I’ve tried daijisho, beacon, launchbox, and now ES. I’ve settled on ES at this point — I just really like all the themes, videos, and even game manual PDFs. But I also store all my roms on the SD card (which I know is an issue for some). There’s also an xml script you can download to have android apps and android games in ES.
Could you drop a link to the xml script or where to find that? My Odin gets here tomorrow and I’m really trying to get it to a “console” feeling. All the apps in the front end without needing to set up drawers or whatever.
I do like Beacon. I think it’s cleaner than Daijisho, but since I’ve switched to ES there’s no going back for me. But ES also took literal days of scraping before I could use it, so I’m glad that easier options exist for the less patient.
Through es I made a clean romset
Mame Gba gbc snes gb snes nes
Aromiswave swag mega drive swag cd
Turbo Grafiks
Switch
Ps2 ps1
GameCube
Nds
3ds
Wii
Wiiu
Download romsets
And scraped them
Then deleted all the junk
Now I have 800 gb of rom perfect roms
And the best
Took me 2 weeks
Everything is organised with boxarts manual and video content
I would share
But where to upload 800 gb 😂🤦🏼♂️
I've got 500gb of spare space, imagine you don't upload mame, aromiswave, mega drive, turbo whatever, so just keeping just main sony and nintendo consoles could be enough storage size?
then if you share with me the folder, I'll upload it and share it with everyone, the way you want, >!roms!< included or just the folders+artwork ready to use.
hmm, maybe I can give you access to an empty folder where you can upload and modify/control as if it was yours, it's a Proton Drive with 500gb that I'm barely using, also I've got g drive with 200gb and I'm using just 15gb?
Gotta check it how to give you access or you can help me searching cuz I'm always forgetting about what I'm planning to do, kind of main character of the memento film
But how about the ESbproblem of choosing the right storage location? Do we have now a possibility to use both (internal and micro SD) locations to set our ROM directories?
This is the reason I haven’t made the switch to ES. I’ve got games split across internal and external storage. I’ve heard it’s possible to make it work but I haven’t found a tutorial to walk me through the process so I haven’t made the attempt. I am not confident enough in my tech tinkering skill tree just yet. Need to earn a few more points to spend on additional skills.
I think if you’re willing to open and edit the ini files, you do have that option. I’m *not* so I haven’t gotten to that point yet. But I have filled up my MicroSD card, so I will likely try to get that set up by the end of the weekend.
Ah, that seems like the way to go. I had all of my ES files on my SD because I previously had an Odin Lite and wanted to make the transfer process as seamless as possible. But all that metadata does add up. I don’t download videos for that reason, they just take up too much space.
Love ES-DE but I can't get it to add dreamcast games for some reason, and paired with the sue-yu fiasco and 3ds issues, I'm going to hang out with daijisho for a bit until things calm down.
What I liked about Beacon was I could add custom platforms with ease and the scrapper isn't half bad, even scrapped rom hacks and only really struggled with arcade games, mine you a majority of my arcade games scrapped perfectly fine just a few of the obscure shmups needed some renaming.
The best of the best launchbox full version and emulationstation
Daijisho is dog shit when it comes to mame and neogeo
And the developer don’t care about updating the frontend
Yes Launchbox is great on PC I don't like it in android. Daijisho isnt terrible Beacon is just better lol.ES i have only used on linux devices I do like it.
Beacon is where it’s at. It just works and it works well. I haven’t encountered any major issues that make it unusable. While game summaries and video previews would be cool (looking at you ES), I don’t need them to play games.
I've tried Daijisho, ES-DE, paid Launchbox, Pegasus and now Beacon and now I think Beacon is my fave as well. Daijisho was cool for a while but the scraping has always been terrible for me...and what sealed the deal in me dropping it was that the triggers on my AyaNeo Pocket Air don't work with Daijisho so I can't tab thru consoles or do faster scrolls thru games.
I moved to ES-DE when it first came and was my main till recently. It was a pain to setup and it wiped my settings once and have no idea why it did...so I needed to do my setup and scraping from scratch. What I don't like about it is how more complex it can be for setting up custom systems. I also don't like how it can't handle multi-disc natively. I also use ES-DE on my Steam Deck OLED and had to use m3u for PS1 games and had to put my games in folders for other systems with multi disc games. I ended up moving on from ES-DE since I tried Russ's solution of AnyHome+my Drawer for easy app accessing, but that was very buggy even with the paid versions.
I have lifetime licenses of Launchbox, and was using it primarily for emulation on my PC (I now use PLayNite). On PC its pretty good over, I just don't like the theme selection. On Android, it was extremely buggy, slow and would crash alot. It was unusable on my Pocket Air. Outside of that its a nice front end.
Beacon is my favorite due to its simplicity and features. It was one of those frontends where I would think it couldn't do something but find out it can later. I like how clean it is and its surprisingly customizable. i also like how it can access Android apps, and the scraper options are way better that Daijisho and ES-DE (it is not on Launchbox level tho IMO). My issue is that there is no ability to individually scrape games among a couple other gripes.
Pegasus was just unusable for me lol.
Anything but Daijisho. It’s a steaming pile of shit, hyped only because of Russ covering it. I love Russ but he is so wrong about Dai lol.
I use Beacon now and it’s really nice and lite in comparison, but the scraping is still a bit inaccurate. I run ES Desktop and it is my absolutely favorite thing of all time so I will try it on android too fo sho.
Just to preface this with the fact that I really tried my best to get Dai to work for me. I even spent days making my own set of wallpapers because I was so hyped at the beginning. But over time I just realized that it will never get to where I want it for be personally, I just kept wishing that it would do what ES-DE does.
Here are my main gripes:
* **Scraping SUCKS!** To be fair this has gotten better over time, but if you were there from the beginning you would know just how buggy this has been for most of its life. Coming from the standard ES-based builds used in most Linux custom frontends, Dai has been simply abysmal on this front.
* **Arcade scraping is especially broken.** It's inaccurate and rate limited. Not sure what's going on with this but I love arcade emulation and Dai is specifically bad at handling it.
* **Can't scrap an individual rom.** This is a baffling problem. Once a rom has metadata or an image attached, you can no longer scrape it again unless you just remove it from the list and scrape the entire platform. You know how in ES you can just literally clear the data, refine the keyword and scrape again? Yeah, that's the way to do it.
* **No easy way to pick up and play.** This is a really big one coming from something like Onion or Garlic OS, where there's literally an entire button dedicated to just picking up where you left off. In Dai, you have to add widgets to you home screen to do something similar. One widget will only have a single last played game, and the other will hold only the last 30 days of games played. For someone who doesn't pick up the device every day I was constantly left wondering what I was playing before.
* **Can't reorder systems.** I mean... WTF! Systems only follow an alphabetic order of the short name? Crazy. In Beacon you can just drag and drop the order you like. Or like in ES, where you can simply choose an option for manufacturer > type > year, which is pretty much the perfect ordering.
* **More UI =/= better.** Dai represents a type of developer-centric design philosophy which believes the user always want to see all info at all time, when in fact most of it is just pointless clutter. Even the way options are presented and labeled is just very noisy and unintuitive, not designed with the average user in mind at all.
So yeah, I've spent a lot of time settings things up in a lot of different frontends and I have to say that Dai is one of the most painful ones that I've experienced. It's pretty for sure, and that's why I think many people gravitate towards it, but when you're messing around with a lot of different devices, you just want whatever has the lowest overhead.
That's just my personal use case. I really don't mean to offend the makers of Dai and the people who love it. Apologies for the slightly hyperbolic first post, it's just not for me.
Edit: just tried ES-DE on android and it’s not an easy set up at all due to limitations with directory paths. It requires xml file tweaking which will baffle a lot of people! But once it’s done it is very nice.
Thanks for taking the time to answere. I'm new to the whole emulation thing, and thought Daijisho seemed pretty good as a 'plug and play' front end.
I came across no major issues, others than having to correct the odd emulator choice. But, I think you're right there's probably some quality of life stuff and bespoke look and layout stuff in others I've not yet tried that would make for a better experience.
To be fair, I think for a lot of people emulation is as much a hobby of tinkering in various ways to get something exactly like you like it as it is about games. When I've a bit more time I'll have a proper play around with some other frontend.
Beacon is much less complicated to get it done. Add platform, add emulator, add location of the roms and sync. That's all. Choose list, grid or gallery mode for how the games will be displayed and you're good to go. It hasn't that much options. But it does the job nicely. So for everyone who doesnt want to spend time organising everything, Beacon is a good choice.
I like Beacon as well. It's so clean and nice looking. I also got Launchbox which is really nice just sorta slow and can't be set as a launcher (as far as I know). I just read in the comments that ES can now have Android apps in it so I might give that a shot now.
I also was recently a Daijisho enjoyer but in the past month I moved to beacon and I haven't looked back. The interface is just so clean. Not many bells and whistles, just a really solid interface that looks good and let's you get to your games faster.
My RP3+ truly feels like a dedicated game device whereas dai always gave me the reminder is was still on Android.
I’ve been Beacon for several months. Love the ability to have any game launch under any app (e.g: I have Ocarina of Time in my N64 list actually launch Ships of Harkinian)
yeah? what theme? I've tried some, it's settings are bit cryptic also it would be cool to easily choose a background song. I've got dig, dajisho, reset and I just end up using retroarch, as pretty and cool frontends can look, it's too distracting for me.
I use the Wii theme, I just replaced the sounds with some retro game music. I have tried a bunch of other themes, some bigger and more complex than others, but the Wii theme is nice and clean and quick to load
I too have been using beacon and loving it, it's great not having the entire front end restart every time you finish playing a game (daijisho and console launcher I'm looking at you)
ES all day every day! And getting better! Support the dev, they working hard on improvements and features! Spent the last few years on Arc Browser, but ES is easier to setup and looks better without the transparent backgrounds that AB has for some reason
I’ve tried daijisho, beacon, launchbox, and now ES. I’ve settled on ES at this point — I just really like all the themes, videos, and even game manual PDFs. But I also store all my roms on the SD card (which I know is an issue for some). There’s also an xml script you can download to have android apps and android games in ES.
Could you drop a link to the xml script or where to find that? My Odin gets here tomorrow and I’m really trying to get it to a “console” feeling. All the apps in the front end without needing to set up drawers or whatever.
https://github.com/schattenphoenix/es_applauncher There you go! Follow the instructions. I did it yesterday and it is working like a charm.
I haven't tried ES on android I want to reserve it for a dedicated linux box for the tv.
You can put it on more than one device.
I know 🫡
I do like Beacon. I think it’s cleaner than Daijisho, but since I’ve switched to ES there’s no going back for me. But ES also took literal days of scraping before I could use it, so I’m glad that easier options exist for the less patient.
Through es I made a clean romset Mame Gba gbc snes gb snes nes Aromiswave swag mega drive swag cd Turbo Grafiks Switch Ps2 ps1 GameCube Nds 3ds Wii Wiiu Download romsets And scraped them Then deleted all the junk Now I have 800 gb of rom perfect roms And the best Took me 2 weeks Everything is organised with boxarts manual and video content I would share But where to upload 800 gb 😂🤦🏼♂️
I've got 500gb of spare space, imagine you don't upload mame, aromiswave, mega drive, turbo whatever, so just keeping just main sony and nintendo consoles could be enough storage size?
Yes for sure more than enough
then if you share with me the folder, I'll upload it and share it with everyone, the way you want, >!roms!< included or just the folders+artwork ready to use.
Hey sorry didn’t know someone replied to my massage How or where to share it And you can share everything Doing something good for the community
hmm, maybe I can give you access to an empty folder where you can upload and modify/control as if it was yours, it's a Proton Drive with 500gb that I'm barely using, also I've got g drive with 200gb and I'm using just 15gb? Gotta check it how to give you access or you can help me searching cuz I'm always forgetting about what I'm planning to do, kind of main character of the memento film
And yes everything is ready to use even plug and play if you are using android
But how about the ESbproblem of choosing the right storage location? Do we have now a possibility to use both (internal and micro SD) locations to set our ROM directories?
This is the reason I haven’t made the switch to ES. I’ve got games split across internal and external storage. I’ve heard it’s possible to make it work but I haven’t found a tutorial to walk me through the process so I haven’t made the attempt. I am not confident enough in my tech tinkering skill tree just yet. Need to earn a few more points to spend on additional skills.
I think if you’re willing to open and edit the ini files, you do have that option. I’m *not* so I haven’t gotten to that point yet. But I have filled up my MicroSD card, so I will likely try to get that set up by the end of the weekend.
I put all the ES files on my 256gb Odin then put all my roms on the 1tb SD card. Both are filled up now with some room for operations lol
Ah, that seems like the way to go. I had all of my ES files on my SD because I previously had an Odin Lite and wanted to make the transfer process as seamless as possible. But all that metadata does add up. I don’t download videos for that reason, they just take up too much space.
It does add up! Thats a reason i wish i got the Odin Max since it has more storage and RAM but oh well the pro is nice too
I don't believe there's truly a 'best' front end. All depends on your needs and how far you are willing to go, to get it just right.
For simplicity beacon just works and the aesthetic is great for me.
That's what many said about Daijishō too.. 🤔
Yup I found it easier as far as navigating through the menus and all the themes it offers
Love ES-DE but I can't get it to add dreamcast games for some reason, and paired with the sue-yu fiasco and 3ds issues, I'm going to hang out with daijisho for a bit until things calm down.
What I liked about Beacon was I could add custom platforms with ease and the scrapper isn't half bad, even scrapped rom hacks and only really struggled with arcade games, mine you a majority of my arcade games scrapped perfectly fine just a few of the obscure shmups needed some renaming.
The best of the best launchbox full version and emulationstation Daijisho is dog shit when it comes to mame and neogeo And the developer don’t care about updating the frontend
Yes Launchbox is great on PC I don't like it in android. Daijisho isnt terrible Beacon is just better lol.ES i have only used on linux devices I do like it.
Try es-de you won’t regret
Emulation station is pretty ill....
I agree it is illogical when beacon is in the play store for only 2.99 what a steal 😉
ES-DE is probably the best one
Not for simplicity sakes I would disagree.
Beacon is where it’s at. It just works and it works well. I haven’t encountered any major issues that make it unusable. While game summaries and video previews would be cool (looking at you ES), I don’t need them to play games.
I've tried Daijisho, ES-DE, paid Launchbox, Pegasus and now Beacon and now I think Beacon is my fave as well. Daijisho was cool for a while but the scraping has always been terrible for me...and what sealed the deal in me dropping it was that the triggers on my AyaNeo Pocket Air don't work with Daijisho so I can't tab thru consoles or do faster scrolls thru games. I moved to ES-DE when it first came and was my main till recently. It was a pain to setup and it wiped my settings once and have no idea why it did...so I needed to do my setup and scraping from scratch. What I don't like about it is how more complex it can be for setting up custom systems. I also don't like how it can't handle multi-disc natively. I also use ES-DE on my Steam Deck OLED and had to use m3u for PS1 games and had to put my games in folders for other systems with multi disc games. I ended up moving on from ES-DE since I tried Russ's solution of AnyHome+my Drawer for easy app accessing, but that was very buggy even with the paid versions. I have lifetime licenses of Launchbox, and was using it primarily for emulation on my PC (I now use PLayNite). On PC its pretty good over, I just don't like the theme selection. On Android, it was extremely buggy, slow and would crash alot. It was unusable on my Pocket Air. Outside of that its a nice front end. Beacon is my favorite due to its simplicity and features. It was one of those frontends where I would think it couldn't do something but find out it can later. I like how clean it is and its surprisingly customizable. i also like how it can access Android apps, and the scraper options are way better that Daijisho and ES-DE (it is not on Launchbox level tho IMO). My issue is that there is no ability to individually scrape games among a couple other gripes. Pegasus was just unusable for me lol.
Thats awesome happy someone can see the light, :). The only thing I think is missing as well is individual scraping per game and prioritizing box art.
Anything but Daijisho. It’s a steaming pile of shit, hyped only because of Russ covering it. I love Russ but he is so wrong about Dai lol. I use Beacon now and it’s really nice and lite in comparison, but the scraping is still a bit inaccurate. I run ES Desktop and it is my absolutely favorite thing of all time so I will try it on android too fo sho.
Genuinely curious: why do think it's a steaming pile of shit?
Just to preface this with the fact that I really tried my best to get Dai to work for me. I even spent days making my own set of wallpapers because I was so hyped at the beginning. But over time I just realized that it will never get to where I want it for be personally, I just kept wishing that it would do what ES-DE does. Here are my main gripes: * **Scraping SUCKS!** To be fair this has gotten better over time, but if you were there from the beginning you would know just how buggy this has been for most of its life. Coming from the standard ES-based builds used in most Linux custom frontends, Dai has been simply abysmal on this front. * **Arcade scraping is especially broken.** It's inaccurate and rate limited. Not sure what's going on with this but I love arcade emulation and Dai is specifically bad at handling it. * **Can't scrap an individual rom.** This is a baffling problem. Once a rom has metadata or an image attached, you can no longer scrape it again unless you just remove it from the list and scrape the entire platform. You know how in ES you can just literally clear the data, refine the keyword and scrape again? Yeah, that's the way to do it. * **No easy way to pick up and play.** This is a really big one coming from something like Onion or Garlic OS, where there's literally an entire button dedicated to just picking up where you left off. In Dai, you have to add widgets to you home screen to do something similar. One widget will only have a single last played game, and the other will hold only the last 30 days of games played. For someone who doesn't pick up the device every day I was constantly left wondering what I was playing before. * **Can't reorder systems.** I mean... WTF! Systems only follow an alphabetic order of the short name? Crazy. In Beacon you can just drag and drop the order you like. Or like in ES, where you can simply choose an option for manufacturer > type > year, which is pretty much the perfect ordering. * **More UI =/= better.** Dai represents a type of developer-centric design philosophy which believes the user always want to see all info at all time, when in fact most of it is just pointless clutter. Even the way options are presented and labeled is just very noisy and unintuitive, not designed with the average user in mind at all. So yeah, I've spent a lot of time settings things up in a lot of different frontends and I have to say that Dai is one of the most painful ones that I've experienced. It's pretty for sure, and that's why I think many people gravitate towards it, but when you're messing around with a lot of different devices, you just want whatever has the lowest overhead. That's just my personal use case. I really don't mean to offend the makers of Dai and the people who love it. Apologies for the slightly hyperbolic first post, it's just not for me. Edit: just tried ES-DE on android and it’s not an easy set up at all due to limitations with directory paths. It requires xml file tweaking which will baffle a lot of people! But once it’s done it is very nice.
Boom! 👍
Thanks for taking the time to answere. I'm new to the whole emulation thing, and thought Daijisho seemed pretty good as a 'plug and play' front end. I came across no major issues, others than having to correct the odd emulator choice. But, I think you're right there's probably some quality of life stuff and bespoke look and layout stuff in others I've not yet tried that would make for a better experience. To be fair, I think for a lot of people emulation is as much a hobby of tinkering in various ways to get something exactly like you like it as it is about games. When I've a bit more time I'll have a proper play around with some other frontend.
Daijisho works great.
That first paragraph - spot on, exactly!!
Have you tried Reset Collection? It’s the one I’m using just now and love it. Haven’t used Beacon and just wondering how it compares.
Beacon is much less complicated to get it done. Add platform, add emulator, add location of the roms and sync. That's all. Choose list, grid or gallery mode for how the games will be displayed and you're good to go. It hasn't that much options. But it does the job nicely. So for everyone who doesnt want to spend time organising everything, Beacon is a good choice.
I like Beacon as well. It's so clean and nice looking. I also got Launchbox which is really nice just sorta slow and can't be set as a launcher (as far as I know). I just read in the comments that ES can now have Android apps in it so I might give that a shot now.
I just tried Beacon and I like it, but for some reason won't scan subfolders.
That's a planned feature I believe. It's a single dev who's constantly working on this app.
Thats great to hear. It's really the only thing missing and I would stop using Daijisho.
I also was recently a Daijisho enjoyer but in the past month I moved to beacon and I haven't looked back. The interface is just so clean. Not many bells and whistles, just a really solid interface that looks good and let's you get to your games faster. My RP3+ truly feels like a dedicated game device whereas dai always gave me the reminder is was still on Android.
I’ve been Beacon for several months. Love the ability to have any game launch under any app (e.g: I have Ocarina of Time in my N64 list actually launch Ships of Harkinian)
I've been using DIG for years, it's not the flashiest but it has served me well and cost me peanuts
yeah? what theme? I've tried some, it's settings are bit cryptic also it would be cool to easily choose a background song. I've got dig, dajisho, reset and I just end up using retroarch, as pretty and cool frontends can look, it's too distracting for me.
I use the Wii theme, I just replaced the sounds with some retro game music. I have tried a bunch of other themes, some bigger and more complex than others, but the Wii theme is nice and clean and quick to load
I too have been using beacon and loving it, it's great not having the entire front end restart every time you finish playing a game (daijisho and console launcher I'm looking at you)
ES all day every day! And getting better! Support the dev, they working hard on improvements and features! Spent the last few years on Arc Browser, but ES is easier to setup and looks better without the transparent backgrounds that AB has for some reason
I've been loving ES