What is your thoughts on EmulationStation on Steam Deck?

[HyperTurboFox]

Guys what is your thoughts on Emulation Station on Steam Deck?
So Far I'm loving it, It's like I'll prefer using it than Steam Rom Manager. I'm think about keeping it as my main.
Anyways what is your guys thoughts on Emulation Station on Steam Deck.
I want to know and give your opinions on it

 

[middler]

I personally use Batocera side booted off of a flashdrive. I dont have any experience with emulationstation. Have you tried Bato? its great if you can get over the minor difficulty in getting your games onto it. I use it so i dont clog up my steam os with emulators :)

 

[iisoide]

I originally used it but I didn't really like having to go into yet another application just to see all my games. I think the UI looks really good though--I just prefer seeing all my games in my actual Steam library as opposed to being split up by launchers.

 

[Cetra_Blues]

Absolutely love it, it's one of the things I use most on my Steam Deck. Pretty much replaced my Wii as my go-to emulation console since I can dock it and play these games on the big screen. Wonderful interface, everything's all neat and organized and I love the screen-saver feature of being able to play whatever game it happens to be previewing. Nothing but love for Emulation Station and the devs that make it possible.

 

[lvl]

For me its awesome! I was already use to it because i use Knulli on my retro handhelds. I prefer to open ES and see all my games there with cover art and video sample and the info about the game, i also organize them by genre, etc. I like to keep my steam games separate from my giant rom library that i totally own the originals. And since i use ES on all the retro stuff i have, i can simple copy my library with the art and videos to another sd card if i get a new retro console and i dont need to scrape everything again.

 

[ISSO1407]

I tried it when i got my Steam Deck in August 2022 but was already extremely pessimistic about it being a messy, bug ridden mess, used it for thirty minutes to test my suspicions because im a masochist and i dont trust most claims on the Internet i havent tested myself, immediately triggered a bug in the .ini which made it basically unusable (i think the thing kept resetting everything after every restart which was fixable by editing the .ini) and uninstalled it again. All of these launchers/image managers suck, never again. Its bad enough that i ..have.. to use RetroArch for Achievements. Linux on Steam Deck is enough of a headache so i use nothing but a few standalones and RetroArch in desktop mode exclusively.

 

[Dannzy]

I thought it was a nice frontend for projects like RetroPie or similar. When on the Steam Deck however I ended up finding it easier to manage collections and then adding tabs to my library for them using the Tabmaster plug-in.

I find it way easier to simply navigate Steam's big picture mode over having to boot it up and then navigate another interface inside it, but I also don't have too many games on there, I'm not anywhere near 100.

 

[MajesticSiN]

I'm a big fan of it at the moment. I love having my emulated games separate from my steam games and I enjoy the interface.

 

[Sunnyside]

Love it! I don't want roms clogging up my steam library and it works great for that. Tidy interface too.

 

[aquova]

I do use EmulationStation, as their UI is really clean and it's one of the easiest ways to set up emulation on the deck, especially if you have a large number of games. I really dislike Retroarch though, which is what it uses behind the scenes. I find Retroarch incredibly annoying to configure well, and really unintuitive. It's the best of what I've used on Deck as it has good controller support, but I never use it on a desktop.

 

[dem6n dem6n]

I tried it when i got my Steam Deck in August 2022 but was already extremely pessimistic about it being a messy, bug ridden mess, used it for thirty minutes to test my suspicions because im a masochist and i dont trust most claims on the Internet i havent tested myself, immediately triggered a bug in the .ini which made it basically unusable (i think the thing kept resetting everything after every restart which was fixable by editing the .ini) and uninstalled it again. All of these launchers/image managers suck, never again. Its bad enough that i ..have.. to use RetroArch for Achievements. Linux on Steam Deck is enough of a headache so i use nothing but a few standalones and RetroArch in desktop mode exclusively.

Thats really strange. Sounds to me like a really old bug that has since been patched. It's incredibly easy to get EmuDeck up and running nowadays. If you have another 30 minutes, you can follow this guide here and get up and running insanely fast.

 

[Kamako]

I think that the cycling short clips of random games in your library is brilliant