The modern gaming market is becoming increasingly hostile towards consumers, to the point where many people are starting to find joy in classic titles. These are games that have been preserved for a long time and can easily be played on any modern hardware, giving you an essentially infinite library you can play for free. But emulation hasn’t always been the easiest to figure out, and just organizing and getting things running can be a challenge.
Thankfully, now that the technical aspects of emulating old consoles have basically been perfected, the community has turned its attention to the user experience itself. EmulationStation, or ES-DE, is a frontend for emulation that makes it incredibly easy to play your old games just as if it were a proper console, and I absolutely love it.
How EmulationStation changes everything
All your games in one place
I’ve set up EmulationStation a couple of times, and the reason it works so well is that it brings together all your platforms and games into an interface that’s easy to browse with either a keyboard or (more importantly) a controller. In EmulationStation, your games are organized by platform, and the main interface shows a list of consoles for which you have games available.
It’s all presented beautifully, too. The default theme is already great, showing logos and renders of the console itself in a carousel. You can scroll left or right. However, you can also install a wide range of custom interface themes, making it look and feel like anything you want. Some menus mimic Nintendo styles, like the Nintendo Switch’s home screen, while others are more original, but all of them are great.
EmulationStation also does a fantastic job of making your game library feel alive and almost like a history lesson. When you use its game data scrapers, your library can present your games with full descriptions, box art, screenshots, and even trailers, making the whole experience feel like a museum of old games you can gawk at and enjoy before you even start playing. It really feels special to set this up myself at home and see it on my TV, especially given how smoothly everything moves.
It forces me to organize my games, too
Everything has its place
I’m not the most organized person when it comes to using my PC, and back in the day, my collection of emulators and games was just kind of scattered haphazardly around my computer. Some consoles may have their own folder, but sometimes ROMs would just stay in my Downloads or something.
Of course, I could fix this myself by just being more organized, but ES-DE helps here too. When you first set it up, it creates a folder with numerous subfolders, each dedicated to a specific platform. All I have to do is drag the ROMs into the respective folder, and it’s all done. It’s simple, but it saves me time creating all those folders. The example above is from a setup that uses RetroDeck for Linux, which also assigns each folder a unique icon.
And if the idea of organizing your games manually still seems too daunting, especially as more options come along, then I’d recommend a tool like File Juggler on Windows. Just have it point to your Downloads folder (or wherever you normally store your ROMs) and match each file extension to its respective folder. The tool will move all your files and continue monitoring the folder to automatically move any new files into the appropriate folder. I highly recommend it.
EmuDeck is the best way to set it up
ES-DE alone is great, but this is even better
As great as ES-DE is on its own, I have to say the best way to use it is easily through tools like EmuDeck or RetroDeck. EmuDeck is more widely compatible, so I’d recommend that first, especially if you’re a Windows user, though I prefer RetroDeck on Linux.
EmuDeck is great because not only does it install ES-DE, with a few choices of themes easily accessible, but it also installs a lot of emulators right out of the gate, so you don’t have to go through the hassle of setting those up yourself, which can sometimes result in a less polished experience. EmuDeck ensures everything works and runs great, and it saves you a ton of time setting things up yourself. It can take a while, but you can just let it run and do everything itself rather than try to figure it out yourself.
In fact, I recently helped my dad reset his computer and set it up to play some old games we used to play together when I was a child (specifically, Battle City on the NES/Famicom). EmuDeck was my solution for setting it all up, and it was both easy for me to set up and for him to use, as someone who’s not at all tech-savvy. It’s such a great solution.
It’s the perfect way to repurpose an old PC
The great thing about most of these old games is that they can now run very easily, even on low-end hardware or an older PC. With that in mind, you can easily install ES-DE or EmuDeck on a computer, force it to launch on startup, and basically turn your PC into a console. You can plug it into your living room TV and connect a Bluetooth controller to play old games on the big screen anytime, without the hassle of using a PC. I can’t recommend this enough if you’re looking to dive into retro gaming.
