EmulationStation

 

The Raspberry Pi is pretty awesome, and I decided to turn mine into a retro games console. When I started, emulation on the RPi was just starting to emerge. I'd been kicking around the idea of writing my own emulator front-end for a while, and decided to finally do it. Enter EmulationStation!

EmulationStation does some stuff:

  • A menu that shows all your games in one place, across all your systems
  • Allows you to use any combination of emulators you want
  • Provides an interface completely navigatable with any joystick or controller (works well with automatic start-on-boot)
  • Allows for individual themes for every system, each with custom images, sounds, colors, and fonts
  • Allows for custom art and descriptions to be displayed for each individual game (definitions can be automated via a Python script)
  • Renders with OpenGL or OpenGL ES 1.1, allowing for hardware-accelerated rendering on pretty much anything (including the Raspberry Pi!)

GitHub: https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation

 

Themes

An awesome community member who goes by the name of Xevin made some really nice themes for EmulationStation a while back. He's been busy as of late, so I've done some slight updates with his themes. Screenshots follow - click for glorious high resolution!

 

 

 

 

 

You can download all of these themes (plus a few more) here!

Where you unzip to depends on how your es_systems.cfg file is set up. The easiest way is to extract to ~/.emulationstation/ and make sure the "NAME=" entries in your es_systems.cfg match up with the theme folder names.

Updated January 20, 2013 to include a PCEngine/TurboGrafix-16 theme, contributed by Van Buren!

Updated January 8, 2013 to include basic variations of every theme!

 

If you've made an awesome theme you want linked here, drop me an e-mail or PM!

 

If you think EmulationStation is awesome, and you somehow have extra money and are feeling generous, you could donate to me: