EmulationStation History

es-history.md

EmulationStation is a graphical and themeable emulator front-end created by Aloshi around 2012. Their original work has been the foundation for the UX of many of our favorite gaming focused projects over the last decade and this document aims to capture a small bit of that history. If you see any errors please let me know in the comments below and I will gladly update this document.

History:

References:

• Aloshi's first public commit: https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation/commit/c0e9683f4537fd3e7fea69ec01ba88c1d3039408
• Retropie's first Readme change (approximate moment when their fork occured): https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/commit/3d215a1f2f83e0a45f9fa08000584e46ae9a5d60
• Recalbox's first Readme change (approximate moment when their fork occured): https://github.com/recalbox/recalbox-emulationstation/commit/b5c99454f6f3ea9f14b54d30d7700153f1205694
• FCAMOD first Readme change (approximate moment when their fork occured): https://github.com/fabricecaruso/old-EmulationStation-fork---see-batocera-emulationstation-instead/commit/f3e51f2ff30849371b31d89921e5938115853df8
• "The Big Merge" (approximate start of Batocera's fork): https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera-emulationstation/commit/8d7fb7b3e843bfc9218833ec01e8f74da6537219
• ES-DE's first public commit: https://gitlab.com/es-de/emulationstation-de/-/commit/fcfbbd3f2bf9fbaf2f61e8ef0023c675df6cc4a2

Projects:

Note

Below are links to the projects referenced above. All use a variant of EmulationStation as the foundation for their UX.

• Original source by Aloshi ARCHIVED (NOT ACTIVE)
  • Website: https://emulationstation.org/
  • Git: https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation
• RetroPie
  • Website: https://retropie.org.uk/
  • Git: https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation
• RecalBox
  • Website: https://www.recalbox.com/
  • Git: https://gitlab.com/recalbox/recalbox-emulationstation
• FCAMOD ARCHIVED (NOT ACTIVE)
  • Git: https://github.com/fabricecaruso/old-EmulationStation-fork---see-batocera-emulationstation-instead
  • Notable Forks
    • ArkOS: https://github.com/christianhaitian/EmulationStation-fcamod
• Batocera
  • Website: https://batocera.org/
  • Git: https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera-emulationstation
  • Notable Forks
    • RetroBat: https://github.com/RetroBat-Official/emulationstation
    • AmberELEC: https://github.com/AmberELEC/emulationstation
    • JELOS: https://github.com/JustEnoughLinuxOS/emulationstation
    • RockNIX: https://github.com/ROCKNIX/emulationstation
• ES-DE
  • Website: https://es-de.org/
  • Git: https://gitlab.com/es-de/emulationstation-de

2019 is when fcaruso joined Batocera and merged his own fca branch into the Batocera branch (and coincidentally it made it also compatible with Windows, which is how Retrobat was born). But batocera-emulationstation started before that, like @nadenislamarre said. However, the contributions from fcaruso to batocera-es are massive with large parts of ES re-engineered and many core features added.

ok. fca stands for f.caruso, i get it now.
yes, fabrice implemented and rewrote a lot of things.

so, the recalbox+retropie-> batocera stands before batocera+fca, and i guess that the fca started from retropie.

awesome, thank you for the updates. will work on an updated flow with this new info soon.

"so, the recalbox+retropie-> batocera stands before batocera+fca, and i guess that the fca started from retropie."

• yup thats what i was building this from so if thats accurate then awesome.