ES-DE Frontend

ES-DE (EmulationStation Desktop Edition) is a frontend for browsing and launching games from your multi-platform collection.

It's officially supported on Android, Linux, macOS and Windows, and semi-officially supported on Haiku. It can also be used on the Raspberry Pi and similar devices if you build it yourself from source code. There is also a ES-DE package in the FreeBSD ports collection.

Website:
https://es-de.org

Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/es_de

YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@ES-DE_Frontend

Discord:
https://discord.gg/42jqqNcHf9

The goal of this project is to make a high quality frontend that is easy to use, requires minimal setup and configuration, looks nice, and is available across a wide range of operating systems.

It comes preconfigured for use with a large selection of emulators, game engines, game managers and gaming services. It can also run locally installed games and applications. It's fully customizable, so you can easily expand it with support for additional systems and applications.

You can find the complete list of supported game systems in the User guide.

There are many high-quality themes that can be installed using the built-in theme downloader. You can also find the web version of the themes list here:
https://gitlab.com/es-de/themes/themes-list

Download

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

The Android port of ES-DE is a paid app, which you can get on Patreon, the Samsung Galaxy Store and Huawei AppGallery.

If you're using a Raspberry Pi, then you need to compile from source code as no prebuilt package is provided for this platform. A detailed build guide is available in INSTALL.md.

If your run FreeBSD then ES-DE is available as an official port.

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 for all past releases and the in-development version

ROADMAP.md - List of major features planned to be added in the future

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 Linear theme.

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 screensavers, including a slideshow and a video screensaver that display random games from your collection.

ES-DE is fully themeable, in case you prefer another look than what the default theme Linear offers. The screenshot above shows the Slate theme that is bundled with the application for the desktop ports.