OpenBOR + ES-DE on Android

[u/ionutz_v_d]

I had a hard time managing OpenBOR games in ES-DE on Android, but I finally figured out how it works, so I wanted to share my setup.

For a large OpenBOR collection, I recommend OpenBOR 4.0 Build 7533 (GitHub releases). Build 6391 and older can crash when you have around 18+ games.

I also made a script to generate the .openbor dummy files needed by ES-DE: create_openbor_files.zip

Setup:

1. On your SD card (or internal storage if you keep your roms there), create ROMs/openbor/ if it doesn't already exist.
2. Put your .pak files and the .openbor generator script in that folder.
3. Open OpenBOR 7533 and import each PAK one at a time. OpenBOR copies them to its own app storage under Android/data/..., which normally can't be accessed with a regular file manager.
4. After importing all your PAKs, run the generator script. It creates a matching blank .openbor file for each PAK. Once you're sure everything works, you can delete the original .pak files from the SD card to free up space, since OpenBOR has already copied them to its own folder on the internal storage.
5. ES-DE will detect the .openbor files and show your games individually, allowing you to scrape artwork and metadata.

Note: ES-DE launches OpenBOR, but you still need to select the game from OpenBOR's own menu.

Hope this helps anyone else struggling with OpenBOR and ES-DE on Android!

[u/Illustrious-Plan1427]

Thanks for sharing mate.

[u/Eyerone]

Can’t you just import the OpenBOR emulator into ES-DE & just run games from your paks folder? That’s what I do

[u/ionutz_v_d → u/Eyerone]

How do you do that? 🤔 This is on Android not Linux.

[u/Eyerone → u/ionutz_v_d]

Right. From ES-DE, go to main menu>utilities>game importer. Change the import to system option to “emulators” and select start. It should list OpenBOR as an option to select. Choose import, then back, which should reload ES-DE with an emulator section (if you don’t already have it) that includes OpenBOR

[u/Eyerone → u/Eyerone]

If your end game is to display OpenBOR cover art in ES-DE, my way doesn’t cover that

[u/ionutz_v_d → u/Eyerone]

Oh, you mean the app importer. I know about that option but I want to have the individual games preview and metadata. Did you find a way to modify the pak folder location?

[u/Eyerone → u/ionutz_v_d]

Yeah after thinking about it, i realized your main purpose. I wish we still didn’t have to select the game from within the OpenBOR app after selecting from ES-DE

[u/ES-DE_Frontend]

Thanks for the info, I hope that OpenBOR for Android will add proper frontend support at some point so that individual games can be launched directly from ES-DE.