Any recommended simple game launcher?

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cearp

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I have now have a small desktop (Windows) for some arcade games (DDR, Stepmania etc).
If it was just one game, I'd make the game boot on boot / user log in, all automatically :)

But because there's two or three games, I want a really simple big full screen menu (that I'll make auto start).
Nothing fancy, no videos etc, just clean and simple.

Similar in concept to those little like those graphical multi OS menus you can set up:
9eNRf.png


Any thing out there that would be good?
Searching online, there's a bunch of "new" stuff, launchers similar to Steam I guess, things which can show you descriptions and trailers.
Maybe some of them you can set a theme or customize to what I'm looking for, I'm not sure.
I can try but first I'm asking here!

Thanks
 
Playnite was my go-to for Windows for a while. Supports games from various storefronts (Steam, Epic etc) along with retro games. Has a really nice scraping tool too for box art etc. No videos (you can maybe add them but I never did) and a generally clean look.

I've been using ES-DE on Android recently though and that does have a free Windows release. Might be a bit more work to setup, but something like the MinUI theme is about as clean and minimal as you can get since it's just game titles listed.

This is what ES-DE looks like on my Odin:

1725926519617.png
 
Emulation Station and even Retroarch are my go tos depending on what Im doing or need.

There are several other options and youll need to do a tiny bit of research on ease of use and screenshots to fit your needs :)
Also even though most frontend emu links say: android, a good majority of the launchers can be used in windows too. Good luck? :evil::toot:

edit: forgot to add no such thing as simple :(
 
Last edited by eternal,
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I've decided on LaunchBox - it's free but can pay to unlock more features, like "BigBox" which is basically the same thing but a separate app it comes with, more full screen etc :)
I've hidden a lot of the junk like game descriptions / everything basically, just have the icons, but I haven't figured out how to disable some of the stuff like the shiny gloss highlights on game icons...

Still open to other choices but think this is good enough.
 

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