Nostlan Emulator
Marguerite Litscher
Frontends are programs that address a quality-of-life issue that emulators may not fulfill. For example, some emulator developers skip the user interface portion of development by having the user launch them from the command line. This usually means opening Command Prompt in the folder where the emulator is installed and typing something like emulator.exe game.rom. From a usability perspective, this is not optimal; running emulators from a shell can be considered tedious if commands aren't already scripted by the user (and they can't be expected to know how to set up such a thing if their first time loading the program is a black window that pops up and then disappears). To avoid this, many emulators will try to incorporate some kind of graphical user interface (GUI) in their standalone builds. For the emulators that never receive one however, a separate frontend project usually emerges.
These "Launchers" or "Executors" use their own graphical interface to start emulators. They're generally very adaptive and can support different arguments between emulators to ease integration. These frontends can be used with almost any emulator of your choosing, as long as they support command-line arguments.
These "frontends" have a graphical user interface that lets you launch emulators that are included with the system, meaning it's not possible (or difficult) to incorporate other emulators. They may or may not contain original emulator cores. If a program has mostly original cores, then it's called a multi-system emulator and is not included here. If you're looking for a full Linux distribution to run on a Raspberry Pi or similar, check out our Emulation Boxes page.
MAME was originally designed as a command line program. However, when the project relicensed as open source in February 2016, they merged the frontend MEWUI into the main project as part of the MAME executable. MEWUI uses the ten-foot interface philosophy which accounts for large television displays where the user is expected to use a TV remote-like input device to navigate the menus. However, MAME still supports command line arguments, so many old launchers still work with newer versions.
Mednafen is a command line program with no graphical interface whatsoever. These programs generally ease the process of launching games, featuring an equivalent for most of the emulator's functions via their graphical interfaces.
BigPEmu had been updated:
- URL
BigPEmu is an Atari Jaguar emulator for the Windows platform. "BigPEmu is the first Atari Jaguar emulator to feature compatibility with the entire retail cartridge library, along with excellent performance and a wide variety of unique features."
MedGui Reborn version 0.125 is available for download:
- URL
"MedGui Reborn is a frontend (GUI) for Mednafen multi emulator, written in Microsoft Visual Studio Community. It is available for the Windows platform. MedGui Reborn is public domain software."
Tried this on in VM Ubuntu and Mint and am pretty stoked, but in reality I'm a (novice) Manjaro user. That being said, it appears I will need to change only one thing in your script (the call to the package manager). I will try this later, primarily because I don't want to try this on my daily driver (just in case). Looking forward to this. Linux does have software with this kind of functionality (Gnome Games, GameHub, Nostlan, Pegasus) but nothing has quite the same... verve? Personally I'd rather have Launchbox as an AppImage or better a Flatpak/Snap (keeping it distro non-specific), but if you got it working in Wine I'll take it.
Doing some testing finally. Atm just testing launching Steam games. I had to manually changed the Steam id shortcut ie steam steam://rungameid/612880 I get a "application path not found" I tried changing the path to the desktop shortcut and get a similar error "file not found" I haven't tried any emulators yet. Maybe I'll try the exe file (this is a Windows game that runs perfectly via Proton). Any suggestions would be great as I'm really into getting this working
Thank you Brett. I do need to clarify though that a native Linux version isn't likely to happen any time soon. Keep in mind that over 7 years of full-time development have gone into LaunchBox and Big Box on Windows, so as you can imagine, starting over for Linux is somewhat of a pipe dream.
I also tried to launch Steam games right now and had the same result as @The_Keeper86: trying to launch Steam games without any tweaks (just like we'd do on Windows) doesn't work. Not even pointing LB to the location of the native version of Steam (Z:\usr\games\steam) allows LB to launch any games (just like you mentioned, I'm also getting "Application path not found" or "File not found").
But, like I stated on a previous post (and I just tested it again, same results), trying to directly launch any games through LB with the native PCSX2 doesn't work: I keep getting the same "CDVD plugin error" because, apparently, native PCSX2 launched through LB isn't loading the plugins.
The good news is that all of these apps / emulators are natively avaliable on Linux; eventually, if there's a way to allow LB/BB to launch the native versions of them, most of the current issues would probably be solved. Let's give it time.
Oh, and I just tested Retroarch again: like I mentioned on a previous post, LB launches the Windows version of Retroarch perfectly. Now I've tested the online functions (online updater, RetroAchievements) and they work just like on the native version. So, for the systems ran with Retroarch, we're fine for now, even without launching the Linux version of Retroarch (but I'm still hoping that the native Retroarch will someday be able to launch games from within LB, of course).
I have loads of games on there but the only frontend that is half decent is SimpleMenu, it's alright but nothing special. I absolutely adore Launchbox so it would quite honestly make my year if someone tells me I could now use it on RG350.
OH yea! I need to swap my arcade machine over to linux and give this a shot. Linux is my daily driver OS but I had been holding out installing it on my multicade because I love LB too much to give it up.
EDIT: Linux is installed! now time to get all the emulation going correctly and run the script. I'll post again below with results.
OS: custom Kubuntu 20.04 "ReOS"
hardware: 4790k 8GB 3TB GTX950SC
arcade bits: 2 Ultimarc Ustik 360 controllers, an Ultimarc light gun inside Happ shell, ebay trackball, and an Elo touchscreen from a POS, inside a Derby Owners Club World edition cab.
Now, I am a bit of a noob when it comes to Wine, but would it be beneficial to add that bit to the overall script from the get go, or if both architectures exist does it automatically pick 64-bit in that case (or is my issue just a one in a million fluke)?
I just updated Wine to version 5.16 staging (Manjaro) and finally LaunchBox started, it can be used well, but it has random craches that make it close.
I tried to replace in the file "Emulators.xml" all the extensions "dll" by "so" to try if the games could be opened with the native version of retroarch, but it didn't work :s I hope that soon we can play the games in the linux native emulators.
Excellent work.
So you installed with the default and changed it to staging after and it worked? I've been hitting my head against the Manjaro wall all weekend trying to figure it out. The best I could do was to get it installed and it would crash at startup. I'll try this on my main laptop when I get home. Thanks.
No, when I install it I use the staging version 5.15 and today update staging 5.16. Still beyond opening the interface, it doesn't open any game (in native mode), and to use retroarch in the windows version, I better keep using the native one and wait for it to improve the compatibility of LB with Linux, but opening the interface is a good advance.
Got it running in a very funky Manjaro Edition called mGAme using the wine-stable-git package from the AUR. So far it runs more or less like the Ubuntu-likes do, though it seems to download assets a little faster (without freezing) and the sub-menu on the main screen (under the three lines) tends to be invisible until I mouse over it. Even with that I am very happy with the results so far, though installing was anything but seamless, and doesn't consistently finish. The largest problem seems to be with installing dotnet48, as it will spit out massive amounts of "fixme" nonsense and sometimes nothing else. But beggars can't be choosers, and I am extremely happy to use LaunchBox on Arch and Arch-like distros. Next I plan on emulating Amnesia a bit and installing Manjaro Gnome on a different laptop then testing native support, though I am not dead set on using native emulators (when Retroarch under Wine works so well).
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