-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
faq
It scans your ROM folders, compares them with the cover art available in the community libretro-thumbnails repositories, and downloads the missing covers into a folder you choose.
All systems published under the libretro-thumbnails organization. The list is discovered automatically from GitHub and cached locally, so new systems appear without an application update. Examples: NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, arcade boards, and many more.
Yes. The application is open source under the GPL-3.0 license. Cover art comes from the community libretro-thumbnails project and remains the property of the respective copyright holders; the application only downloads these publicly available files.
No. It is a Windows desktop application built with WPF and the .NET 10 Desktop Runtime.
No, but it is strongly recommended. Anonymous access is limited to about 55 requests per hour by the application (GitHub allows 60). A token raises this to 4,900 requests per hour (GitHub allows 5,000), which matters for large collections. See Configuration.
Never. The application only reads your ROM file names to match covers. Cover images are written to a separate folder with the same base name as the matching ROM.
The application works one system at a time. Select a system, prepare, download, then switch to the next system. Preparation and downloading only take a few moments per system.
Matching is based on the file name without its extension, so Game (Disc 1).cue, Game (Disc 1).zip, and
Game (Disc 1).chd all match the cover Game (Disc 1).png if one exists. Compressed ROMs are supported
because the archive is never opened — only its name is used.
No. Only the files directly inside the selected ROM folder are scanned. Point the ROM folder at each subfolder separately if your collection is organized that way.
Cover downloads require an internet connection. The systems list is cached, so the application can start and show systems offline, but covers cannot be fetched without access to GitHub.
The application checks for new releases at startup and via Help → Check for Updates. When an update is
available, a banner links to the release page. Replace the extracted files with the new bundle — your
settings are stored separately in %LocalAppData% and are preserved.
Everything lives in %LocalAppData%\RetroGameCoverDownloader. Use File → Open AppData Path to open the
folder. See Configuration for the full list.
The token is stored in settings.dat, encrypted with Windows DPAPI scoped to your Windows account. It cannot
be decrypted by another user or on another machine.
Anonymous launch telemetry (application id and version) and error diagnostics when something fails. ROM names, folder paths, and game names are not collected for analytics; they can appear inside error logs that are reported only when an actual error occurs. Since version 1.5.0, transient network failures, timeouts, rate limits, and cancellations are no longer reported. See Privacy.
Delete the extracted application folder and, to remove all local data, the
%LocalAppData%\RetroGameCoverDownloader folder.
| Symptom | Where to look |
|---|---|
| Empty system list | Troubleshooting |
| Repeated token prompts | Troubleshooting |
| Rate limit countdown | Troubleshooting |
| Covers not matched | Troubleshooting |
| Download failures | Troubleshooting |
- Open a discussion or issue: https://github.com/purelogiccode/RetroGameCoverDownloader/discussions
- Email: support@purelogiccode.com