Emulation Station For Android Is Finally Here! Quick Set Up Guide

hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again it's been a long time coming but we finally got emulation station on Android so what you're seeing on screen right now is emulation station De running on my Galaxy s24 Ultra also using a gamer X2 Pro Controller here and this has been an awesome experience for the longest time I've personally been wanting emulation station to come to Android and it's finally here with emulation station De now there are a few things to note before we get started here but uh really I mean this is awesome emulation station isn't anything new we've been using it for years on PCS Linux machines and even the Raspberry Pi but given how powerful Android devices are nowadays and what kind of emulators we can run on them I think this is kind of the perfect pairing really nice front in with some awesome themes great features built in that can be easily set up on your Android phone tablet Android Mini PC whatever you want to install this on and in this video I'm going to give you a quick rundown on how to get this set up basically I'm going to go over getting it installed getting some games imported and a few emulators set up once you have that down pat you can go at this at your own pace there's a lot built into emulation station for Android that we're not going to be taking a look at but I really want to give you a quick setup guide here just to get you up and running in no time now I did mention there are a few things to note before we get started at the time of making this emulation station De is only available on the Amazon app store so you will have to sideload that on your Android device and it's a paid app it's $5.39 over on the official emulation station De website they state that it might come to Google play sometime down the road but there's no time frame or anything like that it very well could come there but right now we can only get it on the Amazon app store and your device will have to be running at least Android 11 for this to function properly over on their website full Android documentation there's also a frequently Asked question section so I'll leave links for all of that down below but if you're ready to get this set up on your Android phone tablet or Android powered handheld let's go ahead and jump into it setup for emulation station De on Android is actually super simple but like I mentioned it's only available on the Amazon app store at the time of making this video I've side loaded the App Store and basically you can search emulation or emulation station and it is a paid app so I've already bought this on the Amazon app store I'm going to go ahead and install it if this is the first time you're installing anything from the Amazon app store after you sideload it on your device you may need to allow some storage permissions to allow to install different applications but now that we have that installed it's time to talk about our games and ROMs but keep in mind emulation station De doesn't come with any games ROMs or even emulators it's just our front end so you're definitely going to need some ROMs now emulation station De will download videos boxar all the metadata for you you're also going to need to set up your own emulators but in this video I'm going to give you a quick walk through so what I've done here is already transfer some games or ROMs over to my Android device from my PC I've got them in a folder downloads retro games got a few here so we're going to be focusing on just a few of these systems like Game Boy Advance Dreamcast and uh we'll do let's say Genesis also so I've already got my games on my phone but we will need to transfer them to the correct folder once we get emulation station De installed and booted up for the first time so now that we've got it installed we're going to go ahead and open it up and it's going to give us a nice little walkr of few things need to be configured before you can use the app we're going to begin set up we need to Grant emulation station permission to manage our storage we're going to open up the permission screen we're going to allow that back up now we need to select our directory so this is going to be the application data directory this is not where we're going to be putting our games and ROMs basically what I'm going to do here is just have it on my root storage so Galaxy s24 Ultra this is going to be my root storage and once I choose choose this path it's automatically going to set that folder up for us now we need to allow emulation station to create a ROMs folder for us so I'm going to select the directory and again you can go anywhere you'd like I'm going to leave this on my root storage I'm going to use this folder allow so now it knows where we want our ROM directory to be located and emulation station is automatically going to create our ROMs folder and our system info.txt for each one of those we're going to create them now I I understand and now we're in emulation station but obviously we don't have any games installed we've already allowed this to create a ROM directory so what I'm going to do is quit emulation station now I'm going to head over to my file manager and by the way I'm just using the built-in file manager that comes with this device you can use any one you'd like you can download one from Google Play it's not an issue so my files now we've accessed our internal storage if we scroll down a bit you can see we've got a new folder right here esde so this is going to be the emulation station De directory that it created this is our application directory and we also created a ROMs directory now this has all of our folders and this should be pretty self-explanatory for instance if you want to add some Atari 5200 games you're going to put your Atari 5200 games in that folder moving down a bit Game Boy Advance and so on and so on so like I showed you at the beginning I've already transferred some games over to my device they're in my downloads folder retro games and from here we're going to go ahead and move some of these over to our emulation station ROMs directory that it created while setting up the application so you can actually move each folder if you want to or we could just go right in and copy all of them so I've got 30 Game Boy advanced games we're going to copy head back to my internal storage go to the ROM directory that emulation station created for us we need to paste them in the correct directory you can also do this from a PC if you want to but with the file management system and Android 13 and higher I mean it's really nice so I'm going to copy all those right here so now we've got some Game Boy advanced games in the correct directory let's go ahead and move some more I'm going to head back here I'm going to grab my Dreamcast games I'm going to copy these internal storage ROMs and we'll find Dreamcast copy here and I'll do one more while I'm here my ROMs that I've already put on my device we'll do genesis you can see I'm using the copy method but you could use the move method to save space if you need to copy internal storage ROMs and we're going to place these in our Sega Genesis folder okay so now I've got games for Game Boy Advance Dreamcast and Sega Genesis they're in the correct ROMs directory for emulation station De and now we can actually relaunch the application and you can see we've now got some systems listed so if I head into Dreamcast we've got our games but we don't have any artwork or metadata for each one of these games and that's where the built-in scraper comes in handy we're going to press our menu button at the very top we've got our scraper and there's a few to choose from the games DB is a great option or screen scraper and for each one of these for instance I'm on the games DB we're going to move down to our content settings and this is everything that the scraper is going to get for us game names other metadata screenshot images title images box cover images box back and if we take a look here and just Swap this over to the screen scraper it does have more to offer so this will also download videos for us you can deselect any of these that you don't want but usually I kind of want to get as much as I can for each one of these games just going to back up one time scrape these systems we're going to go with all and now we can actually start the scraping it's automatically going to run through it for us it's going to download all of our metadata boxar images whatever you have selected it's going to try to find the correct information and download it for us so this could take a little while depending on how many you're scraping so just let it finish up once the scraper is finished it's going to give you confirmation so out of my 64 games 10 were skipped and it's really due to the naming convention it's the way I have them named and uh most of the time you can actually go in and edit that metadata manually if you want to and I'll show you for instance we'll go to GBA as you can see got some nice box art I mean it's starting to look really good but some of these are missing and it's really because of the naming convention if you really want to change this you can do it manually basically we can edit the game's metadata so by changing the name we can res scrape so I think what's causing this issue here is the USA and Europe at the very end you can go ahead and edit it directly from here you can save the data and then res scrape if you want to but what I'm going to do is just leave it like it is because I've already got a bunch of Gam games here moving over to Dreamcast should have picked up all of these yeah and this does look really good and we've got some Sega Genesis games so that's pretty cool but now it's time to play these games now in order to do this emulation station De doesn't come with its own emulators you will have to download the emulators you want to use and there's actually a really good way to find out what you need so we're going to press our menu button we're going to scroll down to other settings alternate emulators and for Dreamcast you can see it's automatically going to use flycast but I want to use redram so we're going to use the redam Standalone for GBA it's going to be using retro Arch and we can actually choose which core we want you've got the MGB core VBA or you could go with a standalone emulator it's really up to you but for these lower-end emulators personally I like using retro Arch so I'm going to leave it right there kind of the same thing with Genesis there is a Stalone that you can use or you can go with retro Arch if I try to launch a Genesis game right now nothing's going to happen because I do not have retro Arch installed with the correct core so what we're going to do for these lower-end emulators is head over to Google Play and we're going to download retroarch we've got the basic version or plus I'm going to go with plus this is free to use plus version is a more advanced version there's more cores that we can choose from you can go with the regular retro Arch version if you want to and since I was going to be using redream for Dreamcast I've already got it installed now that we have retro Arch we do need to start it up one time we're going to allow permissions here retro Arch just did its basic configuration but now we need to download the core we want to use to play our games online updator core downloader and remember we were taking a look at the emulators or the alternate emulators in emulation station De if you just read through this you'll get a good idea of what each one of these cores is going to emulate we're looking for mgba we're going to be using that core for our Game Boy advaned games so if we move down a bit right here we're going to go ahead and download that now we want uh say now we need to look for a Sega Genesis emulator and for that we're going to be using Genesis GX you can experiment with different cores it's really up to you Genesis plus GX that's the one I want to use for my Sega Genesis games so now that we've got the cores downloaded and retro Arch installed we can actually move back over to emulation station head into a system we want to play and we can start playing the game so we're just going to go with this game it's going to start up retro arch for us and there we have it so we're playing Ace Combat right now with the m GBA core I'm using the onscreen touch controls but retro Arch does register most controllers out there you can also update the a controller profile from within the application but since I'm using a screen recorder with this Android device I'm just going to be using the onscreen controls we're playing GBA right now with retro Arch and that mgba core but we launched everything through emulation station De now in order to exit there's no real clean and cutway right now with emulation station so basically you could hit your back button a couple times bring us back into emulation station or you could totally switch apps so yeah when it comes to Retro arch with emulation station De works out really well but what about stalon now personally I like using as many Stalone emulators as I can especially with the higher end stuff Dreamcast remember we're going to be using the redream emulator here and in order for this to work correctly the emulator also needs to know where our games are located so I'll give you anide idea how this is going to work if I go in right now and try to launch let's say Marvel versus Capcom 2 it's just going to bring us right into redream and that's because the emulator itself doesn't know where to launch those games from so if you haven't set the Standalone emulators up correctly you could definitely run into some issues but when it comes to redream what we're going to do here is tell it exactly where those games are located go to library add directory and remember we're going to be using the ROMs folder that emulation station De created created because that's where we're placing all of our games so we now need to tell redream where they are we're going to use this folder allow and with this emulator it automatically populates our games so we're going to completely exit the emulator head back over to emulation station and we're going to try that one more time and there we go so we're now playing Marvel versus Capcom 2 using the redream emulator but we launched it through emulation station De now I don't have my onscreen controls set up properly for this because I've actually been using a real controller with this emulator but just note we're ready to go we can start playing our Dreamcast games now that we've covered some of the basics here you should be able to start playing your games through emulation station but there's a lot more that we can actually do with this now obviously it looks pretty good like it is but at the beginning of the video you saw I had some different themes installed and these are actually really easy to get up and going we're going to press our menu button UI settings theme downloader we're going to proceed it's going to populate the list for us and we can scroll through and download new themes there's some really good looking stuff in here and if you really wanted to I mean you could just go through download all of them but I'm going to go with a few we'll get the Mania for all Epic newr colorful Revisited and we'll get coin Ops Okay so we've got the themes downloaded in our menu UI settings and we can choose which theme we want I'm going to go with coin Ops we just back up it's automatically going to switch everything over for us and this is a really good looking one we'll do Dreamcast got a nice little wheel there I've already downloaded all of my box art and everything so I do have those clear logos which do make it look really awesome let's go ahead and change change the theme one more time we'll go with colorful Revisited just gives us a new look and if you did want to go through with screen scraper you could download all of the videos and most of these will have video sections for us to play through so emulation station De for Android has turned out to be really awesome I've been testing it on a bunch of different devices it's also available for Windows Mac and Linux I'll leave a link to the official website down below full documentation is over there and what I showed you in this video just kind of scratched the surface of what can be done with esde on Android there's a ton of stuff built-in you can configure each of those themes that we took a look at a built-in PDF viewer an image cleanup process that's built into emulation station to delete all of the duplicate images that you may have downloaded over time there's just a ton that can be done with emulation station on Android and this video was really just to show you how to do a quick setup on it get some stuff up and running and from there you can kind of go through it by yourself and figure everything out again full documentation over on the website and I'd love to know what device you're going to be setting this up on so let us know in the comments below be it an Android phone Android tablet Android Mini PC and if you're using a controller like the one we have here let us know your setup down in the comments below but that's going to wrap it up for this one and like always thanks for watching

Channel: ETA PRIME

Views: 340,643

Keywords: etaprime, eta prime, emulation station android, emulation station de, android emulation front end, android gaming, android emulation, android emulation console, android gaming phone, android gaming handheld, android gaming console, android gaming tablet, ES DE android, Emulation Station, android emulation station

Id: 5Dl-yh--M6I

Length: 17min 37sec (1057 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2024