EmulationStation Desktop Edition (ES-DE)

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

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

Discord server:
https://discord.gg/EVVX4DqWAP

Reddit (r/EmulationStation_DE):
https://www.reddit.com/r/EmulationStation_DE

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

The goal of this edition is to make the software as easy as possible to install and use as a standalone application, and to support the major desktop operating systems, i.e. Windows, macOS and Unix/Linux. Since it's intended to be used as a desktop application rather than as the primary interface for the computer, there are no plans to provide system administration utilities or control over emulator settings from within ES-DE.

It comes preconfigured for use with RetroArch and a large selection of standalone emulators. It's also fully customizable so you can easily expand it to include emulators or applications not covered by the bundled configuration.

You can find the complete list of supported systems and emulators here.

Two theme sets (Slate and Modern) are bundled with the application, and additional themes can be found on the official themes list.

Download

The latest stable version is 1.2.6 (released 2022-08-03) and the latest prerelease is 2.0.0-beta-2023-02-26

Visit https://es-de.org/ to download ES-DE or go to the package registry where you can also find all previous releases.

If you're using a Raspberry Pi or if you run FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD then you need to compile from source code as no prebuilt packages are provided for these platforms. A detailed build guide is available in INSTALL.md.

Additional information

FAQ.md - Frequently Asked Questions

USERGUIDE.md / USERGUIDE-DEV.md - Comprehensive guide and reference for all application settings

INSTALL.md / INSTALL-DEV.md - Building from source code and advanced configuration topics

THEMES.md / THEMES-DEV.md - Guide and reference for theme development

CHANGELOG.md - Detailed list of changes per release

ROADMAP.md - High level release plan

CONTRIBUTING.md - Information on how to contribute to the project

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

Some feature highlights

Here are some highlights, displayed using the default Slate theme set.

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

The Gamelist view, it's here that you browse the actual games per system.

Another example of the gamelist view, displaying advanced folder support. You can scrape folders for game info and game media, sort folders as you would files, mark them as favorites etc.

Games can be grouped into your own custom collections, in this example they're defined as genres.

This is a view of the built-in scraper which downloads game info and game media from either screenscraper.fr or thegamesdb.net. It's possible to scrape a single game, or to run the multi-scraper which can scrape a complete game system or even your entire collection.

There are many settings for the scraper including options to define which type of info and media to download. The above screenshot shows only a portion of these settings.

In addition to the scraper there is a fully-featured metadata editor that can be used to modify information on a per-game basis.

There are four built-in screensaver types, including a slideshow and a video screensaver that display random games from your collection.

ES-DE is fully themeable, so if you prefer another look than what the default theme Slate offers, it's possible to apply another theme set. The image above is of the Modern theme that is also bundled with the application.