Topic: FBN easy to setup frontend

[nchaaa]

Hi everyone,

I have an home made arcade system which i have built 14 years ago now. I am currently updating it from an hardware and software point of view.
FBN is clearly the only emulator I need for my cab, but i would like to have a nice frontend to use it.
Is FBN can do the job ?
If not, what could be the simplest and easiest to setup you could advise me ?
Everything is running on a win10 old laptop system.

thanks on advance guys

[barbudreadmon]

You'll need to define what's a "nice" frontend for you

FWIW, if our ui doesn't fit your needs, it should be easy to use an external frontend which launch FBNeo through command line.

[nchaaa]

hi, thanks a lot for your answer,

by nice, I mean something that show me the games I can play, with game info, screen capture and why not small in-game video, like the so known retropie or hyperspin.
FBN is clearly enough for me, and I just want to power-up my cab and select game with the arcade stick. IS this feasible without any additional FE ?
If not, I am sure it will be easy to use any external FE but there maybe one the community can advise ? 

Thanks a lot

[barbudreadmon]

Navigating our ui without mouse or keyboard might be hard, so i'd recommend an external frontend. I think launchbox is the most popular on windows, but i'm not very knowledgeable about that stuff.

[nchaaa]

ok, thanks, i will start looking at launchbox then.
Thank you for your support

[IPLA]

Hi,

You could try with Retrobat, is easy to setup and have a great scraper options.

[KaaMoS]

I'll tell you my favs, from the best to not so friendly ones.


1. You could go with LAUNCHBOX (if possible, paid to use advanced settings and BIGBOX access). Just remember that you'll also pay with your PC resources, for the effects and visuals you get.
Is beautiful and you could customize it to your taste. Almost everything is click and go. You can even set custom keys for special emulators. The only 3rd party app I added for it was Joy2Key.

2. Otherwise, you could try with something lighter and not so easy to setup, but still cool. In fact, there are projects at GitHub where you can find preconfigured setups, ready to add your roms, gamelists, and scrap them to get images and videos. Here you could search for BOBWIN, PEGASUS F.E. or RETROBAT. If you want to go with a independent O.S. try Batocera.

    ** Just a comment, in case, if you want to adventure with Android TV Boxes, you could go with ARC Browser which is so complete.
Don't know if there's something similar to this, but running in Windows... if there were, i'd surely put it next to LAUNCHBOX (which uses many resources).
    ** Specially for TV Boxes, you could also try premade ISOs to run them from USB Drives, as an independent O.S. which is pretty cool!

3. There are other frontends like PLAYNITE, and HYPERSPIN, but you need to put more of your brain and time on them.
I played with them, but sometimes I had to use more than 3 or 4 different party apps to get what I wanted (not talking about emulators), that's why I just jumped to LAUNCHBOX.


Just take a look at these mentioned frontends, at Youtube, so you could go with anything you see fits better for you.
See ya!