Release Notes

Release Notes

Complete version history for FindRomCover. Download links for each release are available on the Releases page.

3.2.0 — Unreleased

Included in the next build. Download links will be added when 3.2.0 ships.

AI Vision Assist (New)

• AI Pick Best on the Local Files and Google API tabs: a vision-capable model looks at the candidate images and highlights the best cover (green badge, moved to the front).
• Cloud or local models: OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude), Google Gemini and GLM (Zhipu/Z.AI), plus local OpenAI-compatible servers (Ollama, LM Studio) and custom OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible endpoints.
• Default OpenRouter model is now qwen/qwen3.7-flash, the cheapest vision-capable model on OpenRouter (roughly $0.21 per 1,000 cover picks).
• AI Settings window: provider presets, encrypted API key storage, an editable model picker with Test / Load Models, request timeout, candidate/image limits, auto-save threshold, auto-run and verify-on-save toggles.
• Smart model picker: the loaded model list is filtered to vision-capable models by default (using provider modality metadata where available and a model-name heuristic otherwise), searchable with a filter box, and cached per provider for 7 days.
• Verify before saving: the folder watcher asks the model to confirm that a newly saved image matches the selected game before renaming it. Mismatches are left untouched and reported.
• AI Batch Fill: process the whole missing-covers list — local candidates first, optional Google API fallback — saving only when the confidence is above the threshold, with live progress, cancel, and per-item results.
• AI candidate similarity threshold: the filename matcher pre-filters candidates; only local images whose filename similarity is at or above the configured value (default 70%) are sent to the AI.
• No duplicate queries: covers already queried are remembered across sessions in the SQLite database QueryHistory.dat; Batch Fill skips them, and the history can be reviewed and cleared in AI Settings.
• Images are downscaled before upload (default 512px) and verdicts are cached for 30 days.
• Fixed empty AI responses: reasoning models could spend the entire 400-token output limit on internal reasoning and return no text; the limit is now 4,096 tokens, and a clear error explains the cause if a model still runs out.

Under the Hood

• New IVisionModelClient abstraction with native Anthropic Messages API and Gemini generateContent adapters; OpenAI, GLM, local, and custom OpenAI-compatible endpoints share one adapter, while custom Anthropic-compatible endpoints reuse the Anthropic adapter.
• Settings moved to SQLite: all settings (including encrypted API keys) now live in %LocalAppData%\FindRomCover\Settings.dat. The old encrypted settings.dat is migrated automatically on first start and kept as settings.dat.legacy.
• AI request failures are logged as warnings and never trigger the automatic bug-report pipeline.
• Version bumped to 3.2.0 (not released yet).
• GitHub Actions CI now builds and tests every push and pull request on Windows.

3.1.0 — 2026-09-02

Fixes & Improvements

• Automatic scan after selecting a folder — browsing to the ROM or Image folder now scans automatically as soon as both folders are set (#1).
• Clear scan feedback — the status bar reports how many ROM files matched the supported extensions and how many are missing covers; an explicit message replaces a silently empty list (#1).
• Refresh after editing supported extensions — changing the extension list re-scans immediately.
• Repository migrated — the project now lives at purelogiccode/FindRomCover; the update checker follows the new releases page.

Under the Hood

• A corrupt settings.dat is quarantined as settings.dat.corrupt and defaults are restored instead of failing.
• Managed PBKDF2 fallback so settings decryption no longer crashes on systems where the OS cryptographic implementation fails.
• Friendlier Google Custom Search API error messages (invalid API key, quota exceeded, bad requests).
• More robust link opening with an explorer.exe fallback.

Downloads

• release_3.1.0_win-x64.zip
• release_3.1.0_win-arm64.zip

3.0.1 — 2026-07-12

• WebView2 graceful fallback — when the runtime is missing, web search tabs are unavailable but the rest of the application works; no repeated error logs.
• Image conversion improvements — corrupt or misformatted images are detected immediately and skipped without retries; retries remain for transient I/O failures.
• Less log noise — benign events logged at Debug level; the bug-report sink only sends Error-level events.
• Dependency updates: Magick.NET 14.15.0, MessagePack 3.1.8, WebView2 1.0.4078.44, Serilog 4.4.0.

3.0.0 — 2026-07-06

Major release that introduced the tabbed interface and local similarity search.

New Features

• Tabbed search interface — Local Files, Google Web, Bing Web, and Google API tabs, each keeping its own results.
• Local file similarity search — Jaro-Winkler, Levenshtein, and Jaccard algorithms with a 10–90% threshold and trigram indexing for large folders.
• System tray integration — minimize to tray with restore/exit and balloon notifications.
• Keyboard shortcuts — F5 refresh and more.
• Image folder watcher — detects new covers, converts them to PNG, renames them to the selected game, and updates the missing list.
• Delete ROM from missing list — right-click to permanently delete the ROM/ISO after confirmation.

Improvements

• Settings encrypted with AES using a machine-specific PBKDF2 key; legacy settings.xml migrated automatically.
• Serilog structured logging with a live log viewer and rolling 7-day files.
• Dependency injection with Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection.
• Extended image format support (HEIC, HEIF, ICO, SVG, JXL, JP2, AVIF) and Magick.NET resource limits.
• Graceful startup/shutdown, orphaned temp-file cleanup, and global exception handlers.
• Better Google API error messages for 429, 403, and 400 responses.
• Filename sanitization to prevent path traversal.

Breaking Changes

• PlaySound service replaced by IAudioService with a null fallback.
• settings.xml no longer used.
• MameManager no longer a serializable DTO; use MameData.

2.9.0 — 2026-05-25

• Fixed similarity calculation for empty strings (now 100% instead of NaN or 0).
• Handled InvalidWmpVersionException in the audio service.
• Added UpdateCheckOrchestrator and UpdateNotificationInfo for cleaner update flow.
• Extensions sorted alphabetically; accessibility tooltips added.
• Improved error handling and shutdown robustness; fatal startup dialog added.
• Dependency and test coverage updates.

2.8.0 — 2026-05-12

• Performance: trigram indexing for large image folders, Levenshtein early bailout, pre-computed Jaccard n-grams, pooled buffers in Jaro-Winkler, progressive image loading.
• Features: GitHub update checking, anonymized usage tracking, cross-instance settings synchronization.
• UI/UX: tooltips throughout, improved empty states, loading overlay styles.
• Testing: new unit test project with 214 tests.
• Removed MameManager, replaced by MameDataService.

2.7.0 — 2026-04-14

• Comprehensive XML documentation across services and models.
• Code quality improvements and smaller refactors.
• Dependency updates and additional tests.

Older releases

Version	Date	Highlights
2.6.0	2026-02-22	Key UI improvements: loading overlays with progress indicators
2.5.1	2026-01-21	Dependency updates and image loading resilience
2.5.0	2026-01-08	Magick.NET replaces GDI+ for image processing
2.4.2	2026-01-03	Improved error logging
2.4.1	2025-11-28	Audio service crash prevention
2.4.0	2025-11-18	Upgraded to .NET 10 and C# 14
2.3.0	2025-09-17	Codebase update
2.2.0	2025-07-26	UI updates
2.1.1	2025-07-02	Library updates
2.1	2025-04-29	ButtonFactory and command enhancements
2.0.0	2025-03-15	Codebase update
1.10	2025-03-07	GDI+ error fixes, more robust image saving
1.8.0	2025-01-14	.NET Core 9, library updates, bug fixes
1.7.0	2024-12-08	Alphabetical sorting for missing covers
1.6.0	2024-11-28	Right-click context menu
1.4.0	2024-05-20	Code improvements and bug fixes
1.3.0.4	2024-02-28	Added Jaccard and Levenshtein similarity algorithms
1.2.0.3	2024-02-05	Initial release

Related pages

• Installation
• Recommended Models
• GitHub Releases