Playnite Setup Guide

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! You can have all this and more at a low price for free. Categories, descriptions, artwork, and games are 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. Today, we will look at replacing Armoury Crate and EmulationStation and using Playnite as our front end for everything on the Asus ROG Ally.

For newer users, a frontend is a console-like interface that you can boot into, showing all your games, artwork, and everything in one spot. You can then launch a game and play for a bit; after closing the game, it'll bring you back. You're likely doing that right now 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. So, I find myself with a little bit of time waiting for my 2TB Western Digital drive to arrive, and I thought I'd make a video on this topic – I 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 game, platform, emulation system, or you want. It's the best front end I've used, and I love it. Your Ally can boot into it, completely avoiding touching anything with Windows. Once inside, you navigate with your controller, head to whatever tab you'd like, create more if you want, see information about your game, including HowLongToBeat data, and much more. It also has customizable themes; I'm using one 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 recommend using a mouse and keyboard for this guide or a remote desktop, which 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 showing any of this as it's just Windows; I assume anyone can install Steam and games; this is the first time I have seen anything 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 some games installed from each service, or no games at all, we can move on. 

I'll include links for everything in the description. Go to the Playnite website, click the green download button, open the executable, and click Options. I suggest a portable installation and putting mine on the C drive. Select the C drive or wherever you want it installed, and you're ready. Click Install. 

Once it's loaded, click Next. This is where we can connect Playnite to any storefronts you have games on or want. The steps are the same for all of them. You can also choose not to do this if you don't want to.

For each storefront, click connect account and then authenticate. The other settings are up to you. If you click Import not installed games, it will show the entire storefront library of your purchased games in Playnite – so it's up to you if you want that. Once you finish 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 – it just defeats the purpose of a gaming device experience.

You should see an update at the top saying to import to import 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's top left, then settings, and click minimize Playnite to the system tray so that Playnite will always stay open. Also, click launch in full-screen mode and launch Playnite when you start your computer. This will make it so that when you start the ROG Ally, it goes into fullscreen mode, giving you a console-like experience. If you choose this option, we'll need to jump into Armoury Crate and turn off the setting for that to start with Windows to avoid both showing up simultaneously. Don't worry; Armoryrmory Crate still works if you use the button shor; it stops it from popping up on startup.

Back into Playnite now, if you head to the Auto close clients section, you can automatically close your clients when you close a game 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 want this feature for all clients since I don't have any of them running at startup, too, so I will enable it. 

Your services might still be syncing like mine, but don't worry, let's move on. Before we talk about emulators, you likely have a question: 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 on the top left, add a game and scan automatically. Click the scan folder, navigate to the game folder, and select folder. Playnite will search for executables in that folder, select the correct one, as sometimes a few depend on the game and then click Add Games. If the thumbnail, title and information are wrong afterwards, keep watching. I will talk about how to fix that later, near the end.

Okay, let's talk about emulators. You're all set for people who did the EmuDeck setup guide, but if you didn't, I suggest doing so or manually installing all your emulators and configuring them. That differs from the guide's point, so I won't show you how here. How do we get those games into Playnite with our emulator setup?

Head to the controller icon and library, and configure emulators. Click Import at the bottom, then scan folder, and if you're one of the people who 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 the screen – C:\Users\Joey\emudeck\EmulationStation-DE\Emulators, You should see Cemu, Citra, Dolphin, RetroArch and all the emulator folders here. Click the 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. If you installed Xenia Canary as 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 that Playnite knows what emulator to use for each type of game, let's get the games in. I wasn't clear about this in my last video, so I apologize, but to be clear here, I can't share where to get BIOS or ROM files. You'll have to source them yourself, and Google is a great place to start. I saw a lot of comments asking about this in my last video, so I have to add this disclaimer here.

Head to the Controller icon, add a game and emulate the game. Then click add a 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. The 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 I should use for which system or which emulators I should use for what system. The easiest answer is to copy what EmuDeck setup I should use. Again, this only applies to those people. If you head into EmulationStation like we set up in the last video, and then the main menu, the start button, and 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 to keep going back to this screen, but remember, I don't have all emulators installed, so if you have more than I do, this is how you check it. Back to Playnite. L: it'll take a while for sodic-based disc-based systems. Once done, you'll get a screen like mine, and then you can click Import. You should see the games in your library now. You'll want to repeat this step for every emulator you have – and to show you further which emulator or RetroArch core to assign to each emulator; I will show you my settings for each of the ones I have installed on the screen. Remember that your scan folder would differ depending on where you installed EmuDeck. 

Let's get our theme installed. This will make the fullscreen experience look as awesome as possible, as 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 has its configurations and settings, with usually a GitHub or playmate forums link to help you. For this guide, I will choose J Hero and then click Install. You'll have to restart playnite after this, so do it. We'll wait to jump right into it; a few more things to do. If you get booted into fullscreen mode, head to the three lines at the top right and click switch to desktop mode. 

We now have the emulators set up; we have the games linked to that emulator for Playnite to launch; let's get them to show as their category in the theme we just installed. Click the filter icon at the top; it looks like a funnel, and now, on the right, there are many options to filter you on the right library. Head to the platform and choose the platform you want to filter – Super Nintendo is for me. My entire library just got filtered by Super Nintendo games. Now head to the Save icon on the right, click that, and set a name. 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 its tab, which 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, and filter folder, you can see all the images here and their names. So, when creating your filters, 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, here are the right filter names to get images to show for J Hero on these platforms. Just repeat these steps for each until you have a list like mine. Now, you will have a question: Some of your games are missing the thumbnail, the right title, information, and everything else. An easy way to see this is in desktop mode; if you click the grid icon at the top, your library will show in thumbnails. The ones without will be easy to see. To fix this, right-click on the game and click edit. Then, click download metadata at the bottom, and then click 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 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. So another option is to right-click on the game and click edit, then head to the media tab. If you click the globe internet icon, it'll do a Google search for images for this game. Pick the one you want for the icon, cover, and background, and you'll be good. The General tab is also where you can change the game name and other information.

This last part is optional, but I showed you I had HowLongToBeat's data on my game detail screen. For those unfamiliar, How Long to Beat is a website that tells you how long it takes to beat a game. So, if you want that information as I have, we'll head to the controller icon, addons, and, under browse, the generic section. There are a lot of plugins here, and you can spend a lot of time going through them all. We want howlongtobeat right now, so install it and then restart playnite. You might get booted back to fullscreen mode; head back to desktop mode. Once 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 will go through your entire library and match when it can to its website to get the data. It might take some time if you have a large library – a perfect time to check on your loved ones.

If you want to see it afterwards, click the H icon on the left bar and uncheck both filters, and you should see all the data for every game. Some games might not show up if the extension couldn't match the titles. To fix any right-click, click on a game 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 about how this works, but you will only get game profiles if you add the executable to the armoury crate. That means every 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 suggest you add your emulators here and both Playnite's because you can set them to 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. My last tip in the Armory crate is that 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; there are still some emulators that the combination of START+SELECT doesn't close, so you have no other way to close besides the three fingers 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 has all the games. Remember I showed earlier that you have to name the filters correctly to get the updated icons? The controller icon is recently played as we scroll through, and then we have all our platforms. Pushing the start button on the Ally, you can add a game to the favourites list; Y will let you search for a game, and 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 needs to be added on the right, or the how-long-to-beat information or anything else, it just means it wasn't added. As I showed before, check to see how Longtobeat knows which game it is or if you have the right game when updating it through IGDB.

But from here or the main platform menu, we can jump into a game, so click play and off you go. I mentioned it before, but for most emulated games, assuming you set EmuDeck as I did, it's start+select to exit and get back to Playnite. However, you will have to Alt F4 out with the macro for PC games and later emulators like Yuzu. Start+Select is supposed to work; it doesn't seem 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 switch to desktop mode. There's also a settings section to mute the music on the menu or change other things. 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 in a perfect playable state now. No more Windows, just games.