Using RetroPie whilst auto booting to gui

[oclaim]

With my raspberry pi 3B+ (with the default os, raspbian, and RetroPie 4.4 installed ), I'm looking for a way to use RetroPie while auto booting to the GUI (I need VNC to be working at all time). Here is what I know;

• I can make RetroPie work if I launch it from the CLI (with the command emulationstation in the terminal when the GUI [PIXEL] is not opened automatically).
• I can't launch RetroPie if PIXEL is open.
• I can launch PIXEL from the CLI with the command startx.
• If PIXEL was launched from CLI I can logout from the GUI to go back to terminal and launch RetroPie
• I can make a script to launch PIXEL at startup.
• I could make an open ssh server so that I could have access without VNC (but I don't want to struggle with security issues of any kind and I prefer to use VNC for various reason)

What I would like to do is either (there might be other solutions);

• launch a script at startup that waits 30 seconds for an input from the user and that launch the startx command if there is no input
• a way to launch RetroPie from the PIXEL environment

I had problem with making the script ask for an input from the user while making the script and couldn't find a way to force it to work the way I intended it to be.

[mitu]

RetroPie's frontend - Emulationstation - and the emulators are meant to be working without an X server, that's why they cannot be used from the desktop environment. If you want to launch Pixel from RetroPie or automatically start - take a look here and here.

[oclaim]

@mitu It worked! Thank you!