Welcome to Frontends & launchers. This is the board for building a game library you actually enjoy browsing: the software that sits in front of your emulators, the artwork and metadata, the themes, and all the small decisions that make a collection feel finished.
What belongs here
• ES-DE, LaunchBox and Big Box, Playnite, Pegasus, Attract-Mode, Daijisho and other frontends on any platform
• Scraping artwork, videos, manuals and metadata for your own collection
• Themes, layouts and custom collections
• Organising folders, file naming and multi-disc games
• Launching standalone emulators from a frontend, and sharing your finished setups
What doesn't
• Getting an emulator itself to run a game properly: PC emulation, Android emulation or iPhone & iPad emulation
• Raspberry Pi images such as RetroPie, Batocera and Recalbox: Raspberry Pi gaming
• Arcade cabinet front ends tied to a cabinet build: Arcade, MAME & cabinets is often the better fit
• Shaders and bezels: Shaders, bezels & CRT looks
How to ask so people can help
1. The frontend name, version and the platform it runs on
2. The emulator and, if relevant, the RetroArch core it launches
3. Your folder layout and an example file name
4. The scraper you are using and any error it shows
5. What you have already tried
Starter knowledge
• A frontend does not emulate anything. It is a launcher that passes your game to an emulator, so if a game crashes, test it in the emulator directly before blaming the frontend.
• Consistent file names make scraping far more accurate. Many people follow the naming used by preservation projects such as No-Intro and Redump for their own dumps.
• Most scrapers have rate limits. An account with the scraping service usually gives you more speed and fewer failures.
• For multi-disc games, playlist files such as M3U let a frontend show one entry instead of one per disc.
• Back up your configuration and media folders once you are happy. Rebuilding a scraped library from scratch takes a long time.
• Keep artwork sizes sensible on low-powered devices. Huge videos and images can make a frontend sluggish.
Legal and safety
We love a beautiful library, as long as it is made from games you own. Do not post or request ROMs, ISOs, BIOS files, firmware or keys, and do not share pre-built packs or drive images that contain games, even if the post is really about the theme. Screenshots of your setup are welcome. No malware and no selling or paid services, including paid build images.
The usual house rules apply: be kind, English only (other languages are translated automatically), no spam, no keyboard mashing and no self-promotion spam. Theme makers are welcome to share their work, just do it in a single thread rather than reposting it. Use Report if something breaks the rules. This thread is locked, so start your own thread in this board for questions.
Dexter
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