batocera.linux VS EmulationStation

& here's their official website

The OS you probably want is Batocera. I have a couple external SSDs that I use to run it on my VCSs, and they're great. It's definitely an easier setup than Windows with Launchbox, and you don't have to deal with licensing, forced updates, and all the other Windows garbage.

This subreddit is for the completely free and open-source distribution that you would find at https://batocera.org/ which comes with absolutely no copyrighted ROMs(games). You will only get support here for that and that alone. Unfortunately if you bought a preconfigured system ("unofficial image"), your issues are with the people who sold it to you. Nobody here can help you with anything outside the scope of the official release of Batocera. Which does have thorough documentation; https://wiki.batocera.org/

You made this post on the Github as the bug report, right? https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux/issues/8905

This is the only issue I could find and says it has been fixed a few weeks back. https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux/issues/8722

Alternatively, since you just built a nice PC, you can take the free options and just software emulate classic systems and run MAME. If you don't have time to set much up, look into a Batocera boot drive https://batocera.org/

I would suggest some fork of EmulationStation such as the version RetroPie has here https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation or ES-DE.org fork which is on their website

Im not sure what or who a "jrassa" is but their ES fork seems to be merely an out-of-date carbon-copy of the RP fork. As I said, try compiling the "stable" branch of RetroPie's fork. There are Windows build instructions on the github (https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/tree/stable).

Then, the retropie fork became the main one - https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation - last updated Februrary 13, 2022 - 905 commits ahead of Aloshi.EmulationStation - currently on version 2.11.0RP

Because we all will have the same hardware, it's actually a great idea to share the best emulator settings for the Deck like this - just like RetroPie for the RaspberryPi. RetroPie is mostly known as it's own OS/distro for the Pi, but it can also be installed and used as a standalone application, because the core is just RetroArch + other emulators wrapped within another frontend called EmulationStation.

The gamelist.xmls aren’t solely responsible for what appears in EmulationStation. The file responsible for which directories get indexed is es_systems.cfg. The default is located at /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg, and you can override it by creating a new one in your home directory. See the docs: https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation

You can use Retropie's EmulationStation fork from GitHub - https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation.

It determines scrolling of the game descriptions in the menu screen. Scrolling the description requires rendering additional frames, which requires extra CPU power. Saves about 40-45% on single-core Pi 0/1 and 10% on quad-core Pi 2/3 according to the feature's author (I presume Pi 4 is about the same, then): https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/pull/172