FabianZettl/konsoru-launcher-releases v0.4.0

v0.4.0 — Public Beta - UI Redesign

on GitHub

0.4.0 — 15 September 2026

Mostly quality-of-life and interface work: the home screen and the settings menu were both rebuilt,
and a lot of small things that could only be done one way can now be done the way you want.

Home screen

• The shelf can be 1 to 4 rows. One row is the original single carousel; two to four turn it into a grid like a DS, 3DS or Wii U home menu. Tiles resize and reflow with an animation rather than snapping.
• R3 cycles the row count straight from the shelf, without opening anything.
• Select opens the home screen's own options — rows, background, Edit grid and dock auto-hide. The hint row at the bottom now names SEL and R3 alongside B and X.
• Edit grid — move consoles into the order you want with ◀ ▶. A console scanned in after the order was saved keeps its place at the end rather than disappearing.
• Pin Android apps to the shelf. X on an app in the app drawer offers to pin it; pinned apps sit next to the consoles in the same grid. X on a pinned tile unpins it.
• The dock is now five slots. Settings and Apps are fixed at either end; the three between them are yours — an app shortcut or a link to a website, picked from a popup. App icons are cropped to a circle to match the dock's own shape. Scraper and Refresh Library moved into Settings, where a once-in-a-while action belongs.
• The dock can hide itself, giving the consoles the whole screen until you navigate down onto it.
• Tiles are square instead of slightly wide, and the selection is now a frame that grows around the tile rather than the tile itself growing — so nothing shifts as focus moves along a row.
• Console names show only on the single-row shelf, where there's height for them.
• A large, faint silhouette of the highlighted console sits in the bottom-right corner (not on the Wave background, which is already a moving graphic).
• The KONSORU mark now sits next to the wordmark in the top-left.

Settings

• Rebuilt around a floating sidebar, section headings and grouped cards. Rows are now rows: the whole row is the target with a chevron on the right, instead of every line ending in an "Edit"/"Change" button.
• Light or dark to match your home theme, with KONSORU's cyan/pink accents kept in both.
• Systems can be hidden from the home shelf (system options popup → Hidden) and brought back under Settings → Display.
• Games can be hidden from a system's list (game options popup → Hide) and brought back from that system's own popup.
• The app drawer's grid density is adjustable with R3, same as the shelf.
• The Systems tab is gone — per-system folder settings live in each system's own popup.
• About now names the author and carries the AI disclosure from the project page.
• Privacy was rewritten to describe what the app actually does now, including which requests are made without any setup at all.

Metadata scraping

• New: pin a game to an exact LaunchBox entry. "Scrape all" in a game's Metadata tab now searches the LaunchBox database and lists every hit with its system, so you pick the right one by eye instead of trusting the automatic title match. The pick is remembered and steers every later scrape of that game.
• You can also paste a game's link or id from gamesdb.launchbox-app.com (2414-tekken-3, or the whole URL) into the same field to bind it immediately, with no search at all.
• The hit list is deliberately not filtered to the current console — a wrong automatic match is most often wrong about the system, so an arcade original or a compilation stays reachable. A search for "Tekken 3" returns 31 entries across Arcade, PlayStation, NES, Windows and more.

Emulators

• Fixed: Nintendo DS recognised no standalone emulator at all. DS was the only themed system with no standalone entry in the emulator table — it could only ever launch through a RetroArch core, so installed melonDS builds never showed up in the picker. melonDS Dual and melonDS are now both listed.
• Added a launch shape for emulators that take the ROM as the intent's data URI under their own vendor action, which is what the melonDS family uses. The previous two shapes both failed on it: one never resolved (these apps declare no ACTION_VIEW filter), the other opened the emulator with no game loaded (they read the ROM from the intent data, not from an extra).

Fixed

• DS and 3DS kept playing their menu music over a running game. Those two are the only platforms whose grid lives on the second display, so nothing about their window changed when an emulator took over the main one. 3DS additionally never reported a launch at all, which also left its second-screen preview video running.
• The second display showed the wrong system during a boot video. The shelf could still emit a focus change on its way out; the boot route now states which system it is opening.
• Popups could not be closed with the B button — a popup is its own window, so the launcher's own back handling never saw the press.
• Pressing X in the app drawer blew the app icon up to fill the popup instead of offering to pin it.
• Text and icons were partly unreadable in popups on the light theme.
• Home grid performance: the app list was being loaded and every icon rasterized on the main thread, and tiles were resized through layout on every focus change, which re-measured the whole grid each time.
• Two themes still loaded game metadata one game at a time; both now use the shared parallel loader.