latest release: v3.4.0

4 months ago

Release date: 2025-07-15 Release overview

This release introduces a cross-platform game importer tool that makes it possible to import games and apps into ES-DE. This is especially useful on Android where native apps and games can now be loaded into the androidapps, androidgames and emulators systems and launched from inside ES-DE. But the game importer is also available on Linux, macOS and Windows where it can import things like desktop applications, emulators and Steam games.

Support for a number of new emulators has been added across all operating systems, and on Android the Sega Model 3 (model3) system has been enabled. Also on Android the MAME4droid 2024 emulator entries have been removed since the emulator has been renamed to MAME4droid Current by its developer. Replacement entries with the new name were added already in ES-DE 3.2.0-45.

Translations to four new languages are also included, these being Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Portugues (Portugal).

A change in behavior in this release is that the "Gamelist on startup" setting has been removed and replaced with the two new options "System on startup" and "Startup view". To retain the old functionality of going directly into the gamelist view, the "Startup view" setting has to be set to "Gamelist".

Two minor additions is that API statistics is now displayed in the multi-scraper GUI and that device notifications can be disabled for plugging in and removing controllers.

Apart from the above this release includes a large amount of internal changes as most dependencies (libraries) have been upgraded to newer versions. For Android there is also initial support for 16 KB page sizes which is a future requirement from Google. Detailed list of changes

Added a fully configurable cross-platform game importer tool

Renamed the "Gamelist on startup" setting to "System on startup" and added a new "Startup view" option to control where to go on application startup

The scraper API call statistics is now shown in the interface when running the multi-scraper in automatic mode

Added a setting for whether to display notification popups when plugging in and removing input devices (like controllers and keyboards)

Added translations for Bosnian (bs_BA)

Added translations for Croatian (hr_HR)

Added translations for Serbian (sr_RS)

Added translations for Portuguese (Portugal) (pt_PT)

Added support for the Sega Model 3 (model3) game system on Android and macOS

Added the MAME - Current RetroArch core and MAME standalone as alternative emulators for the model3 system on Linux and Windows

Added the Geargrafx RetroArch core as an alternative emulator for the pcengine, supergrafx and tg16 systems

Added the .rom file extension to the pcengine, supergrafx and tg16 systems

Added the DICE RetroArch core as an alternative emulator for the arcade and mame systems

Added the drs (Cave Story) RetroArch core as an alternative emulator for the ports system

Added Ymir standalone as an alternative emulator for the saturn and saturnjp systems on Linux and Windows

Added Play! Arcade (Standalone) as an alternative emulator for the consolearcade system on Linux, macOS and Windows

Changed Play! (Standalone) to Play! Disc (Standalone) for the consolearcade system on Linux, macOS and Windows

Removed the .arcadedef file extension from the ps2 system on Linux, macOS and Windows

Changed the MAME "speech" parameter to "speechadapter" for the ti99 system due to changes introduced in MAME 0.276

Added MAME Legacy (Standalone) as an alternative emulator for the ti99 system on Linux, macOS and Windows

Added find rule entries for the bgfx release of Visual Pinball

(Android) Removed all MAME4droid 2024 emulator entries (replacement MAME4droid Current entries were added in ES-DE 3.2.0-45)

(Linux) Added the native xenia release as the default emulator for the xbox360 system

(Linux) Added Lindbergh Loader standalone as an alternative emulator for the arcade, mame and pcarcade systems

(Linux) Added a RetroArch core find rule entry for ~/.config/retroarch/libretro

(Linux) Added a RetroArch core find rule entry for ~/snap/retroarch/common/.config/retroarch/cores

(Linux) Added support for the Flatpak release of Azahar

(Linux) Added support for the AppImage release of PPSSPP

(Linux) Added support for the manually downloaded release of BlastEm

(Windows) Added BlastEm standalone as an alternative emulator for the genesis, megadrive and megadrivejp systems

(Windows) Added Supermodel Dojo standalone as an alternative emulator for the arcade, mame and model3 systems

(Windows) Added Future Pinball FPLoader standalone as an alternative emulator for the fpinball system

Added MAME - Current [Software list] and MAME Software list as alternative emulators for the apple2gs system on Linux, macOS and Windows

Added an %INJECT% variable for A7800 standalone for the atari7800 system on Linux and Windows

Added an %INJECT% variable for xenia standalone for the xbox360 system on Linux and Windows

Updated the logo and carousel icons for the Sega Mark III (mark3) system

Added support to the theme downloader for detecting and handling diverged repositories

Added a "mipmap" property to the image element to allow for higher quality texture scale-down

Changed the max value for the backgroundHorizontalPadding and backgroundVerticalPadding properties to 1 for the helpsystem, systemstatus and clock elements

Added support for scraping the Sega Pico (segapico) platform (not added as a new system so it will require custom system configuration to use)

Added support for the 5:3 display aspect ratio

Added .webm as a supported video file extension

Added support for a fourth button to GuiMsgBox

Removed the obsolete InputManager::doOnFinish() and InputManager::getTemporaryConfigPath() functions

(Android) Updated the build environment to the latest stable versions

(Android) Updated a number of Java and Kotlin dependencies to the latest stable versions

(Android) Prepared the application for 16 KB page sizes

(Windows) Worked around an OS glitch by changing PlatformUtil::runSystemCommand() to use CreateProcessW() instead of _wsystem()

(Windows) Converted to backslashes instead of forward slashes as directory separators for the screensaver-game-select, game-select and system-select events

(Android) Updated libiconv to 1.18, gettext/libintl to 0.24, ICU to 77.1, libpng to 1.6.47, LibTIFF to 4.7.0 and HarfBuzz to 11.0.1

(Android) Updated FreeType to 2.13.3, Poppler to 24.08.0, OpenSSL to 3.4.1, libgit2 to 1.9.0 and pugixml to 1.15

(macOS) Updated libiconv to 1.18, gettext/libintl to 0.24, ICU to 77.1, libpng to 1.6.47, HarfBuzz to 11.0.1 and FreeType to 2.13.3

(macOS) Updated fontconfig to 2.16.1, libjpeg-turbo to 3.1.0, LibTIFF to 4.7.0, OpenJPEG to 2.5.3 and Poppler to 25.04.0

(macOS) Updated libgit2 to 1.9.0, pugixml to 1.15, Opus to 1.5.2 and FFmpeg to 7.1

(macOS) Removed an unnecessary dependency on libvpx

(Windows) Updated gettext/linbintl to 0.23.1, ICU to 77.1, curl to 8.13.0, GLEW to 2.2.0, HarfBuzz to 11.0.1 and FreeType to 2.13.3

(Windows) Updated libgit2 to 1.9.0, Poppler to 24.08.0, pugixml to 1.15 and FFmpeg to 7.1

Updated SDL to 2.32.8 on Android, Windows, macOS and the Linux AppImage builds

Updated LunaSVG to 3.3.0

Updated CImg to 3.5.3

Updated GLM to 1.0.0

Updated UTF8-CPP to 4.0.6

Updated RapidJSON to commit 24b5e7a8b27f42fa16b96fc70aade9106cf7102f

Updated rlottie to commit e3026b1e1a516fff3c22d2b1b9f26ec864f89a82

Manually updated the rlottie CMake configuration to be able to build with CMake 4.0

Updated the MAME index files to include ROMs up to MAME version 0.277

Bundled the May 2025 release of the Mozilla TLS/SSL certificates

Translation updates for all languages
Bug fixes

(macOS) The application crashed when disconnecting a Bluetooth controller

(macOS) The PDF viewer created unnecessary Fontconfig cache files under some circumstances

Symlinks to directories could not be deleted from the metadata editor

Under some circumstances duplicate system-select events could be generated

Some orphaned data cleanup utility fields were not displayed correctly at some aspect ratios like 8:7

Sorting configuration was missing for the mark3 and vircon32 systems

(Windows) Custom event scripts would not work if the path to the ES-DE directory contained spaces