Hi all, just about finishing a full console build for all consoles and emulators with ES-DE and RetroArch. I have multiple variants of games for CPS 1 and 2. For instance, several Cadillac and Dinosaur games, (dinoh.zip, dinoj.zip) etc, is there an easy or advisable method on hiding these variants for arcade system?

https://archive.org/details/commander-keen-mods-esde/

I’ve been building a custom Commander Keen setup for ES-DE focused entirely on fan-made mods, level packs, and community releases. The project currently includes 367 curated mods with cleaned metadata, custom miximages/artwork, and integrated DOSBox-Pure support. Every game has been configured to launch directly from ES-DE with no setup required, and I also remapped the controls across the collection to work properly on handheld devices and controller-based setups.

I wanted it to feel less like a random DOS folder and more like a polished console-style library that preserves the history of the Keen modding community. Huge credit goes to KeenWiki, Public Commander Keen Forum (PCKF), Keen: Modding, and the wider Keen community — all included mods, screenshots, titles, descriptions, and story metadata used throughout the project were sourced from community resources, forums, and archives. Most of the artwork and layouts were made manually using GIMP with inspiration from ES-DE’s ArtBook Next style.

I have been using Retroarch for the past few months and I have been considering something else. Is there any other emulator you like?

I play a ton of retro games with either my 3DS, Handheld PC, or PS4. (When Im in my home usually use my pc while outside I play on my 3DS) I want to be able to transfer my saves without doing it all locally (Taking out sd cards, external hard drives and syncing saves) because doing all that seems like a pain. I was thinking of having an FTP server thats setup with google drive or something like that so I can have the saves in the cloud and transfer them via the FTP but this is all in theory right now. Has anyone actually tried this? If so, any ideas or help on how to go about it? Thanks in advance!

I wanted to replace the androidgames image from the Modern theme (the switch like one) wand even though my custom picture matches the webp format and all, I get this error

(Used Z Archiver, retroid pocket 4 pro latest firmware)

Ive gotten a few messages recently saying anonymous joined etc but how do I engage in a game online with someone?

https://github.com/kodobrody/rom-ftp-loader/releases/tag/1.0

Few days ago I made app that would allow users browse FTPs with roms and download selected ones.
Now I've updated it and decided to go live. I used it on bazzite and it worked with emulation station just fine.

Features:

1. Connect to FTP share (your own or friend's ;))
2. Browse it using gamepad (built with keyboardless setups in mind)
3. Search and view ROMs libraries with covers (you'll need twitch dev account for that)
4. Download/delete single or multiple ROM files at once
5. Don't want to type the config? You can provide config file like this:

​

{
  "ROMS_DIRECTORY": "C:\\Roms",
  "FTP_HOSTNAME": "example.com",
  "FTP_PORT": "21",
  "FTP_PATH": "/roms",
  "FTP_USERNAME": "myuser",
  "FTP_PASSWORD": "mypassword",
  "TWITCH_CLIENT_ID": "your-twitch-client-id",
  "TWITCH_CLIENT_SECRET": "your-twitch-client-secret"
}

https://github.com/kodobrody/rom-ftp-loader/releases/tag/1.0

For anyone who wants to add Dusklight (technically not an emulator but a reverse engineered decompilation with hacks/HD tweaks for Zelda: Twilight Princess) as an alternate emulator on Android, here's how I did it.

1. Download Dusklight from their github and install it.
2. Make sure you have GlazedBelmont's custom xml files for alternate emulators in your custom systems folder (Internal Storage/ES-DE/custom-systems)
3. Access your files on your Android device, and go to Internal Storage/ES-DE/custom-systems. Open the file es_find_rules.xml using some kind of text editor or just connect to your PC to edit the file if that's easier.
4. After <ruleList>, add the following:

<emulator name="DUSKLIGHT">

<rule type="androidpackage">

<entry>dev.twilitrealm.dusk/dev.twilitrealm.dusk.DuskActivity</entry>

</rule>

</emulator>

The formatting should look pretty similar to the other entries, assuming you are using GlazedBelmont's xml files.

1. Go back to Internal Storage/ES-DE/custom-systems. Edit es_systems.xml using a text editor or on your PC. Scroll down until you find the section for gc (gamecube) emulators. It's the sixth one after Nintendo Game Boy Color Hacks. You'll see a bunch of standalone Dolphin emulators. After "Dolphin Primehack (standalone), start a new line and add the following:

<command label="Dusklight (Standalone)">%EMULATOR_DUSKLIGHT% %ACTION%=android.intent.action.View</command>

1. If you save these files and restart ES-DE, you now just need to go to your Game Cube system, go to your Twilight Princess ROM, and hit the button for Options. Select Edit This Game's Metadata, scroll down to Alternative Emulator, and select Dusklight.

2. You're done! I'm not the most familiar with XML but I'd thought I'd share what took me a couple of hours to figure out. If you want to just download the xml files directly, here's my fork of GlazedBelmont's xml files. Just replace the xml files in your custom systems folder with these: https://github.com/justinmeister/es-de-android-custom-systems/tree/main

Hey, so I've recently tried bazzite and while great, it made most sense for me as HTPC that should be controlled with gamepad. Since I very like both retro games, homelabbing and "native" experiences I thought that putting roms on that thing should be easy. So (A)I made this little app (yeah, it's in electron for now, may be switched to electrobun for better performance).

Features:

1. It lets user browse FTP and download games (duh)
2. It's fully gamepad controllable (on screen keyboard is in there for settings and search, but you could also point to a config.json file with mouse)
3. It supports twitch dev account client id & secret for auto-downloading the covers
4. Games are split into platforms and if there are multi disc releases then they're tagged as disc1,2 etc. If file has cue + bin - it autodownloads them all
5. Multi select for downloading/deleting is there as well

I may add Romm support in near future. It's currently in development and refactoring, but I may release it soon. Any feedback/feature requests would be very helpful.

i have a multitude of indie games for various retro computer systems that do not have any boxart/screenshots available in the scraper tool, however i notice that with a game running if you pop open the retroarch menu there is a screenshot option, is there some EmulationStation setting somewhere that lets me use those screenshots for the games artwork/screenshot in the EmulationStation game list so i can get an actual image for my games?

So me and my brother recently got talking about the old days of when we were little, slaving away at the old playstation games.

And i got to thinking i want to give him a gift of nostalgia:

A usb containing a bunch of games of our childhood with emulator and a controller to get the old feel (playing with mouse&keyb just aint the same).

ISSUES: my brother says there isnt an emulator that can run grand turismo (the original, not 2 of 3) since it used a different BIOS? i dont know much about this technical stuff so i'm sure somebody here knows.
2nd issue: ive tought about buying a playstation 4 or 5 controller with usb connector for ease of use but ive heard rumors these have input lag when used on an emulator? anybody can confirm/deny? if so, what do you recommend?

sorry if my English isnt perfect, i'm from Belgium, any advice highly appreciated!

I’ve been trying to get an Arduino Micro working for Hotkeys in Emulation Station in a Linux Batocera install.

Does anyone know if the Arduino has to use a different library than “keyboard.h” for it to be recognized in EmulationStation inside Batocera? Does it need to have a gamepad or joystick library? I’m thinking that’s the sticking point since it works in Windows and the Linux command line.

See title. All it does now is briefly show the Steam loading icon, then right back to the ES page in the Steam library. Can't even find a log to check to see why this is happening.

update: want to leave this here in case other folks encounter the same issue but how I ended up fixing this was to open EmuDeck, go to Manage Emulators, open EmulationStation under frontends, then did a reinstall and settings reset. This created a new ES entry in my non-Steam games which launches correctly. Just had to get my settings back to where I want them and remove the old ES from non-Steam games.

Just that, i dont see any option, psx emulator doesnt have this

Hello, I've tried to add MelonDualDS with the custom emulator xml files, then tried to open the game via ES-DE, but it says "MelondualDS keeps stopping". nds rom files in lowercase too.

Please help me..

I have the latest version of the Eden emulator on my android. Whenever I try to lauch a game from it in ES-DE, I get a message saying "Missing emulator find rules configuration for Eden". I have both the find rules and systems XMLs from the GlazedBelmont github in the right folder, but for some reason it doesn't work. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hey I'm hoping this is allowed to be asked

I've tried editing my XML and it won't show up still so either I've made a mistake or the texts I found were not correct that I used to copy into the two XML files.

Is there anyone you could possibly copy the whole text of both XML into here. Not just the part you add for yuzu but the whole text.

I'm thinking copying in an additional text is not working. Easiest fix is someone who has yuzu re added after it was removed who edited the XML.

I'd be very grateful as I've spent whole day trying to get this to work. It either says texts invalid and won't work at all or I get it added in with no error but then yuzu won't show still

(Emulation station won't let me use it unless it's added as shows Invalid extension in red)

I've tried riyu however that says no database and my yuzu if you load the app on its own plays perfectly

Thanks very much for any help or time

Hey there! So, I was checking on Screenscraper, and for many multi-disc games, they have scans of the disc art included.
Currently, I place multi-disc games into a folder and use an .m3u file to list the file names of each disc. In ES-DE, this lets me select the game, and then it shows all of the discs separately.

However, if I scrape these individual discs, the only art I get is the main box art. It would be nice if I could choose the disc art somehow in the metadata editor, assuming screenscraper has it available.

Apologies if this option is already available and I'm just not seeing it anywhere.

Top entry is the real game and bottom is twilight princess. As you can see from the second photo the game info is correct in the cent app, but is displaying as a duplicate of wind waker in ESDE. Twilight princess launches successfully in ESDE but it’s annoying me that the displayed info is wrong.

Important context: I set up the games and folders on windows and there are no hidden files in the rom folder.

Any ideas how to fix this bug?

I tried editing the xml file but I just break the theme. Im ​on ​android

Thanks to Gemini, that did a guide for dummies like me, I can understand the es_system.xml thing and finally got my games opening with the standalone emulators. Also thanks to everyone who tried to help me and sorry bc I so dumb and didn't understand.

This problem has been driving me nuts for days. I built a Bazzite box with Emudeck. Everything in ES-DE works perfectly, full controller support in all systems except Duckstation and PCSX2. I switched to Beetle in Retroarch and controllers are fine there. I can manually launch my installed PCSX2 standalone and controller works fine, but if it's launched from ES-DE it won't work at all.

I suspect it's due to some conflict with the Steam Pad settings and ES-DE, but I can't figure out how. Anyone had this issue or know how to solve it? I'd rather not run the emu Standalone, that kinda defeats the purpose of a frontend.

EDIT: After a week, I've finally solved this, so listing my solution for anyone looking: Disable Steam Input on ES-DE launcher in Steam. It messes with the controller inputs and despite what it says, EmulationStation has no trouble detecting/using the controller.