Cocoon Setup Guide

What is Cocoon?

Cocoon is an emulation frontend available for Android that is extremely customizable with a ton of features and social aspects.

It has customizable grids, widgets, dual screen support and more.

Installing Cocoon

Let’s go ahead and install Cocoon, which you can do so from their Github.

Just download the APK from the latest release, install it and open it.

Go ahead and set your language, then click OK.

You now need to set Cocoon as your default launcher (so it opens to it when starting the device or pressing Home).

Click Set as Default Launcher and then select Cocoon from the list and then click OK.

If you’re using a dual screen device, it may ask you to confirm where the top screen of the device is so click OK.

If you want accurate playtime tracking, go ahead and Enable tracking to provide Usage access permissions.

Select Cocoon from the list and then enable Permit usage access. Then back to the app and Continue.

At this point, you need to set a folder to hold all of your Cocoon data, so click Data folder and then create a folder called Cocoon on your SD card if you have one, or just your internal storage, then select Use this folder and Allow.

Then click OK.

For accent color and theme, this would be personal preference, so it’s up to you. Click OK.

I would highly suggest choosing Smart folders to organize your library, no matter how big it is.

You’re now given the option to setup logins for SteamGridDB, ScreenScraper and RetroAchievements. This is optional, but if you want other artwork, metadata and achievements, you’d want to set this up.

So for each, head to their websites, get the API key for SteamGridDB if you want it, the login from ScreenScraper or the login and API key from RetroAchievements and then enter that information for each in the app. Click OK.

Go ahead and click Download now to update the list of platforms, then click Finish.

Some emulators need file access, so click Grant access and grant the All files access permission, then back to the app and Continue.

At this point, Cocoon needs to know where your games are located, so click Select directory and choose the top level folder (like ROMs) that has all of your system folders and games inside, then Use this folder and Allow.

Give it a few minutes to scan and import your games, then click Continue.

You now have an option to Start scraping your games for artwork, so go ahead and choose Start scraping games now.

Click Continue, and this is personal preference to setup how you want your grid to look, click Continue when ready.

What everything is

At this point, you’re now thrown into Cocoon and you’re probably confused – I know I was, so let’s cover what everything is.

If you start to navigate around, all of your systems should show as icons which you can open to see all of your games.

But there’s a few other things to look at.

Silk Pod

This is basically a theme/assets downloader.

Take some time and look at the different options, and install whatever you want as a theme – there’s a lot of them.

Flutter Pod

If you select this, and then enable the Display over other apps permission, Flutter Pod or Flutterkey turns your second screen into a utility type UI where you can use a virtual keyboard, trackpad or trackball mouse feature.

Log Pod

The log pod shows your playtime, games played and other statistics.

Picnic Pod

The Picnic Pod, if you provide it access to your screenshots folder, will link the screenshots you take to the specific game.

Settings Pod

This is where all the settings live, we’ll come back to this one.

Settings

Go ahead and open the Settings Pod from the home screen.

A lot of this is going to be personal preference – especially in the Personalization tab as it’s mostly just how you want to customize the look, but I do like enabling Show battery percentage.

Library & data

This is where you need to head to as this is a section you need to double check.

For instance, you can set the Default Sort for how games are ordered in their folders.

Scraping

Or, you can Scrape for artwork.

By clicking Scrape here, it’ll bring you to a window where you can set what to scrape for.

So All platforms, or specific ones, or what to fill in, and a whole bunch more.

This is all personal preference here.

Fixing emulators

But the important part is at the bottom for each system it found – choosing what emulator to use for each system.

So a good example is Game Boy Advance (GBA) – by default, Cocoon is going to load those games using RetroArch’s vba_next core (which no one uses).

I use mGBA for all my GBA games, and most people use that or gPSP.

So we need to fix that – click into it and then select Default Player, and then choose the right core or emulator from the dropdown.

Make sure to push Y or click the green checkmark button top right to save.

Some other ones you want to look at while you’re here:

• GameCube and Wii defaulting to RetroArch’s Dolphin instead of Dolphin standalone
• NES defaulting to Nestopia (if you follow my guides, we use FCEUMM)
• PS2 defaulting to AetherSX2 instead of ARMSX2
• PS3 defaulting to aPS3e instead of ARMSX3

But do a scan over everything to make sure each is using the right emulator or core for what you usually play on.

Integrations

If you didn’t link SteamGridDB, ScreenScraper or RetroAchievements earlier, the Integrations tab has them or you can connect Discord and Steam as well if you’d like.

System & Advance

Not much here that I would touch, but I do like to turn off Startup Splash Screen to make it a bit quicker.

Home Screen

From the home screen, you have a few options.

If you push Start, you can head to Apps to open any installed apps, add a new folder/game/widget, sort, search, edit the grid or head to Settings.

If you look at the bottom dock, there’s five empty spaces that you can add Apps to by clicking them.