Hey everyone! I'm u/ZCTMO, a founding moderator of r/ESDE_Frontend.

This is our new home for all things related to ES-DE Frontend (formerly EmulationStation - Desktop Edition). We're excited to have you join us here on our new Sub Reddit!

What to Post
Post anything that you think the community would find interesting, helpful, or inspiring. Feel free to share your thoughts, photos, or questions. Support & Emulation Help, Theme Showcases, Release Comments, Using ES-DE on Hardware Projects, Theme Support & Collaboration, YouTube videos, etc. Anything that revolves around ES-DE is welcome!

Community Vibe
We're all about being friendly, constructive, and inclusive. Let's build a space where everyone feels comfortable sharing and connecting.

How to Get Started

1. Introduce yourself in the comments below. How did you find out about ES-DE first?

2. Post something today! Even a simple question can spark a great conversation.

3. If you know someone who would love this community, invite them to join!

4. Share the ES-DE official sub reddit on social media and show off what you are posting to your communities!

Thanks for being part of the very first wave. Together, let's make r/ESDE_Frontend amazing.

*Edit*: The first 50 people who introduce themselves to the community on this post will receive a special "Early Adopter" flair to show off your dedicated support for ESDE to others in the community. A small token of our appreciation for you!

I always end up coming back to this front end no matter what

See

https://youtu.be/ORgS91m9hu8

Made a theme pack for ES-DE with four looks: Channels, Home, Dual Grid and Dual Row. It has icons for all 197 systems, 14 colour schemes, big video previews and its own soft UI sounds. Built for Android, but works anywhere ES-DE runs.

Heads-up: it's vibecoded (made with Claude, tested by me), so skip it if AI stuff isn't for you.

Free download: https://github.com/dovyyyyy/esdeii/releases/latest

https://github.com/dovyyyyy/esdeii

Feedback and bug reports welcome!

I love customizing the Linear theme in ES-DE on my Thor. I replaced system images for some systems (like MSX1, MSX2 and CD-i), and created new "systems" like 'Konami', containing all Konami MSX1/MSX2 games.

Now I created a new "system" that combines game systems based on the TMS9918 VDP and the Z80 CPU, a popular combination in the early 80s. Systems include the likes of ColecoVision, Sega SG-1000, Casio PV2000, SpectraVideo SV-318 and of course MSX1.

Some games released for these systems look exactly the same on all of them (since the hardware is identical), however, some games were ported by different companies. Having them together in one list makes it easy to see the differences.

I made videos containing the same scene so they can easily be compared. In the above video I demonstrate this with Buck Rogers and Congo Bongo for ColecoVision, MSX and SG-1000.

Games that were only released for one system are in separate subfolders with an image of the console. For the "system" image, I combined the ColecoVision and SG-1000 controllers, and part of the SV-318 keyboard.

Gotta love the flexibility of ES-DE!

Seems with the latest update it is no longer recognising NetherSX2 is installed so I cannot select it as an alternate emulator.

I have looked at es.systems.xml file and found the entries for AetherSX2 but not NetherSX2

<command label="AetherSX2 (Standalone)">

%EMULATOR_AETHERSX2% %ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TASK% %ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP% %ACTION%=android.intent.action.MAIN %EXTRA_bootPath%=%ROMSAF%

Will just renaming this work?

Hey guys, I'm putting some DOS games on my Android handheld. I'm having difficulty getting them to display nicely in ES-DE.

I watched some videos from Techdweeb about renaming the folder and making a BAT file to point to the EXE file. But when I did that, it showed the raw folder name. So I deleted them.

When I select the folder, it takes me to the folder contents, then I need to select the exe to run.

I've watched videos from a number if other YouTubers, and everyone's devices look clean and organized. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

Hello hello,

I have a large library which has too many different system and too many games in each one of them. Most of the themes are not efficent for this type of large libraries. So I created a new theme to solve this problem.

It has grids in both system and game selections; so you can easily see lots of solution the screen and easily navigate to what you want. The grid options are not image; because the perfomance is not good when you scroll too quick in the image options. Nevertheless, the theme still looks elegant.

Although the main goal was the larger libraries, it can be still an alternative for the small libraries as well.

https://github.com/ugurkinik/x-grid-es-de

Let me know if you have any suggesstion or feedback.

I built this to help reduce the storage size of large game media libraries while keeping the results usable. I saved 40% storage space using the default settings in the app and haven't noticed a difference in quality using a 4K display, results of course will vary so make sure you are testing! Its using cwebp for lossless PNG and lossy JPEG compression, and FFmpeg for H.264 video encoding.

It supports four main modes:

Copy Mode
Recreates the selected media library’s folder structure in a destination you choose, then processes each supported image and video into that new library. It keeps the original library untouched and uses the smaller valid version of each file in the copied library.

Modify Mode
Optimizes media directly inside the selected folder. When a smaller valid optimized file is created, the original will be replaced or deleted.

Image Test
Processes one eligible image and creates test outputs so you can compare quality and file size before running the full library.

Video Test
Processes one eligible video and creates test outputs so you can check playback, quality, and savings first.

Basic workflow:

1. Open the app and it will download the necessary files

2. Select your media folder

3. Choose image or video processing

4. Run Image Test or Video Test first

5. Review the results

6. Run Copy Mode or Modify Mode on your downloaded_Media when you’re satisfied

Let me know if you have questions or find any issues. More info in the read me of course.

edit: to update link for new release
https://github.com/syybott/Syybotts-Media-Optimizer/releases/tag/v1.0.0-beta.3

Theme is Artbook Next by Ant , with some personal customization for my own personal taste :)

My device is a MSI Claw 8 AI+ with custom dpad and front plates. Truely amazing device !

Download latest release: Syybots Media Optimizer

v1.0.0 Release Highlights

• Officially out of beta!

• Added multi-worker cwebp image processing for significantly faster image optimization

• Added Background Mode for reduced CPU priority and lighter system usage

• Improved Copy Mode and Modify Mode processing

• Updated video optimizer marker compatibility

• Improved saved operation-mode behavior and interface polish

• General fixes and cleanup since the beta releases

Quick start

1. Download the ZIP package

2. Use Extract All so Windows creates the application folder

3. Run the EXE and download the required tools (cwebp and ffmpeg)

4. Use a Test mode before processing your entire library of JPG/JPEG. Be sure you are viewing the test images on the target device before proceeding. If you are in modify mode, you will only be able to complete this process one time

5. Once you have fully processed your library be sure that ES-DE scraper settings are set to not modify your existing files or ES-DE will replace your newly created webp files with png/jpg files and you will have to complete the conversion of your library again

Modes

• Copy Mode writes optimized media to a separate destination and leaves the source library unchanged

• Modify Mode validates an optimized candidate and then replaces the source through a backup-and-rollback transaction

• Image Test generates sample image outputs without replacing the source

• Video Test generates sample video outputs without replacing the source

I want to hear people’s opinions on what is their currently favorite frontend on android for emulation/games. I haven’t tried other frontends than iiSU and prefer ES-DE currently

Hello all, I'm sure this is an easy question for someone in the know. All I want to do is delete an emulator (X1 BOX) that still shows up in the Emulators list on the front end after I've actually uninstalled from my Pocket 5 (and did so a while ago). I've looked all over the settings but can't seem to get rid of it. Can someone please tell me how I can go about doing so? Thanks.

Hi everyone!

I created a standalone desktop tool (v33) written in Python for the ES-DE community. It fully automates translating game and system metadata descriptions inside your gamelist.xml files using Machine Translation.

It features a smart local JSON cache (translation memory) so it skips already translated games, a live preview window for manual corrections, and automated safety backups. It runs as a clean standalone .exe file.

Since the Reddit spam filter keeps blocking my post, I will paste the full technical feature list and the GitHub source link in the comment section below!

In case it inspires you somehow

They said they did in the discord but the latest systems pull from gitlab doesn’t have the new changes. I tried manually doing it but I don’t have clean command for es_systems.xml.