EmulationStation Desktop Edition: User Guide
RetroDECK uses EmulationStation Desktop Edition (ES-DE) as frontend.
The official EmulationStation Desktop Edition user guide is over at their gitlab.
EmulationStation Desktop Edition user guide
Note that the guide is written in a general way for the application and not how RetroDECK handles certain configurations. Also note that RetroDECK is currently not shipped with all the emulators ES-DE supports in the user guide.
EmulationStation Desktop Edition (ES-DE) and it's guide is written by Leon Styhre
Published under the MIT-Licence.
What follows is a list of recommended sections of the User Guide with links.
Navigation
General navigation
These are the buttons mappings automatically applied by ES-DE.
General navigation
If you are using the Steam Deck look at RetroDECKs hotkeys:
Steam Deck: Hotkeys
Settings
General UI Settings
Various settings that affect the user interface.
UI Settings
Other UI settings
These are mostly technical settings.
Other UI settings
General Sound Settings
Various sound settings.
Sound settings
Game settings and filters
Game options
Various navigation for the game options menu.
Game options menu
Game collections
ES-DE provides two types of collections, Automatic collections and Custom collections, the latter being defined by the user. Collections are as the name implies only collections of games already present in your actual game systems, so they're basically grouping of games into convenient views.
Game collections
Set alternative emulator.
ES-DE allows you to change emulators for systems that has many different emulators.
Set alternative emulator
Scraper
What follows are links to parts of the EmulationStation DE user guide that talks about scraping and editing metadata.
Emulation Station DE: User Guide on themes
Contains the various options for the scraper, which is used to download metadata, images and videos for your games.
Scraper guide
Scraper account settings
Setup of ScreenScraper account.
Scraper account settings
Content Settings
Describes the content types to include in the scraping.
Content settings
How to: Manually copy custom media files (images, videos etc..)
How to add custom media files to the ES-DE interface. For example you want other images then those on screenscraper or the game you add don't exists.
How to: Manually copy custom media files
Miximage settings
These are the settings for the miximage generator, which can either be run from the scraper (single-game scraper or multi-scraper) or from the offline generator. The miximage combines the screenshot, marquee, box/cover and physical media images to make a composite picture that is displayed in the gamelist view. There are various settings for the generator.
Various other scraping settings.
Metadata editor
In the metadata editor, you can modify the metadata, scrape for game info and media files, clear the entry which will delete all metadata and game media files, or delete the entire game which also removes its file on the filesystem.
Metadata editor
Video and Media
Video screensaver settings
Options specific to the video screensaver.
Video screensaver settings
Media viewer settings
Settings for the media viewer that is accessible from the gamelist views.
Media viewer settings
Slideshow screensaver settings
Options specific to the slideshow screensaver.
Slideshow screensaver settings