or the cover image if there is no 3D box and the Use cover image if 3D box is missing setting has been enabled. The available options are medium, small and large.

Physical media size

The size of the physical media image. The available options are medium, small and large.

Generate miximages when scraping

Enables or disables the miximage generator when scraping. Applies to both the single-game scraper and the multi-scraper.

Overwrite miximages (scraper/offline generator)

Controls whether miximages should be overwritten or not. Note that the scraper setting Overwrite files and data does not affect the miximages.

Remove letterboxes from screenshots

With this option enabled, any horizontal pure black areas at the top and bottom of the screenshots are automatically cropped.

Remove pillarboxes from screenshots

With this option enabled, any vertical pure black areas at the left and right sides of the screenshots are automatically cropped.

Rotate horizontally oriented boxes

Some consoles such as Super Nintendo have game boxes with the cover printed horizontally rather than using the more common vertical format. If enabling this setting, those images will be rotated 90 degrees so they stand up like the box images for most other systems.

Incude marquee image

Whether to include the marquee (wheel) image in the composite miximage.

Incude box image

Whether to include the box image in the composite miximage. If a 3D box exists for the game, this will be used.

Use cover image if 3D box is missing

Whether to use the 2D box cover as fallback if the 3D box image is missing for the game.

Include physical media image

Whether to include the image of the physical media used to distribute the game, for example a cartridge, diskette, tape, CD-ROM etc.

Offline generator

This is not a setting, but instead a GUI to generate miximages offline without going via the scraper. This tool uses the same game system selections as the scraper, so you need to select at least one system on the scraper menu before attempting to run it. All the miximage settings are applied in the same way as when generating images via the scraper. The prerequisite is that at least a screenshot exists for each game. If there is no screenshot, or if the screenshot is unreadable for some reason, the generation for that specific game will fail. There is statistics shown in the tool displaying the number of generated, overwritten, skipped and failed images. Any error message is shown on screen as well as being saved to the es_log.txt file. Note that although the system selections are the same as for the scraper, the Scrape these games filter is ignored and the generator always attempts to generate miximages for all games in a system.

Other settings

Various scraping settings.

Region (ScreenScraper only)

The region to scrape for. This affects game names, game media and release dates. Possible options are Europe, Japan, USA and World.

Preferred language (ScreenScraper only)

Multiple languages are supported by ScreenScraper, and this affects translations of game genres and game descriptions. As the option name implies this is the preferred language only as not all games have had their metadata translated. Unfortunately some less used languages have quite few games translated, but hopefully this will improve over time as there's an ongoing community effort to make more translations. If the preferred language is not available for a game, ES-DE will fall back to using the English metadata.

Overwrite files and data

Affects both overwriting of metadata as well as actual game media files on the filesystem. Even with this option disabled, metadata entries which are set to their default values will be populated by the scraper. In other words, this option only affects overwriting of previously scraped data, or data manually entered via the metadata editor. Game names are considered as set to their default values if either corresponding to the physical game file on disk minus the extension (e.g. the entry Commando if the file is named Commando.zip), or for arcade games if corresponding to the MAME names as defined in the bundled mamenames.xml. Note that this setting does not affect generated miximages, that is instead controlled by the setting Overwrite miximages (scraper/offline generator) found in the miximage settings menu.

Halt on invalid media files

With this setting enabled, if any media files returned by the scraper seem to be invalid, the scraping is halted and an error message is presented where it's possible to retry or cancel the scraping of the specific game. In the case of multi-scraping it's also possible to skip the game and proceed to the next one in the queue. With this setting disabled, all media files will always be accepted and saved to disk. As of ES-DE v1.2 the file verification is quite basic and future versions will improve on this by using file checksums and other file integrity checks. There is an exception in place for box back covers when using ScreenScraper. As many of these specific images are broken, there is an automatic filter built in that is always active and which removes blank images and those containing only a few lines of pixels.

Search using metadata names

By default ES-DE will perform scraper searches based on the game name that has been manually set in the metadata editor, or that has been previously scraped. If you prefer to search using the physical file name regardless of such data being available, then disable this option. Note that when using TheGamesDB as scraper service for arcade games (MAME and Neo Geo), the short MAME name will always be expanded to the full game name as this scraper service does not support searches using short MAME names. In general it's recommended to disable this option if scraping arcade games using ScreenScraper as the MAME short names is much more reliable than using the metadata names.

Interactive mode (Multi-scraper only)

If turned off, the scraping will be fully automatic and will not stop on multiple results or when no matching game was found.

Auto-accept single game matches (Multi-scraper only)

Used in conjunction with interactive mode, to not having to confirm searches where a single result is returned from the scraper service.

Respect per-file scraper exclusions (Multi-scraper only)

It's possible to set a flag per game file or folder using the metadata editor to indicate that it should be excluded from the multi-scraper. This setting makes it possible to override that restriction and scrape all entries anyway.

Exclude folders recursively (Multi-scraper only)

If this setting is enabled and a folder has its flag set to be excluded from the scraper, then the entire folder contents are skipped when running the multi-scraper.

Scrape actual folders (Multi-scraper only)

Enabling this option causes folders themselves to be included by the scraper. This is useful for DOS games or any multi-disc games where there is a folder for each individual game.

Auto-retry on peer verification errors (ScreenScraper only)

ScreenScraper sometimes has issues with its TLS certificates which causes searches to randomly fail. It's normally resolved within a few days, but in the meanwhile activating this setting will have the scraper automatically make up to eight additional attempts when this error occurs. That is normally enough to complete the search, but if not, just press Retry in the error dialog and ES-DE will try eight more times. This setting applies to both the single-game scraper and the multi-scraper. The following error notification dialog and corresponding es_log.txt entry is displayed when this error occurs: "Error downloading thumbnail: SSL peer certificate or SSH remote key was not OK".

UI settings

Various settings that affect the user interface.

Gamelist on startup

If set to None, the system view will be displayed. Any other value will jump to that game system automatically on startup.

Gamelist view style

Sets the view style to Automatic, Basic, Detailed, Video or Grid. See the description above in this document for more information regarding view styles.

Transition style

Transition animation when navigating between gamelists, or between systems on the System view carousel. Can be set to Slide, Fade or Instant.

Theme set

The theme set to use. Defaults to rbsimple-DE which is shipped with the application.

UI mode

Sets the user interface mode for the application to Full, Kiosk or Kid. See the description above in this document for additional information.

Default sort order

The order in which to sort your gamelists. This can be overriden per game system using the game options menu, but that override will only be persistent during the application session. The System sorting can not be selected here as it's only applicable to collection systems.

Menu opening effect

Animation to play when opening the main menu or the game options menu. Also sets the animation for the game launch screen. Can be set to Scale-up or None.

Launch screen duration

This configures for how long to display the game launch screen when starting a game. The options are Normal, Brief, Long and Disabled. If set to Disabled, a simple notification popup will be displayed instead.

Media viewer settings

Submenu containing all the settings for the media viewer. These are described in detail below.

Screensaver settings

Submenu containing all the settings for the screensaver. These are described in detailed below.

Blur background when menu is open (OpenGL renderer only)

This option will blur the background behind the menu slightly. Normally this can be left enabled, but if you have a really slow GPU, disabling this option may make the application feel a bit more responsive.

Display pillarboxes for gamelist videos

With this option enabled, there are black pillarboxes (and to a lesser extent letterboxes) displayed around videos with non-standard aspect ratios. This will probably be most commonly used for vertical arcade shooters, or for game systems that has a screen in portrait orientation. For wider than normal videos, letterboxes are added, but this is quite rare compared to videos in portrait orientation. This option looks good with some theme sets such as rbsimple-DE, but on others it may be more visually pleasing to disable it. On less wide displays such as those in 4:3 aspect ratio this option should probably be disabled as it may otherwise add quite excessive letterboxing.

Render scanlines for gamelist videos (OpenGL renderer only)

Whether to use a shader to render scanlines for videos in the gamelist view. The effect is usually pretty subtle as the video is normally renderered in a limited size in the GUI and the scanlines are sized relative to the video window size.

Sort folders on top of gamelists

Whether to place all folders on top of the gamelists. If enabled the folders will not be part of the quick selector index, meaning they can no longer be quick-jumped to. That is, unless there are only folders in the gamelist in which case the folders will be handled like files.

Sort favorite games above non-favorites

Whether to sort your favorite games above your other games in the gamelists.

Add star markings to favorite games

With this setting enabled, there is a star symbol added at the beginning of the game name in the gamelist views. If you're not using a theme set which support badges, it's strongly recommended to keep this setting enabled. Especially so if the option to sort favorite games above non-favorites has been enabled. Otherwise favorite games would be sorted on top of the gamelist with no clear visual indication that they are favorites which would be quite confusing.

Use plain ASCII for special gamelist characters

There are some special characters in ES-DE such as the favorites star, the folder icon and the tickmark (seen when editing custom collections) that are displayed using symbols from the bundled Font Awesome. This normally looks perfectly fine, but on some specific theme sets with very pixelated fonts such as es-themes-snes-mini and es-themes-workbench these symbols look terrible. For such themes, this option is available, which will use plain ASCII characters instead of the Font Awesome symbols. For the favorites an asterisk * will be used, for folders a hash sign # will be used and for the tickmark an exclamation mark ! will be used. This only applies to the gamelist view, in all other places in the application the Font Awesome symbols are retained. Make sure to disable this option if not using such a pixelated theme as it looks equally terrible to enable this option on themes where it's not supposed to be used.

Enable quick list scrolling overlay

With this option enabled, there will be an overlay displayed when scrolling the gamelists quickly, i.e. when holding down the Up, Down, Left shoulder or Right shoulder buttons for some time. The overlay will darken the background slightly and display the first two characters of the game names. If the game is a favorite and the setting to sort favorites above non-favorites has been enabled, a star symbol will be shown instead.

Enable virtual keyboard

This enables a virtual (on-screen) keyboard that can be used at various places throughout the application to input text and numbers using a controller. The Shift and Alt keys can be toggled individually or combined to access many special characters. The general use of the virtual keyboard should hopefully be self-explanatory.

Enable menu scroll indicators

With this option enabled, "up and down" scroll indicators will be displayed in the upper right corner of menus (including the metadata editor and scraper) if there are more entries available than can be shown on the screen at the same time. These indicators will change dynamically as the list is scrolled. If the setting is disabled, a simplified static indicator will be displayed instead.

Enable toggle favorites button

This setting enables the Y button for quickly toggling a game as favorite. Although this may be convenient at times, it's also quite easy to accidentally remove a favorite tagging of a game when using the application more casually. As such it could sometimes make sense to disable this functionality. It's of course still possible to mark a game as favorite using the metadata editor when this setting is disabled. The option does not affect the use of the Y button to add or remove games when editing custom collections.

Enable random system or game button

This enables or disables the ability to jump to a random system or game. It's mapped to the thumbstick click button, either the left or right thumbstick will work. The help prompts will also visually indicate whether this option is enabled or not.

Enable gamelist filters

Activating or deactivating the ability to filter your gamelists. This can normally be left enabled.

Enable quick system select

If enabled, it's possible to navigate between gamelists using the Left and Right buttons without having to first go back to the System view.

Display on-screen help

Activates or deactivates the built-in help system that provides contextual information regarding button usage.

Play videos immediately (override theme)

Some themes (including rbsimple-DE) display the game images briefly before playing the game videos. This setting forces the videos to be played immediately, regardless of the configuration in the theme. Note though that if there is a video available for a game, but no images, the video will always start to play immediately no matter the theme configuration or whether this settings has been enabled or not.

Media viewer settings

Settings for the media viewer that is accessible from the gamelist views.

Keep videos running when viewing images

With this option enabled, the video will continue to run when viewing the images for the game. If disabling this setting, the video will stop immediately when browsing to the first image, and it will restart when navigating back to the video.

Stretch videos to screen resolution

This will fill the entire screen surface but will probably break the aspect ratio of the video.

Render scanlines for videos (OpenGL renderer only)

Whether to use a shader to render scanlines for the videos. Be aware that this is quite demanding for the GPU.

Render blur for videos (OpenGL renderer only)

Whether to use a shader to render a slight horizontal blur which somewhat simulates a well-used CRT monitor. Be aware that this is quite demanding for the GPU.

Render scanlines for screenshots and titles (OpenGL renderer only)

Whether to use a shader to render scanlines for the screenshot and title screen images.

Screensaver settings

Settings for the built-in screensaver.

Start screensaver after (minutes)

After how many minutes to start the screensaver. If set to 0 minutes, the timer will be deactivated and the screensaver will never start automatically. It's however still possible to start the screensaver manually in this case, assuming the Enable screensaver controls setting is enabled. While any menu is open, the screensaver will not start regardless of how this timer setting is configured.

Screensaver type

The screensaven type to use; Dim, Black, Slideshow or Video.

Enable screensaver controls

This enables the ability to start the screensaver manually using the Back button from the system view, but also while the screensaver is running to jump to a new random game using the Left and Right buttons, to launch the game currently shown using the A button or to jump to the game in its gamelist using the Y button. If this setting is disabled, any key or button press will stop the screensaver.

Slideshow screensaver settings

Options specific to the slideshow screensaver.

Swap images after (seconds)

For how long to display images before changing to the next game. Allowed range is between 2 and 120 seconds in 2-second increments. The default value is 10 seconds.

Stretch images to screen resolution

This will fill the entire screen surface but will probably break the aspect ratio of the image.

Display game info overlay

This will display an overlay in the upper left corner, showing the game name and the game system name. A star symbol following the game name indicates that it's flagged as a favorite.

Render scanlines (OpenGL renderer only)

Whether to use a shader to render scanlines for the images.

Use custom images

Using this option it's possible to use custom images instead of random images from the game library. As is the case with the rest of ES-DE, the supported file formats are JPG and PNG.

Custom image directory recursive search

Whether to search the custom image directory recursively.

Custom image directory

The directory for the custom images. The tilde ~ symbol can be used which will expand to the user home directory. It's also possible to use the %ESPATH% and %ROMPATH% variables which will set the directory relative to the ES-DE binary directory or the ROMs directory.

Video screensaver settings

Options specific to the video screensaver.

Swap videos after (seconds)

For how long to play videos before changing to the next game. Allowed range is between 0 and 120 seconds in 2-second increments. If set to 0 (which is the default value), the next game will be selected after the entire video has finished playing. If set to a higher value than the length of a game video, it will loop until reaching the swap time.

Stretch videos to screen resolution

This will fill the entire screen surface but will probably break the aspect ratio of the video.

Display game info overlay

This will display an overlay in the upper left corner, showing the game name and the game system name. A star symbol following the game name indicates that it's flagged as a favorite.

Render scanlines (OpenGL renderer only)

Whether to use a shader to render scanlines for the videos. Be aware that this is quite demanding for the GPU.

Render blur (OpenGL renderer only)

Whether to use a shader to render a slight horizontal blur which somewhat simulates a well-used CRT monitor. Be aware that this is quite demanding for the GPU.

Sound settings

Various sound settings.

System volume (Linux and Windows only)

As the name implies, this sets the overall system volume and not the volume specifically for ES-DE. The volume change is applied when leaving the sound settings menu and not immediately when moving the slider.

Navigation sounds volume

Sets the volume for the navigation sounds.

Video player volume

Sets the volume for the video player. This applies to the gamelist view, the media viewer and the video screensaver.

Play audio for videos in the gamelist view

With this turned off, audio won't play for videos in the gamelists.

Play audio for media viewer videos

With this turned off, audio won't play for videos displayed using the media viewer.

Play audio for screensaver videos

With this turned off, audio won't play for videos when using the video screensaver.

Enable navigation sounds

Enables or disables navigation sounds throughout the application. Sounds are played when browsing systems and lists, starting games, adding and removing games as favorites etc. The sounds can be customized per theme, but if the theme does not support navigation sounds, ES-DE will fall back to its built-in samples.

Input device settings

Settings related to the input devices, i.e. the keyboard and controllers.

Controller type

This setting gives the ability to choose between the controller types Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and SNES (Super Nintendo). Doing so alters the help icons and help text as well as the icons and text for the input device configurator. The setting is only cosmetic and does not change the controller behavior or the controller button mappings.

Only accept input from first controller

If enabling this option, only the first controller detected during startup will send its input to ES-DE (the keyboard input is unaffected by this setting and will be enabled regardless). This is a good way to limit potential chaos with multiple persons fighting over which games to start. Disconnecting and reconnecting controllers while ES-DE is running may change what is considered the first controller. This setting does not affect the emulators in any way, it's only applied to ES-DE.

Configure keyboard and controllers

This tool provides configuration of button mappings for the keyboard and controllers, as explained here. Normally this is not required as ES-DE automatically configures all input devices, but button customizations may be useful in some special situations. You may also need to run this tool if you have an unusual controller which could not be automatically configured. Be aware that custom button mappings will not change the help icons or help text.

Game collection settings

Handles collections, which are assembled using games present in the game systems. See the collections section below in this document for more information.

Finish editing 'COLLECTION NAME' collection (Entry only visible when editing a custom collection)

Self explanatory.

Automatic game collections

This lets you enable or disable the automatic game collections All games, Favorites and Last played.

Custom game collections

This lets you enable or disable your own custom game collections.

Create new custom collection from theme (Entry only visible if the ability is provided by the theme set)

If the theme set in use provides themes for custom collections, then this entry can be selected. For example, there could be themes for Fighting games or Driving games etc. The default rbsimple-DE theme set does not provide such themes for custom collections and in general it's not recommended to use this approach, as is explained later in this guide.

Create new custom collection

This lets you create a completely custom collection with a name of your choice.

Delete custom collection

This permanently deletes a custom collection, including its configuration file on the file system. A list of available collections is shown, and a confirmation dialog is displayed before performing the actual deletion. Only one collection at a time can be deleted.

Sort favorites on top for custom collections

Whether to sort your favorite games above your other games. This is disabled by default, as for collections you probably want to be able to mix all games regardless of whether they are favorites or not.

Display star markings for custom collections

With this option enabled, there is a star symbol added to each favorite game name. It works identically to the setting Add star markings to favorite games under the UI settings menu but is applied specifically to custom collections. It's disabled by default.

Group unthemed custom collections

With this enabled, if you have created custom collections and there is no theme support for the names you've selected, the collections will be grouped in a general collection system which is correctly themed. It's strongly recommended to keep this option enabled as otherwise your collections would be completely unthemed which doesn't make much sense. This option is provided mostly for testing and theme development purposes.

Show system names in collections

Enables the system name to be shown in square brackets after the game name, for example CONTRA [NES] or DOOM [DOS]. This is applied to both automatic and custom collections. It's recommended to keep this option enabled.

Other settings

These are mostly technical settings.

Alternative emulators

Using this interface it's possible to select alternative emulators to use per game system, which requires that these alternatives have been defined in the es_systems.xml file. Note that only systems that you have currently populated will be listed. To change to an alternative emulator, you simply select a system from the list and choose which alternative to use from the presented options. If you select an alternative emulator and later remove its corresponding entry from the es_systems.xml file, an error message will be shown on application startup telling you to review your invalid emulator selection. Games will still launch, but the default emulator will be used in this case. How to clear an invalid entry should be self-explanatory once you access the interface. It's also possible to set alternative emulators per game using the metadata editor. If this is done, it will take precedence and override the system-wide emulator selection for the specific game. The alternative emulator badges and the corresponding gamelist filter are controlled by these per-game alternative emulator values and not by the system-wide option.

The system-wide alternative emulators interface.

Game media directory

This setting defines the directory for the game media, i.e. game images and videos. The default location is ~/.emulationstation/downloaded_media

VRAM limit

The amount of video RAM to use for the application. Defaults to 256 MiB (184 MiB on the Raspberry Pi) which works fine most of the time when running at 1080p resolution and with a moderate amount of game systems. If running at 4K resolution or similar and with lots of game systems enabled, it's recommended to increase this number to 512 MiB or possibly more to avoid stuttering transition animations caused by unloading and loading of textures from the cache. Enabling the GPU statistics overlay gives some indications regarding the amount of texture memory currently used, which is helpful to determine a reasonable value for this option. The allowed range for the settings is 80 to 1024 MiB. If you try to set it lower or higher than this by passing such values as command line parameters or by editing the es_settings.xml file manually, ES-DE will log a warning and automatically adjust the value within the allowable range.

Display/monitor index (requires restart)

This option sets the display to use for ES-DE for multi-monitor setups. The possible values are the monitor index numbers 1, 2, 3 or 4. If a value is set here for a display that does not actually exist, then ES-DE will set it to 1 upon startup. Index 1 is the primary display for the computer. It's also possible to override the setting by passing the --display command line argument. Doing so will also overwrite the display index setting in es_settings.xml. The Display/monitor index option only changes the display used by ES-DE; the emulators need to be configured separately (which can easily be done globally if using RetroArch).

Fullscreen mode (requires restart) (Unix only)

This gives you a choice between Normal and Borderless modes. With the borderless being more seamless as the ES-DE window will always stay on top of other windows so the taskbar will not be visible when launching and returning from games. It will however break the alt-tab application switching of your window manager. For normal fullscreen mode, if a lower resolution than the screen resolution has been set via the --resolution command line argument, ES-DE will render in full screen at the lower resolution (assuming the graphics drivers support this). If a higher resolution than the screen resolution has been set, ES-DE will run in a window. For the borderless mode, any changes to the resolution will make ES-DE run in a window.

Exit button combo

This gives the choice of which key combination to use to close the application. The default value is F4, but this can be changed to Alt + F4 on all operating systems. Additionally on macOS the Command + Q combination is selectable and on all other operating systems Alt + Q is selectable instead. Note that on Windows and most window managers on Unix/Linux, Alt + F4 will close the application regardless of the selected option as that key combination is a default which can't be restricted by ES-DE. Similarly on macOS, Command + Q always closes the application, so selecting this combination simply disables the previously selected exit button.

When to save game metadata

The metadata for a game is updated by scraping or by manual editing using the metadata editor, but also when launching it as this updates the Times played counter and the Last played timestamp. This setting enables you to define when to write such metadata changes to the gamelist.xml files. Setting the option to Never will disable writing to these files altogether, except for some special conditions such as when a game is manually deleted using the metadata editor, when scraping using the multi-scraper (the multi-scraper will always save any updates immediately to the gamelist.xml files) or when changing the system-wide alternative emulator. In theory On exit will give some small performance gains, but it's normally recommended to leave the setting at its default value which is Always. Note that with the settings set to Never, any updates such as the Last played date will still be shown on screen, but during the next application startup, any values previously saved to the gamelist.xml files will be read in again. As well, when changing this setting to Always from either of the two other options, any pending changes will be immediately written to the gamelist.xml files.

Hide taskbar (requires restart) (Windows only)

With this setting enabled, the taskbar will be hidden when launching ES-DE, and it will be restored when the application exits. This can make for a more seamless experience as the taskbar could otherwise flash by briefly when launching and when returning from games. But it can potentially cause issues on some Windows installations so it's disabled by default.

macOS Monterey VSync bug workaround (macOS only and hopefully only temporary)

In macOS 12 Monterey an OpenGL driver bug was introduced that causes VSync to always be disabled. This makes the operating system try to render as many frames as it can which slows down ES-DE quite a lot as well as consuming lots of machine resources. By enabling this setting, a small 10 millisecond delay will be introduced after each frame if it took less than 3 milliseconds to swap the last one. This is not a proper solution, and it's not an accurate solution but it's at least something until Apple (hopefully) fixes the bug via an OS update. Earlier macOS versions are unaffected by this issue. To check if you have this problem, enable the Display GPU statistics overlay setting and if your FPS counter shows really high numbers (like in the hundreds of frames per second) then enable this option and the FPS counter should decrease significantly.

Run in background (while game is launched)

Enabling this option makes ES-DE continue to run while a game is launched. This is normally not recommended as it leads to a slightly strange application behavior and also removes the ability to capture return codes and log output from the emulators. But with some graphics drivers on Windows this may be a suitable workaround if there are problems launching games (also see the next option below). Note that launching Steam games on all supported operating systems always makes ES-DE continue to run in the background for technical reasons.

AMD and Intel GPU game launch workaround (Windows only)

There is an issue with launching games on some Windows computers, seemingly on those with AMD and Intel GPUs. The emulator will start and work correctly, but the screen will be blank. Enabling this option is a workaround for that problem, with the drawback that the screen will become white instead of black when the emulator is loading. This option is enabled by default, so experiment with disabling it for a slightly better experience. If you're using an Nvidia GPU, chances are high that it will then work fine. An alternative workaround is to enable the Run in background (while game is launched) option described above, so test which gives the best result. The two options can however not be enabled at the same time. Hopefully this whole game launching issue can be resolved completely in a future ES-DE release.

Upscale video frame rate to 60 FPS

With this option enabled, videos with lower frame rates than 60 FPS, such as 24 and 30 will get upscaled to 60 FPS. This results in slightly smoother playback for some videos. There is a small performance hit from this option, so on weaker machines it may be necessary to keep it disabled for fluent video playback.

Preload gamelists on startup

When this option is enabled, all gamelists will be loaded on application startup. This will increase the startup time slightly and lead to a higher initial memory utilization, but navigation will be smoother the first time a gamelist is entered. The improvement is especially noticeable when the slide transition style has been selected.

Enable alternative emulators per game

If enabled, you will be able to select alternative emulators per game using the metadata editor, which will be used when launching the game. If disabled, the corresponding entry in the metadata editor will be hidden, the alternative emulator badges will not be displayed and it will not be possible to filter the gamelist based on these values. As well, the game will be launched using the default emulator, or using the system-wide alternative emulator if this has been configured for the game system. It's only recommended to disable this option for testing purposes.

Show hidden files and folders (requires restart)

If this option is disabled, hidden files and folders within the ROMs directory tree are excluded from ES-DE. On Unix and macOS this means those starting with a dot, and on Windows it's those set as hidden by using an NTFS attribute. This setting is only intended for special situations and is not to be confused with the next option which hides files based on metadata configuration within ES-DE.

Show hidden games (requires restart)

You can mark games as hidden in the metadata editor, which is useful for instance for DOS games where you may not want to see some batch files and executables inside ES-DE, or for multi-disc games where you may only want to show the .m3u playlists and not the individual game files. By disabling this option these files will not be processed at all when ES-DE starts up. If you enable the option you will see the files, but their name entries will be almost transparent in the gamelist view to visually indicate that they are hidden.

Enable custom event scripts

It's possible to trigger custom scripts for a number of actions in ES-DE, as is discussed below, and this setting decides whether this functionality is enabled. It's recommended to leave it at its default off value unless you need it as it otherwise generates unnecessary log output.

Only show ROMs from gamelist.xml files

If enabled, only ROMs that have metadata saved to the gamelist.xml files will be shown in ES-DE. This option is intended primarily for testing and debugging purposes so it should normally not be enabled.

Disable desktop composition (requires restart) (Unix only)

The window manager desktop composition can adversely affect the framerate of ES-DE, especially on weaker graphic cards and when running at higher resolution. As such the desktop compositor is disabled by default, although the window manager has to be configured to allow applications to do this for the option to have any effect. Note that this setting can cause problems with some graphic drivers (notably the Nvidia proprietary drivers) so if you see strange flickering and similar after quitting ES-DE, then disable the setting. In case of such issues, make sure that the emulator is also not blocking the composition (e.g. RetroArch has a corresponding option).

Display GPU statistics overlay

Displays the framerate and VRAM statistics as an overlay. You normally never need to use this unless you're debugging a performance problem or similar. Note: As of ES-DE v1.2 the VRAM usage statistics is not accurate. This will be addressed in a future release.

Enable menu in kid mode

Enabling or disabling the menu when the UI mode is set to Kid. Mostly intended for testing purposes as it's not recommended to enable the menu in this restricted mode.

Show quit menu (reboot and power off entries) (Unix and Windows only)

With this setting enabled, there is a Quit menu shown as the last entry on the main menu which provides options to quit ES-DE, to reboot the computer or to power off the computer. With this setting disabled, there will simply be an entry to quit the application instead of the complete quit menu.

Quit / Quit EmulationStation

The Quit menu or Quit EmulationStation entry as described by the Show quit menu (reboot and power off entries) option above.

If the menu is enabled, these are its entries:

Quit EmulationStation

If the option When to save game metadata has been set to On exit, the gamelist.xml files will be updated at this point. This applies also if the Quit menu is disabled and replaced by the Quit EmulationStation entry.

Reboot system (Unix and Windows only)

Self explanatory.

Power off system (Unix and Windows only)

Self explanatory.

Game options menu

This menu is opened from the gamelist view, and can't be accessed from the system view. The menu changes slightly depending on the context, for example if a game file or a folder is selected, or whether the current system is a collection or a normal game system.

You open the menu using the Back button, and by pressing B or selecting the Apply button any settings such as letter jumping using the quick selector or sorting changes are applied. If you instead press the Back button again or select the Cancel button, the menu is closed without applying any changes.

The game options menu as laid out when opening it from within a custom collection, which adds the menu entry to add or remove games from the collection.

Here's a summary of the menu entries:

Jump to..

This provides a quick selector for jumping to a certain letter. If the setting to sort favorite games above non-favorites has been enabled, then it's also possible to jump to the favorites games by choosing the star symbol. Similarly if there is a mix of folders and game files in the system and folders are configured to be sorted on top, then it's possible to jump to the folders using the folder icon. If there are only folders or only favorite games for the system, these games and folders will be indexed by their first letters and the star and folder symbols will not be disabled in the quick selector.

Sort games by

This is the sort order for the gamelist. The default sorting shown here is taken from the setting Default sort order under UI settings in the main menu. Any sorting that is applied via the game options menu will be persistent throughout the program session, and it can be set individually per game system and per collection.

Sorting can be applied using the following metadata, in either ascending or descending order:

• Filename
• Rating
• Release date
• Developer
• Publisher
• Genre
• Players
• Last played
• Times played
• System (Only for collections)

The secondary sorting is always in ascending filename order.

Filter gamelist

Choosing this entry opens a separate screen where it's possible to apply a filter to the gamelist. The filter is persistent throughout the program session, or until it's manually reset. The option to reset all filters is shown on the same screen.

The gamelist filter screen, accessed from the game options menu.

The following filters can be applied:

Game name

Rating

Developer

Publisher

Genre

Players

Favorite

Completed

Kidgame

Hidden If the "Show hidden games" option is enabled

Broken

Controller

Alternative emulator If the "Enable alternative emulators per game" option is enabled

With the exception of the game name text filter, all available filter values are assembled from metadata from the actual gamelist, so if there is no data to filter for the specific field, the text Nothing to filter will be displayed. This for example happens for the Completed filter if there are no games marked as having been completed in the current gamelist. The same happens if a metadata setting is identical for all games, such as all games being flagged as favorites.

Note that the Alternative emulator filter only includes game-specific values that have been set using the metadata editor, the system-wide alternative emulators setting has no effect on this filter.

Be aware that although folders can have most of the metadata values set, the filters are only applied to files (this is also true for the game name text filter). So if you for example set a filter to only display your favorite games, any folder that contains a favorite game will be displayed, and other folders which are themselves marked as favorites but that do not contain any favorite games will be hidden.

The filters are always applied for the complete game system, including all folder content.

Note that the game name filter is case insensitive.

Add/remove games to this collection

This entry is only shown if the system is a custom collection. The way this works is described in more detail below.

Finish editing 'COLLECTION NAME' collection

This entry is only visible if the system is a custom collection and it's currently being edited.

Edit this game's metadata / Edit this folder's metadata

This opens the metadata editor for the currently selected game file or folder.

Metadata editor

In the metadata editor, you can modify the metadata, scrape for game info and media files, clear the entry which will delete all metadata and game media files, or delete the entire game which also removes its file on the filesystem. When manually modifying a value, it will change color from gray to blue, and if the scraper has changed a value, it will change to red. When leaving the metadata editor you will be asked whether you want to save any settings done manually or by the scraper.

The metadata editor.

Metadata entries

The following entries can be modified (note that some of these are not available for folders, only for game files):

Name

This is the name that will be shown when browsing the gamelist. If no sortname has been defined, the games are sorted using this field. If the scraper option Search using metadata names has been enabled, this name will be used for scraper searches.

Sortname (files only)

This entry makes it possible to change the sorting of a game without having to change its name. For instance it can be used to sort Mille Miglia as 1000 Miglia or The Punisher as Punisher, The. Note that the Jump to... quick selector on the game options menu will base its index on the first character of the sortname if it exists for a game, which could be slightly confusing in some instances when quick jumping in the gamelist.

Description

Usually provided by the scraper although it's possible to update this manually or write your own game description.

Rating

Rating in half-star increments. This can be set as such manually or it can be scraped, assuming the scraper service provides ratings (currently only ScreenScraper does). If an external scraper application such as Skyscraper has been used that may set the ratings in fractional values such as three-quarter stars, then ES-DE will round them to the nearest half-star. When this happens, the rating stars will be colored green to notify that a rounding has taken place and a question will be asked whether to save the changes even if no other manual changes were performed.

Release date

Release date in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD).

Developer

Developer of the game.

Publisher

Publisher of the game.

Genre

One or multiple genres for the game.

Players

The amount of players the game supports. This could be an absolute number such as 1 or 3, or it could be a range, such as 2-4.

Favorite

A flag to indicate whether this is a favorite game. This flag can also be set directly from the gamelist view by using the Y button (assuming the Enable toggle favorites buttom option is enabled).

Completed

A flag to indicate whether you have completed the game.

Kidgame

A flag to mark whether the game is suitable for children. This will be applied as a filter when starting ES-DE in Kid mode. Although it's possible to also set this flag for folders, this will not affect the actual files inside those folders. It will instead only be used to display the Kidgame badge for the folders themselves.

Hidden

A flag to indicate that the game is hidden. If the corresponding option has been set in the main menu, the game will not be shown. Useful for example for DOS games to hide batch scripts and unnecessary binaries or to hide the actual game files for multi-disc games. If a file or folder is flagged as hidden but the corresponding option to hide hidden games has not been enabled, then the opacity of the text will be lowered significantly to make it clear that it's a hidden entry.

Broken/not working

A flag to indicate whether the game is broken. Useful for MAME games for instance where future releases may make the game functional.

Exclude from game counter (files only)

A flag to indicate whether the game should be excluded from being counted. If this is set for a game, it will not be included in the game counter shown per system in the system view, and it will not be included in the system information field in the gamelist view. As well, it will be excluded from all automatic and custom collections. This option is quite useful for multi-file games such as multi-disc Amiga or Commodore 64 games, or for DOS games where you want to exclude setup programs and similar but still need them available in ES-DE and therefore can't hide them. Files that have this flag set will have a lower opacity in the gamelists, making them easy to spot.

Exclude from multi-scraper

Whether to exclude the file from the multi-scraper. This is quite useful in order to avoid scraping all the disks for multi-disc games for example. There is an option in the scraper settings to ignore this flag, but by default the multi-scraper will respect it.

Hide metadata fields

This option will hide most metadata fields as well as any badges. The intention is to be able to hide the fields for situations such as general folders (Multi-disc, Cartridges etc.) and for setup programs and similar (e.g. SETUP.EXE or INSTALL.BAT for DOS games). It could also be used on the game files for multi-disc games where perhaps only the .m3u playlist should have any metadata values. The only fields shown with this option enabled are the game name and description. So using the description it's possible to write some comments regarding the file or folder, should you want to. Game images and videos will also still be displayed if this setting is enabled.

Times played (files only)

A statistics counter that tracks how many times you have played the game. You normally don't need to touch this, but if you want to, the possibility is there.

Controller

This entry provides a selection of controller icons that are built into ES-DE (although the theme set can override the actual graphics files). The selected icon will be displayed as a badge if the current theme set support badges. The gamelist can also be filtered based on the controllers, but apart from this the functionality is cosmetic and will not affect the actual emulators.

Alternative emulator (files only)

If the option Enable alternative emulators per game has been enabled, there will be an entry shown where you can select between alternative emulators for the specific game. There is a similar Alternative emulators entry under the Other settings menu, but that will apply the selection to the entire game system. If you select an alternative for a specific game using the metadata editor, that will take precedence and override any system-wide emulator selection (the currently selected system-wide emulator will be clearly marked on the selection screen). The alternative emulators need to be defined in the es_systems.xml file, and if there are no alternatives available for the current system, this row in the metadata editor will be grayed out. If you select an alternative emulator and later remove its corresponding entry from the es_systems.xml file, an error notice will be shown on this row. In this case you have the option to remove the invalid entry. But even if there is an invalid entry, games will still launch using the default emulator while logging a warning message to the es_log.txt file. Apart from this, the emulator selection should hopefully be self-explanatory.

Buttons

For game files, there will be five buttons displayed on the bottom of the metadata editor window, and for folders there will be four. These are their functions:

Scrape

Opens the single-game scraper. The Y button can also be used as a shortcut to start the scraper without having to navigate to this button.

Save

Saves any changes and closes the window.

Cancel

Cancels any changes and closes the window.

Clear

This will remove any media files for the file or folder and also remove its entry from the gamelist.xml file, effectively deleting all metadata. The actual game file or folder will however not be deleted. A prompt will be shown asking for confirmation.

Delete (Files only)

This will remove the actual game file, its gamelist.xml entry, its entry in any custom collections and its media files. A prompt will be shown asking for confirmation. The deletion of folders is not supported as that would potentially be a bit dangerous, instead use the appropriate operating system tools to handle deletion of directories.

Game media viewer

The game media viewer displays videos and images in fullscreen mode and is launched from the gamelist view by pressing the X button.

If a game video is available, this will be played automatically when launching the viewer. The left and right buttons are used to navigate betweeen the game media files. By default the video will continue to play when browsing the images, but this can be changed with a setting as described earlier in this document.

The media viewer can display the video, box cover, box back cover, title screen, screenshot and miximage.

The other settings for the media viewer are similar to what is available for the screensavers; the audio can be enabled or disabled, the video can be stretched to fill the entire screen and scanlines and blur can be rendered on top of it. For screenshots and title screens, scanlines can be rendered. All these options are configurable via the UI Settings menu.

Pressing any other button than left or right closes the media viewer.

Screensaver

There are four types of screensavers built into ES-DE: Dim, Black, Slideshow and Video.

Numerous options can be set for these screensavers, as detailed here.

The Dim screensaver simply dims and desaturates the current view and Black will show a black screen. The Slideshow and Video screensavers are more interesting as they can display images and videos from your game collection. In addition to this, the Slideshow screensaver can be configured to only show images from a specified directory.

If the option Enable screensaver controls has been activated, you can manually toggle the screensaver from the system view by pressing the Back button. In addition to this, for the Slideshow and Video screensavers, the controls will allow you to jump to a new random image or video by using the Left and Right buttons on your keyboard or controller. It's also possible to launch the game currently displayed using the A button, and the Y button will jump to the game in its gamelist without starting it.

For the video and slideshow screensavers, an overlay can be enabled via the screensaver options that displays the game name and the game system as well as a star symbol if the game is marked as a favorite.

If the Video screensaver has been selected and there are no videos available, a fallback to the Dim screensaver will take place. The same is true for the Slideshow screensaver if no game images are available.

An example of what the video screensaver looks like.

Game collections

ES-DE provides two types of collections, Automatic collections and Custom collections, the latter being defined by the user. Collections are as the name implies only collections of games already present in your actual game systems, so they're basically grouping of games into convenient views. As such the use of collections is entirely optional, but especially the custom collection support is a very nice feature which is worth some effort to setup.

The numerous collection settings available are covered here.

Automatic collections

The automatic collections are named All games, Favorites and Last played. The All games collection simply groups all your game systems into one big list, Favorites combines all your games marked as favorites from all your game systems, and Last played is a list of the 50 last games you have launched.

These automatic collections can be individually enabled or disabled by going to the main menu, selecting Game collection settings and then Automatic game collections.

Custom collections

These are collections that you create yourself. Examples could be grouping in genres like Shoot em up, Fighting games etc. or perhaps a time period like 1980s, 1990s and so on.

If the theme set supports it, you can create a custom collection directly from a theme. However, rbsimple-DE does not provide such themes as it's believed that grouping them together in a dedicated Collections system is a more elegant solution. Especially since the theme set would need to ship with an almost endless amount of collection themes for whatever categories the users would like to use for their game collections.

So if you have enabled the option Group unthemed custom collections (it's enabled by default), any collections you add will show up in the special Collections system. Here you can access them just as you would access folders inside a regular gamelist. The amount of games per collection is shown in the description, and a random game is displayed each time you browse through the list. You can also quick jump to this random game by pressing the Y button.

To create a custom collection, go to Game collection settings from the main menu and choose Create new custom collection.

Choose a name and press enter, let's use the name Platform for this example.

The collection will now be created and the collection edit mode will be entered. You can now add games to the collection by navigating to any gamelist and pressing the Y button. Any number of games from any of your game systems can be added. A game can also be part of multiple collections, there is no real limit for this.

Removing games works the same way, just press Y to remove it if it's already present in your collection. You can do this either from the gamelist where the game was added, or from the collection itself.

Only files can be part of collections, not folders. Games marked as hidden or to not be counted as games can't be added either.

During the time that the collection is being edited, any game that is part of the collection is marked with a leading tick symbol in the game name.

When you are done adding games, you can either open the main menu and go to Game collection settings and select the Finish editing 'Platform' collection or you can open the game options menu and select the same option there. The latter works from within any gamelist, so you don't need to first navigate back to the collection that you're editing.

You can later add additional games to the collection by navigating to it, bringing up the game options menu and choosing Add/remove games to this game collection.

Example of custom collections, here configured as genres.

When editing a custom collection, a tick symbol will be displayed for any game that is already part of the collection.

The way that custom collections are implemented is very simple. There is a single configuration file per collection inside the folder ~/.emulationstation/collections

For this example a file will have been created named ~/.emulationstation/collections/custom-platform.cfg

The file contents is simply a list of ROM files, such as the following:

%ROMPATH%/amiga/Flashback_v3.2_1163.hdf
%ROMPATH%/amiga/JamesPond2_v1.1_AGA_1354.hdf
%ROMPATH%/amiga/Nebulus_v1.3_0361.hdf
%ROMPATH%/c64/Bionic Commando.d64
%ROMPATH%/c64/Great Giana Sisters, The.d64
%ROMPATH%/c64/Trantor.d64
%ROMPATH%/c64/Zorro.d64

Any changes to custom collections, for example adding or removing a game, will be immediately written to the corresponding collection configuration file.

If you copy or migrate a collection from a previous version of EmulationStation or if you're setting up ES-DE on a new computer, the collection will not be enabled by just copying its configuration file to the ~/.emulationstation/collections directory. You always need to explicitly enable each collection via the menu.

If you're migrating from a previous version of EmulationStation that has absolute paths in the collection files, these will be rewritten with the %ROMPATH% variable the first time you make a change to the collection.

Themes

ES-DE is fully themeable, and although the application ships with the comprehensive rbsimple-DE and modern-DE theme sets, you can use any RetroPie-compatible EmulationStation themes as well. Just be aware that ES-DE has added additional theme functionality compared to the RetroPie fork and more still will be added in future versions. This means that you may not get the full benefits of the application if you're using a theme set which has not been updated specifically for ES-DE. Some themes may also look slightly different as bugs that were present in the RetroPie fork have been fixed. Also note that most Batocera and Recalbox themes are not compatible as these forks are quite different.

As a side comment, the terms theme and theme set are both used when talking about theming. The technically correct term for what you apply to the application to achieve a different look is a theme set as it's a collection of a number of themes for a number of game systems. But in practice it doesn't matter as both terms refer to the same thing and the terms are used interchangeably in this guide.

Themes are most easily installed to your ES-DE home directory, i.e. ~/.emulationstation/themes. By just adding the theme sets there, one folder each, they will be found during startup and you can then choose between them via the UI Settings menu on the main menu.

For this example, we've downloaded the Carbon and Fundamental themes and uncompressed them to the ES-DE home directory:

~/.emulationstation/themes/es-theme-carbon
~/.emulationstation/themes/es-theme-fundamental

We now have four entries in the Theme set selector in the UI settings menu, i.e. rbsimple-DE, modern-DE, es-theme-carbon and es-theme-fundamental.

Although you place additional themes in your ES-DE home directory, the default rbsimple-DE and modern-DE themes are located in the installation folder. For example this could be /usr/share/emulationstation/themes or /usr/local/share/emulationstation/themes on Unix, /Applications/EmulationStation Desktop Edition.app/Contents/Resources/themes on macOS or C:\Program Files\EmulationStation-DE\themes on Windows.

So if you would like to customize the rbsimple-DE or modern-DE theme sets, simply make a copy of their directories to ~/.emulationstation/themes and then those copies will take precedence over the ones in the application installation directory.

Here are some resources where additional theme sets can be downloaded.

https://aloshi.com/emulationstation#themes

https://github.com/RetroPie

https://gitlab.com/recalbox/recalbox-themes

https://wiki.batocera.org/themes

An example of a modified version of the Fundamental theme applied to ES-DE.

Custom event scripts

There are numerous locations throughout ES-DE where custom scripts will be executed if the option to do so has been enabled in the settings. By default it's deactivated so be sure to enable it to use this feature.

The setup for event scripts is a bit technical, so refer to the INSTALL-DEV.md document to see how it's configured.

Portable installation (Windows only)

On Windows, ES-DE can be installed to and run from a removable media device such as a USB memory stick. Together with games and emulators this makes for a fully portable retro gaming solution. The setup is somewhat technical, refer to INSTALL-DEV.md to see how it's done.

Command line options

See the INSTALL-DEV.md document for a list of the command line options per operating system.

Supported game systems

Note: The following list is what the default es_systems.xml files and the rbsimple-DE and modern-DE themes support. These theme sets are very comprehensive, so if you're using another theme, it may be that some or many of these systems are not supported. ES-DE will still work but the game system will unthemed which looks very ugly.

Note as well that the list and corresponding es_systems.xml templates may not reflect what is readily available for all supported operating system. This is especially true on Unix/Linux if installing RetroArch via the OS repository instead of using the Snap or Flatpak distributions (or compiling from source code) as the repository versions are normally quite crippled.

The column System name corresponds to the directory where you should put your game files, e.g. ~/ROMs/c64 or ~/ROMs/megadrive. This follows the RetroPie naming convention, with some additions for systems that are not supported on RetroPie. So if migrating from Batocera or Recalbox, check this carefully and rename your system folders as required or ES-DE will not be able to find your games.

Regional differences are handled by simply using the game system name corresponding to your region. For example for Sega Mega Drive, megadrive would be used by most people in the world, although persons from North America would use genesis instead. The same is true for pcengine vs tg16 etc. This only affects the theme selection and the corresponding theme graphics, the same emulator and scraper settings are still used for the regional variants although that can of course be customized in the es_systems.xml file if you wish.

Sometimes the name of the console is (more or less) the same for multiple regions, and in those cases the region has been added as a suffix to the game system name. For instance na for North America has been added to snes (Super Nintendo) giving the system name snesna. The same goes for Japan, as in megacd and megacdjp. Again, this only affects the theme and theme graphics.

For the Full name column, text inside square brackets [] are comments and not part of the actual system name.

The Default emulator column lists the primary emulator as configured in es_systems.xml. If this differs between Unix, macOS and Windows then it's specified in square brackets, such as [UW] for Unix and Windows and [M] for macOS. If not all of the three platforms are specified it means that the system is not available on the missing platforms. For example Lutris which is only avaialable on Unix is marked with only a [U]. Unless explicitly marked as (Standalone), each emulator is a RetroArch core.

The Alternative emulators column lists additional emulators configured in es_systems.xml that can be selected per system and per game, as explained earlier in this guide. This does not necessarily include everything in existence, as for some platforms there are a lot of emulators to choose from. In those cases the included emulators is a curated selection. In the same manner as the Default emulator column, differences between Unix, macOS and Windows are marked using square brackets. Unless explicitly marked as (Standalone), each emulator is a RetroArch core.

The Needs BIOS column indicates if additional BIOS/system ROMs are required, as should be explained by the emulator documentation. Good starting points for such documentation are https://docs.libretro.com and https://docs.libretro.com/library/bios

For additional details regarding which game file extensions are supported per system, refer to the es_systems.xml files unix/es_systems.xml, macos/es_systems.xml and windows/es_systems.xml. Normally the extensions setup in these files should cover everything that the emulators support. For systems that have alternative emulators defined, the list of extensions is a combination of what is supported by all the emulators. This approach is necessary as you want to be able to see all games for each system while potentially testing and switching between different emulators, either system-wide or on a per game basis.

If you generated the ROMs directory structure when first starting ES-DE, the systeminfo.txt files located in each game system directory will also contain information about the emulators and supported file extensions.

For CD-based systems it's generally recommended to use CHD files (extension .chd) as this saves space due to compression compared to BIN/CUE, IMG, ISO etc. The CHD format is also supported by most emulators. You can convert to CHD from various formats using the MAME chdman utility, for example chdman createcd -i mygame.iso -o mygame.chd. Sometimes chdman has issues converting from the IMG and BIN formats, and in this case it's possible to first convert to ISO using ccd2iso, such as ccd2iso mygame.img mygame.iso.

MAME emulation is a bit special as the choice of emulator depends on which ROM set you're using. It's recommended to go for the latest available set, as MAME is constantly improved with more complete and accurate emulation. Therefore the arcade system is configured to use MAME - Current by default, which as the name implies will be the latest available MAME version. But if you have a really slow computer you may want to use another ROM set such as the popular 0.78. In this case, you can either select MAME 2003-Plus as an alternative emulator, or you can use the mame system which comes configured with this emulator as the default. There are more MAME versions available as alternative emulators, as you can see in the table below.

There are also other MAME forks and derivates available such as MAME4ALL, AdvanceMAME, FinalBurn Alpha and FinalBurn Neo but it's beyond the scope of this document to describe those in detail. For more information, refer to the RetroPie arcade documentation which has a good overview of the various MAME alternatives.

In general .zip or .7z files are recommended for smaller-sized games like those from older systems (assuming the emulator supports it). But for CD-based systems it's not a good approach as uncompressing the larger CD images takes quite some time, leading to slow game launches. As explained above, converting CD images to CHD files is a better solution for achieving file compression while still enjoying fast game launches.

Consider the table below a work in progress as it's obvioulsy not fully populated yet!

Default emulator/Alternative emulators columns:
[U]: Unix, [M]: macOS, [W]: Windows

All emulators are RetroArch cores unless marked as (Standalone)

System name	Full name	Default emulator	Alternative emulators	Needs BIOS	Recommended game setup
3do	3DO	4DO
64dd	Nintendo 64DD	Mupen64Plus-Next [UW], ParaLLEl N64 [M]	ParaLLEl N64 [UW]
ags	Adventure Game Studio game engine
amiga	Commodore Amiga	PUAE		Yes	WHDLoad hard disk image in .hdf or .hdz format in root folder, or diskette image in .adf format in root folder if single-disc, or in separate folder with .m3u playlist if multi-disc
amiga600	Commodore Amiga 600	PUAE		Yes	WHDLoad hard disk image in .hdf or .hdz format in root folder, or diskette image in .adf format in root folder if single-disc, or in separate folder with .m3u playlist if multi-disc
amiga1200	Commodore Amiga 1200	PUAE		Yes	WHDLoad hard disk image in .hdf or .hdz format in root folder, or diskette image in .adf format in root folder if single-disc, or in separate folder with .m3u playlist if multi-disc
amigacd32	Commodore Amiga CD32	PUAE
amstradcpc	Amstrad CPC	Caprice32	CrocoDS
android	Google Android
apple2	Apple II
apple2gs	Apple IIGS
arcade	Arcade	MAME - Current	MAME 2000, MAME 2003-Plus, MAME 2010, FinalBurn Neo, FB Alpha 2012	Depends	Single archive file following MAME name standard in root folder
astrocade	Bally Astrocade
atari2600	Atari 2600	Stella	Stella 2014	No	Single archive or ROM file in root folder
atari5200	Atari 5200	Atari800
atari7800	Atari 7800 ProSystem	ProSystem
atari800	Atari 800	Atari800
atarijaguar	Atari Jaguar	Virtual Jaguar
atarijaguarcd	Atari Jaguar CD	Virtual Jaguar
atarilynx	Atari Lynx	Handy	Beetle Lynx
atarist	Atari ST [also STE and Falcon]	Hatari
atarixe	Atari XE	Atari800
atomiswave	Atomiswave	Flycast
bbcmicro	BBC Micro
c64	Commodore 64	VICE x64sc Accurate	VICE x64 Fast, VICE x64 SuperCPU, VICE x128, Frodo	No	Single disk, tape or cartridge image in root folder and/or multi-disc images in separate folder
cavestory	Cave Story (NXEngine)	NXEngine
cdimono1	Philips CD-i
cdtv	Commodore CDTV
chailove	ChaiLove game engine	ChaiLove
channelf	Fairchild Channel F	FreeChaF
coco	Tandy Color Computer
colecovision	ColecoVision	blueMSX
daphne	Daphne Arcade Laserdisc Emulator
desktop	Desktop applications	N/A		No
doom	Doom	PrBoom
dos	DOS (PC)	DOSBox-Core	DOSBox-Pure, DOSBox-SVN, DOSBox Staging (Standalone) [UM]	No	In separate folder (one folder per game, with complete file structure retained)
dragon32	Dragon 32
dreamcast	Sega Dreamcast	Flycast
epic	Epic Games Store	Epic Games Store application (Standalone)		No	Shell script/batch file in root folder
famicom	Nintendo Family Computer	Nestopia UE	FCEUmm, Mesen, QuickNES	No	Single archive or ROM file in root folder
fba	FinalBurn Alpha	FB Alpha 2012	FB Alpha 2012 Neo Geo, FB Alpha 2012 CPS-1, FB Alpha 2012 CPS-2, FB Alpha 2012 CPS-3	Yes	Single archive file following MAME name standard in root folder
fbneo	FinalBurn Neo	FinalBurn Neo		Yes	Single archive file following MAME name standard in root folder
fds	Nintendo Famicom Disk System	Nestopia UE		Yes	Single archive or ROM file in root folder
gameandwatch	Nintendo Game and Watch	GW
gamegear	Sega Game Gear	Gearsystem	SMS Plus GX, Genesis Plus GX, Genesis Plus GX Wide
gb	Nintendo Game Boy	SameBoy	Gambatte, Gearboy, TGB Dual, Mesen-S, bsnes
gba	Nintendo Game Boy Advance	mGBA	VBA-M, VBA Next, gpSP
gbc	Nintendo Game Boy Color	SameBoy	Gambatte, Gearboy, TGB Dual, Mesen-S, bsnes
gc	Nintendo GameCube	Dolphin
genesis	Sega Genesis	Genesis Plus GX	Genesis Plus GX Wide, PicoDrive, BlastEm	No	Single archive or ROM file in root folder
gx4000	Amstrad GX4000
intellivision	Mattel Electronics Intellivision	FreeIntv
j2me	Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME)	SquirrelJME		Yes	Single JAR file in root folder
kodi	Kodi home theatre software	N/A		No
lutris	Lutris open gaming platform	Lutris application (Standalone) [U]		No	Shell script in root folder
lutro	Lutro game engine	Lutro
macintosh	Apple Macintosh
mame	Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator	MAME 2003-Plus	MAME 2000, MAME 2010, MAME - Current, FinalBurn Neo, FB Alpha 2012	Depends	Single archive file following MAME name standard in root folder
mame-advmame	AdvanceMAME			Depends	Single archive file following MAME name standard in root folder
mame-mame4all	MAME4ALL			Depends	Single archive file following MAME name standard in root folder
mastersystem	Sega Master System	Genesis Plus GX	Genesis Plus GX Wide, SMS Plus GX, Gearsystem, PicoDrive	No	Single archive or ROM file in root folder
megacd	Sega Mega-CD	Genesis Plus GX	Genesis Plus GX Wide, PicoDrive
megacdjp	Sega Mega-CD [Japan]	Genesis Plus GX	Genesis Plus GX Wide, PicoDrive
megadrive	Sega Mega Drive	Genesis Plus GX	Genesis Plus GX Wide, PicoDrive, BlastEm	No	Single archive or ROM file in root folder
mess	Multi Emulator Super System	MESS 2015
moonlight	Moonlight game streaming
moto	Thomson MO/TO series	Theodore
msx	MSX	blueMSX	fMSX
msx1	MSX1	blueMSX	fMSX
msx2	MSX2	blueMSX	fMSX
msxturbor	MSX Turbo R	blueMSX
multivision	Othello Multivision	Gearsystem
naomi	Sega NAOMI	Flycast
naomigd	Sega NAOMI GD-ROM	Flycast
n3ds	Nintendo 3DS	Citra [UW]	Citra 2018 [UW]
n64	Nintendo 64	Mupen64Plus-Next [UW], ParaLLEl N64 [M]	ParaLLEl N64 [UW]	No	Single archive or ROM file in root folder
nds	Nintendo DS	DeSmuME	DeSmuME 2015, melonDS
neogeo	SNK Neo Geo	FinalBurn Neo		Yes	Single archive file following MAME name standard in root folder
neogeocd	SNK Neo Geo CD	NeoCD		Yes	Single archive in root folder (which includes the CD image and ripped audio)
neogeocdjp	SNK Neo Geo CD [Japan]	NeoCD		Yes	Single archive in root folder (which includes the CD image and ripped audio)
nes	Nintendo Entertainment System	Nestopia UE	FCEUmm, Mesen, QuickNES	No	Single archive or ROM file in root folder
ngp	SNK Neo Geo Pocket	Beetle NeoPop	RACE
ngpc	SNK Neo Geo Pocket Color	Beetle NeoPop	RACE
odyssey2	Magnavox Odyssey2	O2EM
openbor	OpenBOR game engine
oric	Tangerine Computer Systems Oric
palm	Palm OS	Mu
pc	IBM PC	DOSBox-Core	DOSBox-Pure, DOSBox-SVN, DOSBox Staging (Standalone) [UM]	No	In separate folder (one folder per game, with complete file structure retained)
pc88	NEC PC-8800 series	QUASI88
pc98	NEC PC-9800 series	Neko Project II Kai	Neko Project II
pcengine	NEC PC Engine	Beetle PCE	Beetle PCE FAST	No	Single archive or ROM file in root folder
pcenginecd	NEC PC Engine CD	Beetle PCE	Beetle PCE FAST	Yes
pcfx	NEC PC-FX	Beetle PC-FX
pokemini	Nintendo Pokémon Mini	PokeMini		No
ports	Ports	N/A		No	Shell/batch script in separate folder (possibly combined with game data)
ps2	Sony PlayStation 2	PCSX2 [UW]
ps3	Sony PlayStation 3
ps4	Sony PlayStation 4
psp	Sony PlayStation Portable	PPSSPP
psvita	Sony PlayStation Vita
psx	Sony PlayStation	Beetle PSX	Beetle PSX HW, PCSX ReARMed, DuckStation	Yes	.chd file in root folder for single-disc games, .m3u playlist in root folder for multi-disc games
residualvm	ResidualVM game engine
samcoupe	SAM Coupé	SimCoupe
satellaview	Nintendo Satellaview	Snes9x - Current	Snes9x 2010, bsnes, bsnes-mercury Accuracy, Mesen-S
saturn	Sega Saturn	Beetle Saturn	Kronos [UW], YabaSanshiro [UW], Yabause
saturnjp	Sega Saturn [Japan]	Beetle Saturn	Kronos [UW], YabaSanshiro [UW], Yabause
scummvm	ScummVM game engine	ScummVM		No	In separate folder (one folder per game, with complete file structure retained)
sega32x	Sega Mega Drive 32X	PicoDrive		No	Single archive or ROM file in root folder
sega32xjp	Sega Super 32X [Japan]	PicoDrive		No	Single archive or ROM file in root folder
sega32xna	Sega Genesis 32X [North America]	PicoDrive		No	Single archive or ROM file in root folder
segacd	Sega CD	Genesis Plus GX	Genesis Plus GX Wide, PicoDrive
sg-1000	Sega SG-1000	Gearsystem	Genesis Plus GX, Genesis Plus GX Wide, blueMSX
snes	Nintendo SNES (Super Nintendo)	Snes9x - Current	Snes9x 2010, bsnes, bsnes-mercury Accuracy, Beetle Supafaust [UW], Mesen-S	No	Single archive or ROM file in root folder
snesna	Nintendo SNES (Super Nintendo) [North America]	Snes9x - Current	Snes9x 2010, bsnes, bsnes-mercury Accuracy, Beetle Supafaust [UW], Mesen-S	No	Single archive or ROM file in root folder
solarus	Solarus game engine
spectravideo	Spectravideo	blueMSX
steam	Valve Steam	Steam application (Standalone)		No	Shell script/batch file in root folder
stratagus	Stratagus game engine
sufami	Bandai SuFami Turbo	Snes9x - Current	Snes9x 2010, bsnes, bsnes-mercury Accuracy
supergrafx	NEC SuperGrafx	Beetle SuperGrafx	Beetle PCE
switch	Nintendo Switch	Yuzu (Standalone) [UW]		Yes
symbian	Symbian
tanodragon	Tano Dragon
tg16	NEC TurboGrafx-16	Beetle PCE	Beetle PCE FAST	No	Single archive or ROM file in root folder
tg-cd	NEC TurboGrafx-CD	Beetle PCE	Beetle PCE FAST	Yes
ti99	Texas Instruments TI-99
tic80	TIC-80 game engine
to8	Thomson TO8	Theodore
trs-80	Tandy TRS-80
uzebox	Uzebox	Uzem
vectrex	Vectrex	vecx
vic20	Commodore VIC-20	VICE xvic			Single disk, tape or cartridge image in root folder
videopac	Philips Videopac G7000	O2EM
virtualboy	Nintendo Virtual Boy	Beetle VB
wii	Nintendo Wii	Dolphin
wiiu	Nintendo Wii U
wonderswan	Bandai WonderSwan	Beetle Cygne
wonderswancolor	Bandai WonderSwan Color	Beetle Cygne
x1	Sharp X1	x1			Single archive or ROM file in root folder
x68000	Sharp X68000	PX68k
xbox	Microsoft Xbox
xbox360	Microsoft Xbox 360
zmachine	Infocom Z-machine
zx81	Sinclair ZX81	EightyOne
zxspectrum	Sinclair ZX Spectrum	Fuse