ES-DE Gets Massive 3.4.0 Update With Tracked Playtime, More Emulator Support, Better Dual-Screen Support, And More

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I was introduced Whenever I am using emulators on my devices, I always prefer going through a graphical frontend to unite them all into one easy-to-use UI. ES-DE has been my go-to frontend ever since I first used it with EmuDeck. I have been following the project ever since, and it has only been getting better and better. Today, the next update for ES-DE, 3.4.0, has finally been released, and it includes some pretty fantastic changes.

There are a couple of big changes, but for us on a Steam Deck and other handheld PCs, it will be playtime tracking. Now, we can see how long each game has been played for, using similar logic to how it works on Steam. Themes will need to be updated to take advantage of the change, but once they are, we can see the time we have spent in each game we play. The team has also completely moved away from the new EmulationStation Desktop Edition moniker and gone to ES-DE, which means it will no longer search for the .emulationstation directory on startup.

There is also some new emulator support with the update, including support for Parallel Launcher, Gopher64, AzaharPlus, Xenia Edge, 3dSen, ares, and some alternatives for shadPS4. It appears there is also some support for Native ports for Nintendo 64 recompilations, which is a nice bonus.

As for those using Android devices, we also have some big changes. There is new support for PS3, Steam, and Epic Games Store systems, so we can access those games directly from ES-DE. There is also improved support for dual-screen devices, like the AYN Thor. They give an example where you can select an option to launch games on the other screen instead of the one that you are controlling ES-DE on. There's also some experimental support for RetroArch in multi-user setups.

There are a bunch of new emulators that are now supported on Android as well, including aPS3e, GameNative and GameHub, ARMSX2, Winlator Cmod, Kenji-NX, Pizza Boy SC, and Linkboy.

On top of all of that, there are new ScreenScraper regions, including China, Canada, Sweden, UK, Taiwan, and Spain. WebP is also now supported as an image file for scraped media, which can save on a lot of storage when scraping large libraries, and there's a new menu option for generating Miximages in PNG or WebP format.

You can check out the full changelog for the release via their GitLab.

ES-DE can be downloaded individually from their website, or you can get it in your installation of EmuDeck or RetroDECK on Steam Deck. If you already have it downloaded, ES-DE will prompt you to update when you launch. I highly recommend using this frontend, especially if you want a gorgeous-looking UI for all of your ROMs.

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