Releases: nixxou/Litebox
Release list
LiteBox 0.9.3
Minor release, with two new modules.
Monitor Profiles lets you save display setups and switch between them, and pick which one a game uses when it starts.
Launch Rules lets you build sets of rules that run right before a game launches, so you can do things like rewrite an emulator configuration depending on which gamepads are plugged in.
LiteBox 0.9.2
The web frontends keep working while a game is running. Before, launching a game emptied the cache and the phone or tablet you had open went blank until you quit. Now it falls back to reading the disk and the metadata database, so covers, videos and descriptions still show up. Anything served that way is never kept, so you always get the real thing back once the game is closed. And the web pages will not start a second game while one is already running.
Plugins got a real cleanup. Every DLL under Plugins\ is now found, however deep it sits, and listed by its path so two plugins in the same folder no longer collide. Only actual plugins show up, not the libraries shipped next to them. Everything LaunchBox installs itself stays enabled by default, in the old layout and in the new System\Plugins one from LB 14, and you can still turn one off if you want. Heads up, your plugin selection is listed differently now, so check the Plugins page once and tick back anything of your own you want loaded.
Third party plugins are loaded the way they ship and get the events LaunchBox sends them, so things like ThirdScreen behave properly now.
YouTube downloads work again. yt-dlp needed a JavaScript engine, LiteBox fetches one for it and tells you which one is in play. Videos no longer need ffprobe either, ffmpeg alone does the job.
Playlists show their nested name everywhere instead of the internal one, and their art is picked up from media packs like everything else. Tree order follows Sort Title when a game has one.
The game list has an index bar down the side, a proper thin scrollbar that only shows when it is needed, and there is an optional blurred wallpaper behind the panels. Right clicking a store game offers what that game can actually do rather than always saying Play.
You can now download documents and music for a whole selection at once, and adding an image gives you the source, the crop and the size in a single window.
Fixes worth naming: the poster grid could put every position a hundred games out, a cached 3D model was shown forever however stale, the ExtendDB mirror had the wrong base URL so no image ever came down, and settings are read from what you chose rather than what LaunchBox last wrote.
LiteBox 0.9.1
This release is mostly about LaunchBox 14.
LaunchBox 14's game list index is now in LiteBox, both in the list and in the image grid, and it uses the same setting as LaunchBox so ticking it once is enough.
The cassette cases got a good pass, colours, spine text, and the clear ones finally look like the real thing.
3D models are lit properly everywhere now, not just in the preview.
Nothing to redo on your side, your settings are kept.
LiteBox 0.9.0
The big change this time: LaunchBox's own menus now live right inside LiteBox. The main bar, the View and Tools menus and the right click game menu are all wired up, so you manage your collection with the real thing instead of a cut down version.
Your box art finally looks like actual boxes. LiteBox builds each case to match the console it belongs to, from jewel cases and cardboard sleeves to PS5 and Switch 2 shells, measures the spine straight from the scan, and textures it from your own front and back image choices.
Editing your library got more powerful and a lot safer at the same time. Combine and Expand handle multi disc sets and alternate versions exactly the way LaunchBox does, keeping their saves, media and metadata together. Renaming a game moves its files along with it, and every change now goes through a journal, so a crash or a bad write can never leave your collection half done.
There is plenty more on top: a proper notification center, your RetroAchievements points and profile shown in the bar, a MAME high scores tab, support for your own badge packs, smarter playlists you can auto fill or edit by hand, and sorting and search that finally behave the same on every screen and actually find what you type.
Parental control was rebuilt from scratch and now works on plain LaunchBox and BigBox in any language, with its own simple installer.
LiteBox 0.8.9
LiteBox 0.8.9
This release lets LiteBox stand on its own. The ExtendDB plugin is no longer needed, and everything it used to bring is now part of the program itself: the extended database and its updates, the website, ROM archive handling, RetroAchievements and parental control.
The right panel changed a lot. Game cases are built in 3D and shown like any other image, with a fullscreen view where you can spin the case around and read the spine. Videos are there too. They play right in the panel, the controls appear when the mouse moves over them, and fullscreen works from the keyboard. Clicking twice on an image opens it large, and the arrow keys walk through the others.
Duplicate images are spotted and left out, so you no longer get the same cover three times. You also decide which images show up, in what order, and how many.
Search gains an advanced filter, and a Similar Games section now sits next to every game.
The settings have been tidied and documented. A file shipped with the program describes every option and every data file, with its default value.
The rest is quieter but matters just as much: less memory used while a game runs, caches you can trust, and an automatic cleanup that never deletes anything by mistake.
Installation: download LiteBox-Setup-0.8.9.exe, put it wherever you like and run it. It finds your LaunchBox and installs the right version.
LiteBox 0.8.8
LiteBox 0.8.8
When you exit a game from the pause screen, you can now choose what happens next. You can leave the game to close by itself, close the game window, or close the emulator, and you decide how long LiteBox waits before it acts. The option sits in the gameplay settings, and you can also set it for a single emulator or a single game.
Game detection is more accurate. By default LiteBox now waits until a window is both running smoothly and takes up a fair part of the screen before it treats it as the game, so it stops mistaking a launcher splash for the real thing. You can also tell it to ignore a window by its title, not only by the program name, and it already knows to skip the EA launcher.
The documents you attach to a game now stay in the Documents tab. They no longer show up as playable versions of the game, and they are kept out of multi disc playlists.
Editing several games at once is more reliable. A command line you type is no longer lost when you switch tabs, and a game can no longer end up with both DOSBox and an emulator turned on at the same time.
A few smaller things were fixed as well. There was a possible crash in the image editor, web image downloads now check that they really received an image, and some text that could overlap on the Uninstall and Caches pages at larger display sizes was tidied up.
The debug log is now off unless you turn it on, so a normal launch writes nothing extra.
LiteBox 0.8.7
LiteBox 0.8.7
A big media update — new Videos and Documents editors, plus multi-select polish.
- Videos : a proper video page with thumbnails and a built-in player. Add gameplay/trailer videos from your metadata database, EmuMovies, Steam, or YouTube (search and preview right in the editor), and trim clips to a keyframe.
- Documents & Manuals : a new page to set a game's manual and extra documents. PDFs get a real first-page thumbnail (comics and text too), and you can download manuals straight from the database or EmuMovies.
- Images : the database, EmuMovies and Steam sources are now merged into one flow, colour-coded by source, and the multi-game coverage grid handles very large selections smoothly.
- Multi-select : works in the poster grid now, and your selection stays put after editing a batch of games.
- Startup / end screens : "keep on top without stealing focus" is now set per launch type (emulators, Windows apps, DOSBox, and each store) instead of a single global switch.
Install: run LiteBox-Setup-0.8.7.exe (works on LaunchBox 13.27 and 13.28+), or extract the matching LiteBox-0.8.7-net9.zip / LiteBox-0.8.7-net10.zip into your LaunchBox\Core folder.
v0.8.6
v0.8.5
v0.8.4
LiteBox 0.8.4
Big update focused on the Edit Game window and the Play button.
You can now manage Additional Versions and Additional Apps just like in LaunchBox, and each version remembers its own play count and play time. New pages for Alternate Names and Controller Support, with a full Manage Game Controllers dialog. The Launching section is complete too: DOSBox, Mounts, Emulation, Root Folder and Startup/Pause settings, all saved to your LaunchBox data.
LiteBox can also update your game progress automatically based on your RetroAchievements and play time, with the same automation and organization options as LaunchBox.
The Play button got smarter. Every version can have its own default emulator and the button follows your selection. Games that are plain Windows or DOS executables now show "Launch game.exe" or "DOSBox game.exe" instead of an emulator name. When you pick something other than the default, the button turns a lighter green, and a small red button lets you go back to the defaults in one click.
Also fixed a conflict with the ExtendDB plugin that could break save management, plus a few smaller issues with the emulator menus.