What is Emulation Station, and what does it do?

Emulation Station is essentially a launcher for emulators; when RetroPie has been installed, it loads automatically when the Pi is booted, and allows user to select a game from the library, which is loaded into the required emulator.

Please note: the following assumes some familiarity with Linux, the terminal / console, and commands for basic navigation and file editing.

A future post will cover core information which may be useful when getting to grips with the Pi at a lower level. Whilst the command line can be daunting if you’re only ever used to GUI systems, you really only need a smattering of commands to manipulate the files necessary for customising a RetroPie installation*

A couple of important questions to address regarding the emulators shown in the Emulation Station User Interface, before looking at the main configuration file:

Q. Why isn’t the Megadrive (Genesis/SNES/PlayStation etc) emulator showing in the list?

A. Emulation Station shows the emulators included in RetroPie in a gallery-style list which the user can scroll left or right, however a large number of the supported emulators are not shown by default. It is necessary to place at least one game ROM/image file in the emulator’s corresponding ROM folder for the emulator entry to appear in the UI.

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