EmulationStation on Steam Deck! Showcase & Guide

[Music] hey everybody this is ross from retro gamecore today i'm going to show you how to run emulation station on the steam deck now the other day i made a video about mudek this is a tool that allows you to put all of your roms directly onto the steam os interface and i think that's a great solution however if you have a large rom library that could potentially clutter your interface and so that's where emulation station comes in this is one single app that will house all of your roms directly inside now you might be familiar with emulation station as a front end if you've ever used something like retropie bottasera or muelleck because all those operating systems run this emulation station as a front end and so here what we're going to do is directly use that app to navigate and to launch all of our roms and amazingly this goes hand in hand with the mudek tool so all of those configurations that are embedded into emudec actually carry over into emulation station 2. and so in this video i'm going to show you how to get emulation station up and running on your steam deck in less than 20 minutes and i'll also show you how to pretty up the app so that it looks really nice in steemos too on top of that i'll show you a couple other workarounds so you can add your favorite games directly to steam outside of emulation station if you would prefer that as well and this has now become my favorite way to have all my roms because it doesn't clutter up my steemos interface an emulation station is surprisingly fast and responsive too so buckle up grab your favorite drink and let's dive right into it [Music] okay first thing here i'm gonna assume you have already watched my emu deck video and so i'm gonna breeze through the first part of the setup because it's exactly the same but as a quick refresher here's how to get emu deck up and running we're gonna open up firefox and go to mudec.com and as you can see the site has been updated now to reflect the fact that it works really well with emulation station and then right below it is the 10 steps guide to get set up including my video here and just like before we're going to make sure we're in desktop mode we're going to download all of our favorite emulators and we'll open up each one of them one time now i've already installed most my emulators here and you can find them here in my game section but if you haven't installed them yet you're going to want to go over to the discover store here and it's the little icon that looks like a shopping bag you're going to want to go to applications then games and then emulators and then download the emulators you want to use with your retro gaming setup i recommend using retroarch for psp and below and then standalone emulators for everything more recent than that for example i don't have citra installed right now so i'm just going to go and press the install button and just like that it's now installed and like i mentioned you do have to open each of these one time so i'm going to go into games then citra and then once the window appears here all i have to do is just close it out this little action here will allow mudek to pre-configure all the settings for you when you install it and if you have any questions about what emulators to install you can click this show list button here and the developer has now added all the recommended apps now we're actually going to skip this steamrom manager section here because it's not necessary for emulation station but of course if you have any questions about that then check out my emu deck video okay we're almost done at this point all we have to do is install emudec and run it one time and you have the choice between two different installers depending on where you put your roms on the sd card or internally me personally i use the sd card version and while you're here consider joining the developer's patreon throw him a couple bucks for all of his hard work anyway i've already downloaded the sd card version of the installer which you can see here on my desktop so i'm just going to go ahead and open it up and let it run through the script what it's going to do is download the necessary files and it'll then install all the retroarch cores that you're going to want to use and then also create the rom directory for your games and as you can see here it shows you the exact path for your roms and your bios folders so i'm going to navigate to my sd card and then emulation and then here is bios in roms and within the roms folder are all the different directories where you're going to want to put all of your game files and this has already been pre-set up for you so you just have to drag and drop your games the only one that's a little bit different is that he has one named gamecube but emulation station requires a folder named gc instead this will probably get changed in a future version but for now if you don't have a gc folder you're going to want to make one and then put your gamecube files in that one instead but yeah i've already transferred all my game files over here in my last video so i don't have to mess with anything at all but this is how you would set it up and same thing with the bios folder that's going to be right next to the roms folder and i've already installed my retroarch bios pack and if you don't know where to find your bios files they are copyrighted but a quick google search will usually find what you need okay so now we're going to set up emulation station the most important part here is to know the path to your roms folder and you can find it by opening up your roms folder and then clicking on the path up here near the top of the window and as you can see here it is run media and then whatever name for your sd card then emulation and roms now this is case sensitive so remember how this is all written out you may want to write this down on a piece of paper just to have it handy and so now let's actually install emulation station we're going to go to es-de.org initially i thought this was like the german version of emulation station but it stands for desktop edition and if you scroll down to the downloads section you can see under linux app image there's a steam deck version so all you want to do is click on this link and then download that file it'll likely show up in your downloads folder and here it is here you can move it wherever you want i'm going to keep it in my downloads folder myself and so now we're going to add emulation station to our steam interface and this is pretty easy too first thing you want to do is open up the steam desktop client and then on the bottom left there's an option to add a game here select add a non-steam game and then under the list here you'll have an option to browse now navigate to where emulation station is for me it's under home then deck then downloads and you won't see it initially and that's because you need to change the file type to all files but here it is here so we're just going to select open and then add selected programs now if we scroll down through my steam's game list you can find the emulation station here but the name is all messed up so let me show you how to make it nice and pretty too what you want to do is right-click on the title name and then select properties and then here under shortcut you can change the name to whatever you want by the way you can do this for any steam game for example if one's all caps and you don't like it this is how you would adjust it so anyway once you've made that change all you have to do is close it out and it'll save that new name and there are other things we can do to make it nice and pretty we'll do that later in this video for now let's just get it up and running now if you go in and press play immediately it's not actually going to open up and that's because the very first time that you open it you have to open the app image itself so instead go back to your downloads folder and then open up the app here it's going to ask you do you really want to do this and you're going to hit yeah man i want to do it the first window you're going to see is emulation station asking you where your rom directory is and this is why it's important to remember where all of your roms are stored so we're going to select change rom directory and then we're going to delete the path here and then add in the file path of where our roms are actually stored i'm using a usb keyboard so i'm going to press alt and tab which is going to bring up my other windows and so i can actually just compare them directly right here now you might notice that i accidentally wrote rum instead of run so i'm going to fix that real quick and then we're going to go and hit that check mark it'll tell you that everything has been saved and then restart the app to rescan and now we can actually press the play button within steam and it'll open right up it'll take a second to kind of load the configuration but here we go it's actually recognized all of my game folders and within each of these systems it now recognizes my games too and so there you have it at the very most basic terms we now have emulation station up and running on our steam deck but of course the experience is not quite as refined as i would like and so let's go and start adding things like box art to do that we're going to use a tool called scraper and this is available right in the menu by pressing start within this scraper section you're going to have an option to use screen scraper or the game's database screen scraper is generally the best when it comes to images but the server is always having problems so what you can do is you can check if you go into account settings and then you add in your screen scraper username and password which you can get for free via screenscraper.fr you can then go through and test it and see whether or not the server is up i'm going to select just one system here super nintendo games and also you can adjust the content for example i only like to see the box art and then videos and so i'm going to unselect everything else because i don't want to spend time downloading all that and you can also go in and set your preferred language and region as well and finally i recommend turning off interactive mode in the other settings section if you leave this one on it's going to ask you every time to confirm every single game so it just saves you time in the long run and so moment of truth here we're going to select start here and yeah screen scraper is down right now so if it is down then just change it to the game's database and then start all over again and this one's working fine and so i'm going to speed it up here but it'll basically scrape through all of your games and so let's back out of the menu and this is what it's going to look like when it's all said and done now i have a couple of games here listed as favorites this is from a previous time when i was messing around with this system so i'm just going to remove those real quick by pressing y either way you can see most of the games worked correctly some didn't for example super castlevania 4 showed up as the japanese version and so what you want to do here is press select and then choose edit this game's metadata next press the right trigger to go to the bottom of the menu and then select scrape this is going to re-run that search but then allow you to choose which one you want and i'm going to choose super castlevania then all you have to do is press save and you're good to go now we have super castlevania in the correct position and everything and so this is my recommendation is to scrape one folder then go through the folder and find any mismatches that you have for example illusion of time should be illusion of gaia here in the us so i'm going to redo the scrape and then i'm going to select illusion of gaia finally after saving it it's good to go now some of these might not work as easily for example star fox here has an f in front of it and when i run this scraper it doesn't actually find any other games so here you want to go to refine search and then i'm just going to remove that f altogether so it's only going to search for the word star fox and there you go there's the north american version of star fox and so in a nutshell that's how to scrape all of your box art to make everything look a lot prettier now there are other things you can do to change the interface as well the most common thing is to change out the theme an emulation station ships with two different themes directly on it if you go into ui settings and then theme set you can see there's another one called modern and this one is actually the one i prefer it kind of has a nintendo switch style interface and it just looks nice and clean but one thing i don't like is how much these boxes slide as i move them across and this is something you can change in the settings you're going to want to press start go into ui settings and then under transition style change it to instant now when i shuffle through my systems it looks a lot cleaner and not quite as busy okay one other thing i want to clean up in each of the folders there's a readme file and the file extension is a dot md file the problem is a lot of sega systems use dot md file system too and so what you want to do is go through and delete all those readme files for the sega systems that you don't want showing up and again you would do this under the edit this game's metadata section too and that's pretty easy and you only have to do it one time and so yeah this is what it looks like once you've scraped everything as you can see i have all my different game box arts and i can navigate through my systems either directly in the main menu or in the game list menu as well by pressing left and right and as you can see it is super zippy and fast too this is a joy to navigate but one thing that would make it even easier is to have a favorites list and let me show you how to set that up it's pretty easy too we're going to press start then go into game collection settings then automatic game collections and then select favorites now when we back out of the main menu we now have a favorites menu and so all those games that i previously marked as favorites now have their own section now anytime i open up emulation station i can go directly into my favorites or i could also go to the other systems if i just want to browse and play too so quite a lot of options with an emulation station and i'm really happy with how this one is set up right now so let's go ahead and quit out of emulation station and do a couple more configurations before we jump right back into handheld mode most importantly i want to make sure it looks very good on the steamos interface to do that we're going to go into the library section here and then we're going to add different art to it as you can see right now under recent games it's the number one most played game but as you can see it has no art and this is actually very easy to add as well we're going to go to steamgriddb.com and then search for the word emulation station and luckily within here it has all the art you're going to want to use within steam there are three main images we want to grab the first one is going to be what they call the poster which is the little icon that you usually see as you're navigating the second one is called the hero that's the overall banner that you'll see when you click on a game and then finally there's the grid and this is the one that'll show up when it's your most recently played game so i'm going to open up all these images in separate tabs and then i'm going to download them individually all you have to do is right click and select save image as and then you can name it whatever you want i've already downloaded all these but i'll do it all over again the poster i'm just going to call es.png the hero i'm actually going to call the es banner and then the grid i'm just going to call the es grid okay now that we have those downloaded let's actually add them to the image we'll start with the grid because this is the most recent game right here and this will only work when it is the actual most recent game i know it's kind of weird but this is the process that you have to do to get it working correctly so right click on it here go to manage and then select set custom artwork now we're going to navigate to where i save those images for me it's going to be under home slash deck and then downloads and then i made a folder called steam boxes now i just have to navigate down to find the es grid and then hit open and there we go just like that we now have nice box art when it's shown as the most recent game but what about the other situations let's click on it and do the hero next here you just want to go up to that top banner right click on it and then select set custom background same thing we're going to go to home slash deck then downloads then steam boxes and then we're going to find my es banner now another thing you can do is add a custom logo that will show instead of the word emulation station now i didn't download this but this is also available too so let me show you that one real quick as you can see there are two different logos available a colored one as well as a white one for the example let's try the white one i'm going to save it here i'm going to name it es logo now going back to steam i'm going to select set custom logo and then i'll select the es logo picture and as you can see it now shows both the hero as well as the logo so we're almost done adding all of the art now we got one last thing to do which is the poster which is probably the most important one what you want to do is scroll down to the all games section here so you can see all the posters and there it is it sticks out like a sore thumb again we're going to right click go to manage set custom artwork and then pick the file es.png and bam look at that it looks great now now here's a neat trick you can do this with any steam game for example enslaved right next to it it has like that old box art it doesn't look very good in steam os so i could go back to the database download a new image and then upload it that exact same way for example i did that very thing with shadow complex as you can see here it had one of those terrible box arts but i went and i updated it with a better one by the way shadow complex is awesome on the steam deck it runs really well and it's just perfect for a handheld situation okay last note here the cemu emulator does not work well with the emulation station right now and so because that i actually made cemu a standalone game like this here and so now what i'll do is i'll go into steam operating system and i'll launch this which will open up the cemu emulator it's not the most elegant way to get to my wii u games but it does work and of course you can add your own custom art and everything else too now earlier in the video i talked about how you could set up standalone roms too for example i have metroid prime here running a fork of dolphin called prime hack and i set this up to launch directly with steam and so let me show you real quick how to do this in the steam rom manager all you have to do is open up the app like i showed in my mudek video and then pick a system and then scroll down and select disable current parser and then next time it's not going to scan that folder so all you have to do is disable everything but the one you want to have showing so i'm going to go through and disable everything but prime hack now i'm going to go up to the preview button and just like in my emu deck video i'm going to select generate app list but because only prime deck is an active parser it's only going to show this one game and there you go you can go and adjust your art and everything else like in the last video and then select save app list that will then create its own game file which will show up in steam os independently and so for example if you only wanted to have say super nintendo games show up on steam os and everything else in emulation station that's how you would set it up anyway we spent a lot of time doing configuration now let's actually enjoy the fruits of our labor we're gonna exit out of desktop mode and go back into gaming mode here and i'm just gonna show it in handheld mode directly in my camera and look at that emulation station shows up at the first one it's the most recent game we played and it has wonderful box art so as you can see i have cemu as a standalone app then emulation station then the metroid prime trilogy and then i also downloaded this individual linux game which i had actually bought from itchio during a recent bundle and then finally i also set up xbox cloud streaming too if you're interested in knowing how to set up those last two let me know when i can make a new video but we're here to check out emulation stations so let's start this up and see how it looks in handheld mode and yeah look at that it has all the fancy art that we added and so here we are just like how we had it in the desktop client we now can navigate through everything here and launching a game is as simple as just pressing the a button and it'll come right up and thanks to the fact that we used emudec to turn on all the configuration it's going to do all sorts of nice things like pre-configure all of our hotkeys and then add shaders that look really good on the steam deck too right now my hotkey is select and start to exit a game and so yeah this is basically the gist of it you can navigate through your systems then pick your game and then launch it right there and again thanks to emudec we have these nice bezels on the side of the screen and also has a nice colorization that looks a lot like an original gameboy and of course i'm super biased because i'm the one that sent him the config files that he used in emu deck but i'm really happy with how this is all pre-configured essentially all you have to do is add your roms and bios files and then set up emulation station and you're ready to go on top of that if you end up adding or removing games from your folders emulation station will automatically notice and then remove them or add them from the interface too you may have to rescrape the box art but other than that it's a seamless experience and like i mentioned going through the favorites menu is my favorite part of all this because it allows me to streamline down to a collection of just maybe 30 games altogether and that allows me to prevent things like netflix syndrome where i just sit there and scroll instead of actually playing a game and so one of the main draws about having emulation station on the steam deck like this is that one it's not going to clutter up your steam os interface by using the steamrom manager especially if you have a large rom library but then also once you have custom firmwares like bottasera available those are also going to work really well too but you'll have to boot out of steamos in order to boot into those operating systems and so this by far is the quickest way to access all of your roms without cluttering up your main interface that way you can use the steam deck to primarily rely on all of the pc games that it runs really well but then you also have access to your entire rom library right then and there too now one last note before we close up shop is the fact that there are other themes available but none of them are perfect just yet the thing is most of the more modern themes the ones you can find in bottasera or recall box or even emulek they actually don't work with this version of emulation station at all instead you're going to be limited to retropie based themes and these work well the problem is that the retropie themes don't really account for some of the higher end systems so that means things like xbox and nintendo switch are not going to have the assets that you might expect and so as you're navigating through the system it can be very jarring to just have the words instead of a nice pretty picture and so my hope is that as the community kind of grows and more themed developers get their hands on the steam deck we're gonna see new themes popping up here and there but for now i think that the modern theme that ships with emulation station is your best bet anyway that's it for this video i hope it helped you kind of get everything set up with emulation station as you can see there's a lot of potential here and so i'm really excited to see what happens in the coming months as this gets more refined as always thank you for watching be sure to like and subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music] you

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 154,176

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Id: 5upaSxC1wTg

Length: 20min 19sec (1219 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 30 2022