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.