Are you tired of your Asus ROG Ally booting into this? Are you spending more time trying to scroll through all these boxes to the game you want to play than actually playing? Do you wish you had more detail, categories and control? That’s where Playnite comes in! At the low, low price of free – you can have all of this and more. Categories, descriptions, artwork and all your games in one spot, Call now and we’ll even throw in HowLongToBeat data at no extra charge.
Hey everyone and welcome back to Joey’s Retro Handhelds. I’m Billy Mays. Nope, I’m Joey and today we’re going to be looking at replacing Armoury Crate and EmulationStation and using Playnite as our frontend for everything on the Asus ROG Ally.
For the newer users, a frontend is basically the console like interface that you can have your device boot into that shows all your games, artwork and everything all in one spot. You can then just launch a game, play for a bit, and after closing the game, it’ll bring you right back. Right now, you’re likely doing that with Armoury Crate, or if you followed my EmuDeck guide, EmulationStation through Steam for your retro games. But unless you plan on putting all your non-Steam games on Steam, you’ll soon run into a problem with multiple frontends, and that’s not fun. We want one for everything. And so I find myself with a little bit of time waiting for my 2TB Western Digital drive to arrive, and thought I’d make a video on this topic – have a list in my description for some ROG Ally accessories like the drive that you might find helpful as well.
So I showed it earlier, but here’s Playnite. Playnite can be used as your frontend launcher for every single game, platform, emulation system, whatever you want. It’s honestly the best frontend that I’ve personally used and I love it. Your Ally can boot right into it, completely avoiding having to touch anything with Windows. Once inside, you navigate around with your controller, head to whatever tab you’d like, create more if you want, see information about your game including HowLongToBeat data, and honestly so much more. It also has customizable themes, the one I’m using is called J Hero.
So enough about all that, how do we get to this spot? The great thing is, if you followed my EmuDeck guide, you’ve done 90% of the work. So let’s talk about prep work. I’d advise using a mouse and keyboard for this guide, or remote desktop, makes things much easier. Before we install Playnite, install your storefronts or wherever your games are. So Steam, EA, GOG, Epic, Battle.net or whatever you want. Just easier if you do this now. I’m not going to show any of this as it’s just Windows, I assume any person can install Steam and install games, nothing new with this process here. It would also help to have your emulators installed, which is why our EmuDeck install is perfect as it takes care of all of that for us – you can add things after the fact though if you want. Let’s jump right in.
Once that’s all done, and you have your storefronts installed and maybe some games installed from each service, or no games at all, we can move on.Â
I’ll have links for everything in the description. Head to the Playnite website. Click the green download button, and then open the executable and click Options. I’d advise a portable installation and I’m going to put mine in the C drive. Just select the C drive or wherever you want it installed and you’re good to go. Click Install.
Once it’s loaded, click Next, and now this is where we can connect Playnite to any storefronts that you have games on or that you want. The steps are basically the same for all of them. You can also choose not to do this if you don’t want to for whatever reason.
For each storefront, just click connect account and then authenticate. The other settings are up to you. If you click import not installed games, it’s going to show that entire storefront library of your purchased games in Playnite – so up to you if you want that. Once you’re done with all the storefronts, you’ll be brought to Playnite’s Desktop mode. This is important as Playnite has two modes – desktop and fullscreen. Fullscreen is the console like frontend that I showed earlier, where all your games are easily launchable using just the controls. This mode here is more for changing settings and doing behind the scenes things, but you can also launch games from here if you’d like – just kind of defeats the purpose of a gaming device experience.
You should see an update at the top saying importing games from your services and you’ll start to see your games populate on the left side.
Let’s change some Playnite settings while that’s happening. Head to the controller top left, then settings, and click minimize playnite to system tray, so that Playnite will always stay open. Also, click launch in fullscreen mode and launch playnite when you start your computer. This will make it so when you start the ROG Ally, it goes right into fullscreen mode so you get a console like experience. If you do choose this option, we’ll need to jump into Armoury Crate, and turn off the setting for that to startup with Windows, to avoid both showing up at the same time. Don’t worry, Armory Crate still works if you use the button shortcuts, just stops it from popping up on startup.
Back into Playnite now, if you head to the Auto close clients section, it gives you the option to automatically close your clients when you close a game that was using it. So for example, if you choose to run an EA or Steam game from Playnite, and you stop playing, you can have it close the EA or Steam app so it’s not running in the background. I personally want this feature for all clients since I don’t have any of them running at startup too, so I’m going to enable it.
Your services might still be syncing like mine, but don’t worry, let’s move on. Before we talk about emulators, a question you likely have is how do you add games that are not part of a service? Since all we’ve done so far is add games from services, what about others? And I’m not going to ask questions about where you got them. Head to the controller icon top left, add game, scan automatically. Click scan folder and navigate to the game folder and select folder. Playnite will search for executables in that folder, select the correct one as sometimes there’s a few depending on the game and then click Add Games. If the thumbnail, title and information are wrong after, keep watching, I talk about how to fix that a bit later on near the end.
Okay, let’s talk about emulators. For people that did the EmuDeck setup guide, you’re all set, but if you didn’t – I would suggest doing so, or manually installing all your emulators and configuring them. Not the point of the guide, so won’t be showing you how here. So with our emulators setup, how do we get those games into Playnite?
Head to the controller icon, library, configure emulators. Click Import at the bottom then scan folder, and if you’re one of the people that followed the EmuDeck guide, navigate to the EmuDeck folder on your C drive that has all the emulators – the path is what I’m showing on screen – C:\Users\Joey\emudeck\EmulationStation-DE\Emulators, You should see Cemu, Citra, Dolphin, RetroArch and all the emulator folders here. Click select folder and it’ll take some time to scan. Click import. Head to Xenia on the left, and then default under built in profiles, and if you installed Xenia Canary like I did in my EmuDeck video, select Canary from the built in profile dropdown. Click Save at the bottom. If you did all your emulators yourself, you can repeat these steps for all your emulator folders, it’s the same idea.
So now Playnite knows what emulator to use for each type of game, let’s get the games in. I wasn’t clear in my last video about this, so I apologize, but to be clear here – I can’t share where to get BIOS or ROM files. It’s something that you’ll have to source yourself, and Google is a great place to start. I saw a lot of comments asking on my last video, so have to add this disclaimer in here.
Head to the Controller icon, add game, and emulated game. Then click add scanner and you want to change the following fields: scan with emulator (choose the emulator, so Super Nintendo for me), Profile (Besides RetroArch, the other emulators usually only have a default profile – for RetroArch, you want to select the core you’ll be using for Super Nintendo, so SNES 9x in this case), then click the scan folder icon and find your ROMS for that emulator, so we’ll be headed to where EmuDeck has our Roms – for me, that was on my SD card, so my D drive. Last thing we want to do is have this automatically search for new games if we add them, so click save as auto-scan configuration, and name it – I chose SNES. A question you likely have here is what RetroArch core should I use for which system, or which emulators should I use for what system, and the easiest answer is to copy what EmuDeck setup. And again this only applies to those people. If you head into EmulationStation like we setup in the last video, and then the main menu which is the start button, head to other settings and alternative emulators – you can now see what emulators are being used for each platform. If it says standalone next to it, it’s not using RetroArch. I’ll put this list in my description to make it easier for you than having to keep going back to this screen, but keep in mind I don’t have all emulators installed so if you have more than I do, this is how you check it. Back to Playnite. Let it scan, it’ll take a while for some of the disc based systems. Once done, you’ll get a screen like mine and then you can just click import. You should see the games in your library now. You’ll basically want to repeat this step for every emulator you have – and just to further show you which emulator, or RetroArch core to assign to each emulator, I’m going to show you my settings for each of the ones I have installed on screen. Just remember your scan folder would be different depending on where you installed EmuDeck to.
Let’s get our theme installed. This will make the fullscreen experience look as awesome as possible, like I showed in my opening. Head to the controller icon, addons, and under the browse section, themes fullscreen. There’s a bunch here, and each have their own configurations, settings, all of it with usually a github or playnite forums link to help you. For this guide, I’m going to choose J Hero and then click install. You’ll have to restart playnite after this so go ahead and do it. We’re not going to jump right into it yet, a few more things to do. If you get booted into fullscreen mode, head to the three lines top right and click switch to desktop mode.
We now have the emulators setup, we have the games linked to that emulator for Playnite to launch, let’s get them to show as their own category in the theme we just installed. Click the filter icon at the top, looks like a funnel and now you’ll see on the right a whole bunch of options to filter your library. Head to platform, and choose the platform you want to filter – so Super Nintendo for me. My entire library just got filtered by Super Nintendo games. Now head to the Save icon on the right and click that, and set a name. Now, to rewind a bit, when I showed you Playnite in the beginning, you likely noticed that each console platform had a cool looking image as their tab, and that comes from the theme you use. So, when naming filters, you have to match the name of the image the theme uses to get that to show. So for example, in this guide I’ll be showing the J Hero theme, and if I navigate to Playnite’s folder on the C drive and the themes, fullscreen, J hero, Icons, filter folder, you can see all the images here and their names. So when creating your filters, just match the names. Super Nintendo is the one I need for SNES games, so let’s head back to Playnite and write that in. Make sure to select the second checkbox, to show as a quick filter. To help you out, here’s the right filter names to get images to show for J hero for these platforms. Just repeat these steps for each until you have a list like mine.
A question you’re going to have at this point, is some of your games are missing the thumbnail and the right title, information, everything. An easy way to see this is in desktop mode, if you click the grid icon at the top, your library will now show in thumbnails. The ones without will be easy to see. The way to fix this is to right click on the game and click edit. Then, click download metadata at the bottom, and the IGDB option. Now, this acts like a search. It’s wonky sometimes, Pokemon needs that accented e to be found for example, but in this case, the option I need is on screen, so just click it and choose select. It’ll ask about importing that data, select. Then click save. Now we have a thumbnail, perfect. For romhacks, sometimes it can’t find the game and so another option is to right click on the game and click edit, then head to the media tab and if you click the globe internet icon it’ll basically do a Google search for images for this game, pick the one you want for Icon, Cover and Background and you’re good. The General tab is also where you can change the game name and other information if you want.
This last part is optional, but I showed you that I had HowLongToBeat’s data on my game detail screen. For those unfamiliar, how long to beat is a website that basically just tells you how long it takes to beat a game. So if you want that information like I have, we’re going to head to the controller icon, addons, and under browse, the generic section. There’s a lot of plugins here, and you can spend a lot of time going through them all. For right now, we just want howlongtobeat, so install it and then restart playnite. You might get booted back to fullscreen mode, just head back to desktop mode. Once it’s installed, head to the controller icon, extensions, howlongtobeat and the download plugin data option. Since it’s our first run, you can keep the default settings and click download. It’s going to go through your entire library, and match where it can to its website to get the data. It might take some time if you have a large library – perfect time to check on your loved ones.
If you want to see it after, click the H icon on the left bar, and uncheck both filters, and you should see all the data for every games. Some games might not show up if the extension couldn’t match the titles. To fix any of those, right click on a game that’s missing that data, howlongtobeat, view how long to beats data and now you’ll have to match it yourself – so Yoshi’s Cookie is Yoshi’s Cookie. Done.
One last thing we should talk about is Armory Crate’s Game profiles. There might be some confusion with how this works, but you won’t get any game profiles unless you actually add the executable to armory crate. That means every single PC game, but not every Rom or emulator game. So if we jump into my Armory crate, you’ll see all the emulators we added before are here, Playnite’s fullscreen and desktop executable, both of which are in the Playnite folder, and other PC games – I still haven’t added them all, it takes forever. Now, I highly, highly suggest you add your emulators here, as well as both Playnite’s and the reason being is that you can set them to use Gamepad mode and whichever power profile and fan profile you want. Let me show you mine for each emulator – this is still a work in progress, so don’t take it as gospel, you might need a higher profile for some games. For all these emulators, games and Playnite fullscreen, I would set them to Gamepad mode. For Playnite Desktop, I would set that to desktop controls. It works perfectly. The very last tip that I have in Armory crate, is I would highly suggest mapping ALT+F4 as a macro to one of your buttons – I have mine set to M1 in Gamepad mode. Yes, this does mean that one wrong button press and my game closes, but it hasn’t been an issue for me and there are still some emulators that the combination of START+SELECT doesn’t close them, so you have no other way to close them besides the three finger swipe up gesture.
Okay, the moment we’ve all been waiting for, let’s see what all that work accomplished. Head to the controller icon then switch to fullscreen mode. This is the fullscreen experience. I’m here on the Games tab, which is all games. Remember I showed earlier that you have to name the filters correctly to get the updated icons – so as we scroll through, the controller icon is recently played, and then we have all our platforms. Pushing the start button on the Ally and you can add a game to the favorites list, Y will let you search for a game, r3 can filter the lists further if you want. Lots of options.
You can also go into any of them, and click the detail button which is A and you should see all the same information that I do. If the description is missing on the right, or the how long to beat information or anything else, just means it wasn’t added. Check to see Howlongtobeat knows which game it is, or that you have the right game when updating it through IGDB, like I showed before.
But from here, or from the main platform menu, we can just jump into a game, so click play and off you go. I mentioned it before, but for most emulated games, assuming you setup EmuDeck like I did, it’s start+select to exit and get back to Playnite. But for PC games, and later emulators like Yuzu for example, going to have to Alt F4 out with the macro. Start+Select is supposed to work, just doesn’t seem to right now. Just make sure you save before you exit!
That’s the whole workflow. You can stay in here forever. If you ever want to get back to desktop mode for Playnite, push the select button or navigate to the three lines up top, and do switch to desktop mode. There’s also a settings section here if you want to mute the menu music, or change other things around. I said it before, but there’s a lot you can customize and do with Playnite, we just scratched the surface with this video.
And that’s it. You should be at a perfect playable state now. No more Windows, just games.Â
