EmulationStation

A simple front-end for emulators made with SDL, designed for controller navigation. Developed for use with the Raspberry Pi and RetroArch, though it can easily be used for other things.

RetroArch for the Raspberry Pi can be found here: https://github.com/ToadKing/RetroArch-Rpi I'm not associated with RetroArch in any way!

Building

EmulationStation has a few dependencies. For building, you'll need SDL 1.2, the SDL TTF library, and Boost.Filesystem, which can easily be obtained with apt-get: sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev sudo apt-get install libsdl-ttf2.0-dev sudo apt-get install libboost-filesystem-dev

You can build EmulationStation by simply running make.

Configuring

When first run, an example systems configuration file will be created at $HOME/.es_systems.cfg. This example has some comments explaining how to write the configuration file, and an example RetroArch launch command. Keep in mind you can define more than one system! Just use all the variables again.

If an SDL Joystick is detected at startup, and $HOME/.es_input.cfg is nonexistant, an Input Configuration screen will appear instead of the game list. This should be pretty self-explanatory. If you want to reconfigure, just delete $HOME/.es_input.cfg.

Mappings will always be applied to the SDL joystick at index 0. An Xbox 360 controller with the xboxdrv driver was tested. POV hats are automatically mapped to directions (so if you're not using an analog stick, you'll need to skip mapping Up/Down/Left/Right by pressing a keyboard key).

Keep in mind you'll have to set up your emulator separately from EmulationStation. If you're using RetroArch, a handy input config generation tool can be found in the tools/ subdirectory - you can use it with retroarch-joyconfig -o ~/.retroarch.cfg or something similar. You may need to tell RetroArch to load this config file with -c ~/.retroarch.cfg in your RetroArch launch commands.

-Aloshi http://www.aloshi.com