CoreELEC EmuELEC Add on vs EmuELEC Standalone - EmuELEC/EmuELEC GitHub Wiki

EmuELEC Kodi Addon for CoreELEC

EmuELEC comes in 2 flavors a full-featured standalone distro and a "light" Kodi add-on to be used in CoreELEC

The differences are (apart of the obvious add-on vs standalone) quite a few, the add-on version is meant to be used by people that want to once-in-a-while play emulators without changing their CoreELEC installation and don't care for advance options and customization.

The biggest advantage of the add-on version is that you get to keep Kodi, so if that is important to you this is the version you need.

The biggest disadvantage is customization and features and because of how Kodi works (as far as I know), when you update an add-on it overwrites any older files related to that add-on, this makes it so that all of your customization are lost on each update, unless you manually backup any settings/files you want to keep and restore after update. I still have not found a way to handle this automatically.

Also please be aware, I am sure (in fact, I know) the add-on can be run on other distros that are made for Amlogic and you are more than welcome to use it in any distro you like, but at this time I will not offer any kind of support for any other distro other than CoreELEC

Standalone EmuELEC

The standalone is made for people that want to use their Amlogic device as a full-fledged emulation system, it includes many more advanced and customization options like:

  • Set up the most common settings for Retroarch from within ES, either globally, per system or per game, this allows you to have a fully customizable experience with your games, choose from Aspect Ratio, Emulator, Shader, Run-ahead frames, resolution, etc.
  • Bezel & themes download from within ES
  • Some kernel changes to make emulators run at their best on Amlogic devices
  • Script support (like Retropie)
  • Batocera version of Emulationstation (adapted for EmuELEC) that has many options not available in the regular (Retropie) Emulationstation
  • Easier ROM management
  • Better sound handling in ES (mixed sounds, so you can have background music + video snaps at the same time)
  • Many other small features

The standalone version does not include Kodi, there are 2 reasons for this:

1.- Because the EmuELEC kernel and the CoreELEC kernel differ enough to make Kodi not work as it should.
2.- Even if I managed to make the kernels compatible, maintaining EmuELEC takes a lot of work and time for one person (yes, although a few people have helped EmuELEC directly, it's mostly one person doing all the changes) and making sure Kodi works on each version takes a lot of time and more important, knowledge, so I leave Kodi in the hands of the experts at CoreELEC.