EmulationStation
A graphical and themeable emulator front-end that allows you to access all your favorite games in one place, even without a keyboard!
What is EmulationStation?
EmulationStation is a graphical and themeable emulator front-end that allows you to access all your favorite games in one place, even without a keyboard!
Works with any controller
EmulationStation provides an interface that is usable with any 4-button controller, set up from within the program itself.
Give each system the look it deserves with the custom theming system
EmulationStation includes a custom theming system that gives you control over how each screen looks on a per-system basis, from the system select screen to the game list.
Don't like our style? Try another set, or make your own!
Easily download game box art with the built-in metadata scraper
Download the full name, description, box art, rating, release date, developer, publisher, genre, and number of players for every game in your library with the press of a button.
The project seems to be no longer developed. Last version, 2.0.1a, released in March 2015, can be still downloaded from the official website.
EmulationStation Screenshots
EmulationStation Features
EmulationStation information
- Developed byAlec Lofquist
- LicensingOpen Source (MIT) and Free product.
- Written in
- RatingAverage rating of 4
- Alternatives29 alternatives listed
Supported Languages
- English
GitHub repository
- 1,870 Stars
- 884 Forks
- 507 Open Issues
- Updated
Comments and Reviews
Said about EmulationStation as an alternative
It is a great alternative to RetroArch but it is only a frontend and requires backends and requires a bit of computer knowledge to setup
its a bit more prettier to look at for a start and it supports themes
It's a nice boxart-based frontend for emulated videogames compatible with almost every gamepad or input controller out there.
Tags
- User interface
- Game Emulator
- frontend
- joypad
- retro-gaming
Category
Gaming SoftwareRecent user activities on EmulationStation
- Tvgold added EmulationStation Desktop Edition as an alternative to EmulationStationTv
r3tr0g4m3r added EmulationStation as alternative(s) to Pegasus- Upvoted a comment on EmulationStationGuI've been around the emulation world for a good two decades, and probably tried just about every emulator frontend at one point. A few years ago, one type became particularly popular: fullscreen multi-emulator frontends, heavy on graphics and animations, themed to reflect different emulated systems depending on which game list is being browsed, often even playing video previews and music taken from the currently selected games. The push to popularity was thanks to the spread of HTPCs (home theater PCs), and other low-cost computers such as the Raspberry Pi, which users connected to their TV sets for various entertainment uses. **GameEx** and **Hyperspin** are the most widely known. However, in my personal opinion but by a large margin, I've never seen any of the alternatives reach the level of quality design and aesthetics that **EmulationStation** comes with right out of the box. Other frontends often go way too far into sensory overload, screens are too busy and irritating, and they could do with some serious improvement in the typography department. If you want to impress with, and be impressed by, a visually appealing multi-emulator system, **EmulationStation** is the way to go. It's true that configuration is a bit of tedious manual work. The configuration interfaces of other frontends are completely missing at this point. Systems, emulators and game paths first need to be set up by editing a few configuration text files. It's largely painless, though. Modifying a handful of lines per system is usually enough, and the documentation is good. Complete computer newbies will have some trouble, but everyone who knows their way around a text editor and maybe has even edited an INI file before, should be fine. Everything else is very simple in comparison. Setting up a controller happens right in the interface, most everything from there on out is done through pretty and simple menus. Scrapers allow you to download game metadata, descriptions and cover artwork from online databases. Availability of add-on themes is lower than for other frontends due to fewer people using it at this point, and there are some small but bothersome bugs. Unfortunately, it seems that work on the software has stopped. The last version was released over two years ago, and no pull requests have been handled since. Thankfully, it's open-source, so work continues on various forks. The ones I found seem to focus on either the Pi or Linux platforms. However, if you look for a bit, you can find that people are successfully running, and sometimes offering Windows builds of, one of the most active Pi-focussed forks around, **RetroPie**. [Here is one such](https://github.com/jrassa/EmulationStation/releases).
I've been around the emulation world for a good two decades, and probably tried just about every emulator frontend at one point. A few years ago, one type became particularly popular: fullscreen multi-emulator frontends, heavy on graphics and animations, themed to reflect different emulated systems depending on which game list is being browsed, often even playing video previews and music taken from the currently selected games. The push to popularity was thanks to the spread of HTPCs (home theater PCs), and other low-cost computers such as the Raspberry Pi, which users connected to their TV sets for various entertainment uses.
GameEx and Hyperspin are the most widely known. However, in my personal opinion but by a large margin, I've never seen any of the alternatives reach the level of quality design and aesthetics that EmulationStation comes with right out of the box. Other frontends often go way too far into sensory overload, screens are too busy and irritating, and they could do with some serious improvement in the typography department. If you want to impress with, and be impressed by, a visually appealing multi-emulator system, EmulationStation is the way to go.
It's true that configuration is a bit of tedious manual work. The configuration interfaces of other frontends are completely missing at this point. Systems, emulators and game paths first need to be set up by editing a few configuration text files. It's largely painless, though. Modifying a handful of lines per system is usually enough, and the documentation is good. Complete computer newbies will have some trouble, but everyone who knows their way around a text editor and maybe has even edited an INI file before, should be fine.
Everything else is very simple in comparison. Setting up a controller happens right in the interface, most everything from there on out is done through pretty and simple menus. Scrapers allow you to download game metadata, descriptions and cover artwork from online databases.
Availability of add-on themes is lower than for other frontends due to fewer people using it at this point, and there are some small but bothersome bugs. Unfortunately, it seems that work on the software has stopped. The last version was released over two years ago, and no pull requests have been handled since. Thankfully, it's open-source, so work continues on various forks. The ones I found seem to focus on either the Pi or Linux platforms. However, if you look for a bit, you can find that people are successfully running, and sometimes offering Windows builds of, one of the most active Pi-focussed forks around, RetroPie. Here is one such.
Now don't get me wrong, EmulationStation is great! But, it is hard for first timers to setup, the first time i installed this on my pc it was too complicated to setup. So this is for the people who want to give it a shot!
code 1
all the names are below NOTE: These are case sensitive.
3do amiga amstradcpc apple2 arcade atari800 atari2600 atari5200 atari7800 atarilynx atarist atarijaguar atarijaguarcd atarixe colecovision c64 - commodore 64 intellivision macintosh xbox xbox360 msx neogeo ngp - neo geo pocket ngpc - neo geo pocket color n3ds - nintendo 3DS n64 - nintendo 64 nds - nintendo DS nes - nintendo entertainment system gb - game boy gba - game boy advance gbc - game boy color gc - gamecube wii wiiu pc sega32x segacd dreamcast gamegear genesis - sega genesis mastersystem - sega master system megadrive - sega megadrive saturn - sega saturn psx ps2 ps3 ps4 psvita psp - playstation portable snes - super nintendo entertainment system pcengine - turbografx-16/pcengine wonderswan wonderswancolor zxspectrum ignore - do not allow scraping for this system; will remove this system from the scraping list and remove the "scrape" button in the metadata editor.