es-de/emulationstation-de v1.0.1 on GitLab

Version 1.0.1

Release date: 2021-05-01

Release overview

v1.0 maintenance release.

Detailed list of changes

Added support for the new RetroArch v1.9.2 default core directory location on macOS

Bug fixes

Fixed high DPI display support on macOS

Version 1.0.0

Release date: 2021-04-20

Release overview

First release, a major update to the application compared to the RetroPie version on which it is based. This includes new gamelist sorting logic, new game media handling and an updated Windows port as well as a macOS port. The menu system has also been completely overhauled and the scraper has been expanded to support multiple media types as well as providing detailed scraping configuration options.

Full navigation sound support has been implemented, and the metadata editor has seen a lot of updates including color coding of all changes done by the user and by the scraper. Favorite games can now also be sorted on top of the gamelists and game collections.

OpenGL GLSL shader support has been added (not for the OpenGL ES renderer though) and there are multiple effects implemented such as scanlines for videos, blurred background when opening menus etc.

A new default theme rbsimple-DE (based on Recalbox Multi) is bundled with the application and is part of the installation package/installer. Theme sets created for the RetroPie EmulationStation fork will still work.

Many bugs have been fixed, and numerous features that were only partially implemented or broken have been updated to a fully working state. The application runs much faster as well due to lots of optimizations.

Detailed list of changes

Initial version, fork from RetroPie EmulationStation 2.10.0rp-dev (master)
Added support for Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD
New default theme rbsimple-DE bundled with the software (this theme is largely based on Recalbox Multi by the Recalbox community)
Added extensive es_systems.cfg templates for Unix, macOS and Windows that are automatically installed on first application startup
Added support for generating the ROM directory structure from within the application based on information in es_systems.cfg
Added full navigation sound support, configurable per theme set with a fallback to the built-in sounds if there is no theme support
Added multi-monitor support by giving the option to define on which display to run ES-DE
Improved input device configuration and default keyboard mappings are now applied if the keyboard has not been configured by the user
Reorganization and general overhaul of the menu system, hopefully making it more intuitive to navigate and easier to understand the menu entries
New game media file logic using a media directory with files matching the ROM names instead of explicitly pointing to the media files from the gamelist.xml files
GUI-configurable option to sort favorite games above non-favorite games
GUI-configurable option to flag favorite games with star symbols
GUI-configurable option to sort folders on top of the gamelists
Added volume sliders for navigation sounds and game videos to the sound settings menu
Added support for OpenGL GLSL shaders (OpenGL 2.1 renderer only, no support for OpenGL ES 1.0 renderer)
Added multiple animations and shader effects, such as when opening menus, playing videos in the gamelists and via the screensaver etc.
Updated the application to work properly on high resolution devices (such as 4K monitors)
Seamless (almost) launch of games without showing the desktop when starting and returning from RetroArch and other emulators
Updated scraper to support additional media files, detailed configuration of what to scrape, semi-automatic mode etc.
Added user account support when scraping using ScreenScraper
Added support for scraping game genres and game descriptions in multiple languages when using ScreenScraper
Files or folders can now be flagged for exclusion when scraping with the multi-scraper, and for folders it can be set to apply recursively
Overhaul of the game collection functionality including many bug fixes and optimizations
Added ability to delete custom collections from the GUI menu
Help system updated and expanded to the complete application (previously it was only partially implemented)
Game systems are now sorted by full names which makes much more sense from a user perspective
In the metadata editor, any values updated by the single-game scraper or by the user are now highlighted using different font colors
Expanded the metadata for folders and made it possible to mark them as favorites
Added metadata entry to mark games as broken/not working (e.g. useful for MAME games)
Added metadata entry to indicate whether the file should be counted as a game (e.g. useful to exclude setup files and similar for DOS games)
Added metadata entry to hide the metadata values from the gamelist views (useful for general folders, DOS game configuration utilities etc.)
Added a "Clear" button to the metadata editor to delete the media files and gamelist.xml entry for a game or folder while still retaining the game file
Added a system view counter for favorite games in addition to the total number of games
Added a gamelist info text field displaying the game count, any applied filters as well as an icon if a folder has been entered (requires theme support)
Properly implemented the option to show or hide hidden files and folders
Properly implemented the option to show or hide games flagged as hidden in the metadata editor
Added support for converting two-byte Unicode characters to uppercase and lowercase
Added the ability to display pillarboxing and letterboxing for videos with non-standard aspect ratios
Custom event scripts can now be enabled or disabled with a menu option
Gamelist sorting is now working as expected and is persistent throughout the application session
Expanded the gamelist filter functionality to include completed and broken games and added the ability to filter game names via a free text entry
Added functionality to remember cursor positions inside folders and grouped custom collections
Per-game launch command override, so that different cores or emulators can be used on a per-game basis (saved to gamelist.xml)
The emulator core location can now be defined relative to the emulator binary using the %EMUPATH% variable in es_systems.cfg (used extensively on macOS and Windows)
Core locations can be searched from a configurable list of directories if defined in the es_systems.cfg file using the %COREPATH% variable (mostly useful on Unix where there are no standardized core directories)
Clear notifications and logging have been added for missing emulator binaries and cores when attempting to launch games
Overhaul of the screensaver (the game info overlay now works correctly for instance)
Added support for jumping to the start and end of gamelists and menus using the controller trigger buttons (or equivalent keyboard mappings)
Many additional quality of life improvements and removal of GUI inconsistencies
Replaced the main application font with Fontfabric Akrobat
Replaced the on and off button icons with new graphics
Replaced the checked checkmark icon with new graphics
Changed the application icons and splash screen color theme from blue to red
Improved the menu interface on 4:3 aspect ratio displays
Made ScrollableContainer (used for the gamelist game descriptions) fade in as the text position is reset
Made the ScrollableContainer scroll speed adaptive depending on the font size and width of the text container
Moved all resources to a subdirectory structure and enabled the CMake install prefix variable to generate the resources search path
Changed the theme set directory to the install prefix (e.g. /usr/share/emulationstation/themes) with themes in the home directory taking precedence
No more attempts to open files directly under /etc, instead only the install prefix directory, the ES-DE executable directory and the home directory are used
Added proper error handling for missing resource files and improved overall logging
Refactoring, cleanup and documentation of the source code, removal of deprecated files etc.
Speed improvements and optimizations, the application now starts faster and feels more responsive
Added new component GuiComplexTextEditPopup to handle changes to configuration file entries and similar
Added full UTF-16 (Unicode) support on Windows
Removed the PowerSaver
Game counting is now done during sorting instead of every time a system is selected. This should make the UI more responsive in case of large game libraries
All required fonts bundled with the application, no dependencies on the OS to provide them any longer
Made pugixml an external dependency instead of bundling it
Replaced the custom math functions with standard C++ functions whenever possible
Implemented proper random functions using Mersenne Twister pseudorandom number generators (it actually makes a practical difference)
Modernized the audio code, for example using SDL_AudioStream instead of the older SDL_AudioCVT
Overhaul of application settings, now the configuration file is only updated when there have been actual configuration changes
Decreased CPU usage dramatically by only rendering the currently visible view (previously all views were always rendered)
Updated the CMake/CPack install and package configuration files to work as expected (can now generate DEB, RPM, DMG and NSIS installation packages with correct dependencies)
Added support for Clang/LLVM, made the application build with no errors or warnings using this compiler (Unix and macOS only)
Added support for both MSVC and MinGW (GCC) on Windows
License files are now included for all the libraries and resources that are bundled with the application
Updated the MAME ROM index files to include ROMs up to MAME version 0.230 and created scripts to easily generate these index files in the future
Greatly expanded the application documentation (which is hosted in the ES-DE repository on GitLab)

Bug fixes

On Unix, adding a hidden folder with a game in it crashed the application on startup
If the user tried to enter a blank game name in the metadata editor, the application would crash upon saving
Switching to the Grid view style with a placeholder shown in the gamelist crashed the application
FileSystemUtil::getDirContent crashed when searching through directories recursively
Large text sizes at higher resolutions (such as 4K) would crash the application as fixed-size texture buffers were used which weren't big enough to hold the larger font textures
Fixed a massive memory leak related to SVG images
Fixed an issue where SVG images would sometimes be cut off slightly on the right side (e.g. logos on the system view carousel)
The audio volume control did not detect if there was a new default audio device or if the audio volume had been changed outside ES-DE
The scraper didn't handle error conditions correctly
The metadata editor insisted that changes had been made although nothing was updated
Sorting by number of players did not work properly for games with ranges such as 1-2 or 1-8
Restart and power-off menu entries not working on any of the tested operating systems
Toggling the screensaver didn't work as expected
The setting to enable or disable audio for the video screensaver only worked on Raspberry Pi
The screensaver random function did not consider the previously selected game and could potentially show the same image or video over and over again
The random system selection did not consider the currently selected system
The random game selection did not consider the currently selected game
The random game selection traversed folders, i.e. a game could be selected inside a subdirectory and vice versa
The controller D-PAD could not be used for entering the UI mode change passkey
Filters were not applied when leaving folders using the back button
The cursor stack logic was not completely implemented for the Grid view style, making it largely broken
Editing long text entries made the cursor jump outside the editing field
Long words would sometimes render partly outside the designated text area instead of being abbreviated
Fixed an annoying gamelist issue that caused the game images and data to be updated and rendered up to six times every time the list was scrolled
Not all input events were logged when running with debug logging activated
Unknown command line options were silently accepted instead of halting the application startup and logging an error
Added a sanity check to the --resolution flag to keep the resolution within reason (and to avoid crashes when making a typo for this parameter)
Deleting a game from the metadata editor did not delete the game media files or its entry in the gamelist.xml file
Hidden files still showed up if they had a gamelist.xml entry
Fixed multiple instances of misaligned GUI elements on high-resolution displays due to the use of fixed-pixel constants
Fixed a rounding issue which caused single-pixel lines to sometimes be shown along the upper and left screen edges
The VRAM statistics overlay was somewhat broken and incorrectly displayed numbers in megabytes instead of mebibytes
Long game names would sometimes not scroll in the gamelist view
Game media was not rendered when moving between gamelists using the slide transition style
Wrapping around the first and last game systems generated strange camera movements when using the slide transition style
Some bundled graphics (resource files) displayed excessive texture pop-in under some circumstances
SystemView didn't properly loop the systems if only two systems were available
When changing to the video view style from inside a gamelist, the view was not completely initialized
Game images were sometimes scaled incorrectly
The rating component would sometimes not render immediately if using SVG graphics
Non-transparent favorite icons were not rendered correctly
The SliderComponent knob position was set incorrectly if the minimum value was not zero
The debug overlays didn't work for all image and text components
Lots and lots of additional small bugs and inconsistencies fixed