How To Set Up And Use DIG the Best Android Emulation Frontend!

hey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at and setting up the dig emulator front end for android within the last eight months i've had hundreds of people ask me to cover this but one of the big reasons i didn't cover it was because i thought it was a dead project it hadn't been updated since i believe september 2019 but luckily we just got an update with full android 10 support and in this video i'm going to show you how to set it up now this is actually really easy to do and we're going to do some basics here like snes and nes but once you get the hang of that you'll be able to add any other standalone emulator that you'd like to from the google play store and by the end of this video you can have the dig emulator front end up and running on your android device looking something like this and if you're not into this look maybe you'd like it to look like this or how about this because the dig emulator front end for android does support themes and there's actually a ton to download from their website it's really easy to set up it'll automatically scrape your box art and screenshots it works with pretty much every emulator that's available on google play but like i mentioned in this video we're going to be covering the basics and we're actually going to be using retro arch for everything you're going to see in this video but it does work with 99 of the other standalone emulators on google play okay so first things first dig does not include any games or emulators you will have to add your own games now i usually place mine on a micro sd card but you don't have to do this if you don't have an sd card slot i just find it a lot easier to transfer them from my pc i placed them in their individual folders so for snes i'll put my snes games in there nes same thing and so on and so on i just want to keep them organized and you can actually create a root folder called roms just to keep it all together if you'd like to and dig can actually scan your whole device for your rom so you can basically place them anywhere on the internal storage or external storage with a micro sd card so now that we got our games in place it's time to download the dig emulator we're just going to head over to the google play store and from the search bar we're just going to search for digg the app is free to use but it does have some built-in premium features and it really doesn't keep you from using the app at all and even with the free version they allow you to use three of the premium features for free and if you do want to support the developer and purchase it it's 3.99 it's an in-app purchase and you can buy it from within the app the next thing we need is retro arch so we can just head over to google play type in retro arch and download this application like i said dig doesn't include any emulator so we're going to be using course from within retro arch to play our favorite retro games and once we have dig and retro arch downloaded we can go ahead and start it but if you have some standalone emulators you can also use those from within dig like redream citra daemon ps2 and even the dolphin emulator it's really up to you but this video is more about getting you acquainted to setting up the dig emulator and by the end you'll be able to add your own standalone emulators let's go ahead and start it up on the initial startup you'll have to give the application storage permission so just go ahead and click allow and once it's finished initializing it's going to ask you if you want to scan your device for games i always click scan whole device but you can scan a specific folder if you know exactly where your games are and as you can see it's already populating my games list we have our systems genres collections and all games down below now i didn't add a ton of games here and this could take a long time if you have thousands and thousands of games on your device so just be patient with it mine looks like it's done so i'm gonna head over to systems as you can see it will scan your android games also but we're not worried about that we're gonna head to game boy advance and while this is sitting it's gonna automatically download the box art and screenshots for your games and again this really depends on how many games you have this could take a while so i've just let mine sit for about four minutes and i think all of my box art has finished downloading and yeah at least for snes we're totally finished here downloading all of our artwork and it does it automatically so it's found my games and downloaded my artwork now we need to set up a specific emulator for this system and we're going to be using retro arch so up in the top right hand corner we're going to tap on the three little dots choose manage game and it's gonna ask us what emulator we'd like to use now right out of the box it's using the core called snes 9x 2010 and as of right now we don't have that installed because we haven't even started up retro arch but that's the emulator we're going to be using to launch and play our snes games from within the dig emulator so we're going to head back to our main menu on android and we're going to find retro arch we're going to start this up for the first time we're going to have to allow storage permissions it's going to get everything ready with the app and now we need to download that snes 9x 2010 core we'll go to online updater core updater and we'll scroll down until we find that emulator core it's going to be listed under nintendo snes and it's known as snes 9x 2010 and here it is nintendo snes snes 9x 2010 we're going to tap on this it's going to download the core and install it for us so that's all we need to do with retroarch right now for snes we can go ahead and close the app down head back to our dig emulator and start playing our game because that's the emulator we have associated with our snes games and as you can see we do have on-screen touch controls now these can be disabled and i'll show you how to do it in a second but if you don't own a physical controller you can always still play your games like this i'm personally not a big fan of it so i'm going to go ahead and grab my bluetooth controller retro arch is automatically going to detect it and if you do want to get rid of those on-screen touch controls we can tap on the little retro arch icon and over on the right hand side there's a little gear icon and from within this menu we're going to scroll down until we see on-screen display the very first option is on-screen overlay and we're going to disable overlay from right here now we're going to back up and resume the game so we can go to the main menu by pressing the home icon quick menu and resume the game now those on-screen controls are totally gone and we can just use a physical [Music] controller okay so you have snes up and running let's go ahead and do one more we'll go with game boy advance i'll find the game i'd like to play up in the top right hand corner we have those three little dots manage game and now we can see what core we need in retro arch mgba we'll head back to retroarch and download that core online updater core updater and we'll find mgba from here it'll be listed under game boy or game boy advance nintendo game boy advance mgba the core is now installed let's go ahead and properly exit retro arch we'll go back to the dig emulator and we can start playing sonic advance 2 for game boy advance and i'm still using my controller here i'll get into a little bit of gameplay and then i'll show you how to change the theme because now that you know how to set up games you want this to look good too so setting up themes really couldn't be any easier the developer has done an amazing job setting this up for the android platform and the community has really come through with some awesome themes so we'll head back to the front end go to options and from the options menu we'll choose themes now in the themes menu there's an option to browse themes we're going to choose ok it's going to open up a web page for us this is where we can download all the themes for this front end and most of the developers have put together a little showcase so you can see what the theme looks like and some of them have a light version which is just a smaller download without all the bells and whistles like music and videos added so we're gonna download a theme but unfortunately sometimes your device won't let you download through the front end so up in the top left hand corner we'll choose the three little dots and we'll open this in an external browser it'll open up in your chrome browser or your samsung browser whatever you have installed and from here we can start downloading our themes i'm just going to download a few of them that i know of and like and i usually choose the bigger version because i do want all the bells and whistles so i'll find a few here download them they're going to go into my download section on my device and once these are all finished downloading we can head back to the front end i was still in the browser so just back up to the options menu and from themes we have an option called install theme i'm going to browse my local device these went into my download folder as you can see i've downloaded four of them so i'll go ahead and install them some of them take a little longer to install especially if you downloaded the bigger version because it's more to extract i'm just going to install these four themes and i've got the themes i want installed ready to go and i can choose my theme from here and that's basically it you now have the themes installed with the dig emulator everything looks great here you can make your own theme if you'd like to there is documentation over on the dig website but overall this definitely adds a whole new layer to emulation on your android device it's really easy to set up and the biggest reason i never covered this in the past is because like i said i thought it was a dead project but we recently got that update so there is hope i'm gonna swap this theme out here and this one looks absolutely amazing but unfortunately some of the systems don't have artwork like dreamcast and 3ds so if you're using those higher end systems you will see the stock front-end icons and they just don't look that great so before i wrap this up i did want to talk about the premium version of this front end now it's totally free to use you can actually choose three of the premium features if you're on the free version and you can enable them from within the settings but if you'd like to help support the developer you can head to the options section under app and purchase the premium version it's 3.99 and in my opinion it's totally worth four bucks and this might give some more incentive to the developer to keep updates coming for this front end but that's pretty much it for this video really appreciate you watching i just wanted to get you guys acquainted with the dig emulator for android it's very easy to set up like you saw in this video and it's definitely one of the best front ends if not the best front end for android on the market right now and by the way the tablet you saw being used in this video is the new samsung galaxy s7 plus i've done a review on it it's an absolute beast but it's way overpriced for what it is if you have a lower end android phone this application will also work on that if you have any questions let me know in the comments below and like always thanks for watching

Channel: ETA PRIME

Views: 411,861

Keywords: etaprime, eta prime, dig android frontend, dig android, dig android emulator, best android emulator, best emulation frontend, best emulation front end for android, best free front end emulation, how to use dig emulator, how to set up dig emulator, add themes DIG android, android DIG themes, reset collection vs dig, tab s7+, retroarch android, how to retroarch android, front end, best emulator for android, dig emulator frontend, new emulator for android

Id: fT0bRIOp9XU

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020