One of Our Biggest Updates Yet 🎮✨

LaunchBox 14.0 is one of our biggest Windows updates in years. This release began as 13.28, but the scope grew far beyond a typical update. With major new features, deep under-the-hood changes, and broad improvements across everyday workflows, this is now LaunchBox 14.0.

This release adds the new LaunchBox Reader, major performance upgrades for List View and Image Grid views, a revamped Big Box Filter / Sort experience, overhauled media playback with the new LaunchBox Media Engine, smarter startup and shutdown handling, better organization for game extras, searchable Options, new premium 3D case models, and a long list of fixes and polish across the app.

Here is a breakdown of the highlights.

📖 LaunchBox Reader

Your manuals, guides, magazines, and other documents now have a proper home inside LaunchBox and Big Box.

LaunchBox Reader is a built-in reading experience designed for game manuals, strategy guides, magazines, PDFs, EPUBs, image-based documents, reference docs, and anything else you want to keep alongside your games. You can open documents directly inside LaunchBox or from Big Box, then read with realistic page turns, configurable layouts, appearance settings, bookmarks, resume behavior, and keyboard or controller input mappings.

That means you can pull up a manual before starting a game, browse a guide from the couch, or keep strategy guides and reference material connected to the games they belong to.

To use it, add or organize documents for a game, then open them from LaunchBox or from the Big Box Game Menu. From there, customize the layout, appearance, and controls to match how you like to read.

⚡ Faster Lists, Smoother Grids, Quicker Navigation

Large libraries should feel fast, even when they are packed with artwork, badges, custom columns, and years of careful organization.

LaunchBox 14.0 includes a reworked List View for the default theme with much better performance, especially in large libraries and during fast scrolling. The new list view is also fully themeable, giving custom theme developers a new foundation to build on.

The default Image Grid has also been updated with a new implementation focused on better performance, clearer selection highlighting, more reliable image refresh behavior, and a new Configure Layout option. Existing custom themes continue using the previous Image Grid, while custom theme creators can choose to adopt the new one.

There is also a new optional Arrange By scrollbar for LaunchBox game lists and the default Image Grid. When enabled, it shows group markers, hover labels, and click or drag navigation through your current arranged view. You can use it only when needed, or turn it on permanently with the new Game List Index setting. If your library is arranged by platform, genre, series, release year, or another grouping, you can jump through those groups much more quickly.

🕹️ Big Box Improvements

Big Box gets a more comfortable browsing experience in 14.0, especially for controller-first setups.

The new Big Box Filter / Sort experience makes it easier to filter and reorder games without leaving the couch. This has been a long-standing request from Big Box users, and it gives you a controller-friendly way to adjust filters and sorting directly from within Big Box, including useful sort options such as star rating.fff

The default Big Box theme has also been updated with new visual elements for Filter / Sort, including sort context labels and a redesigned popup. These controls are fully themeable, so custom Big Box themes can support the new experience too.

Beyond Filter / Sort, Big Box should feel noticeably faster, smoother, and more dependable during everyday browsing, especially in media-heavy themes and larger collections. You should feel the difference in cleaner transitions, steadier 3D FlowModel and wheel navigation, faster handling for artwork-heavy views, and more reliable video and audio behavior when moving in and out of games. Background music discovery now runs in the background too, so larger music folders should no longer slow down startup or navigation.

🗂️ Game Extras Are Easier to Organize

Additional Applications have been reorganized into clearer groups: Applications, Versions, Documents and Links.

This makes it easier to separate different types of extras. Applications can cover things like setup tools, alternate launch commands, patches, or companion apps. Versions can hold things like regional game versions, fan translations, or ROM hacks. Documents can hold manuals, strategy guides, magazines, notes, and other readable material.

The new organization also makes those extras easier to choose from in the Big Box Game Menu, which pairs especially well with LaunchBox Reader. Instead of every extra living in one long list, the type of extra is clearer before you open it.

Links also remain part of the broader game information workflow, giving you a cleaner way to keep external resources connected to the games they belong to.

🎬 Media Playback and Reliability

Media playback gets some important behind-the-scenes work in 14.0, centered around the new LaunchBox Media Engine.

Video and audio playback now run through a cleaner, more isolated media layer. For users, the goal is simple: smoother previews, fewer playback interruptions, cleaner transitions between videos, and better stability across LaunchBox and Big Box.

This new media layer also gives us more flexibility going forward. Because media playback is now abstracted away from the main app, we can push independent media engine updates to address media-related issues without requiring a full LaunchBox update every time.

Startup videos have also been completely rewritten, addressing a long-standing issue for some Big Box users using specific hardware configuration. Startup video playback is now handled inside Big Box itself, which should make startup videos much more reliable on setups where they have historically been troublesome, including some Windows handheld configurations.

🔎 Options Are Easier to Find and Configure

Options are much easier to navigate in 14.0 thanks to searchable Options pages.

You can now search for settings by name or related terms, which makes it much quicker to find the exact option you need without clicking through every page. Options performance and search responsiveness have also been improved, so the whole area should feel snappier.

There is also a new Ctrl+, keyboard shortcut for opening LaunchBox Options, matching a familiar shortcut used by many desktop apps.

Image preferences are easier to manage too. A new Default Image Group setting under Viewing options lets you choose the default image type used across the interface. Platform, playlist, and platform category image group handling has also been improved, including a new Use Default option that quickly clears a custom image group and returns that area to the global default.

🚦 Clearer Startup, Shutdown, and Multi-Install Handling

LaunchBox is now clearer about what it is doing while opening, closing, and switching between LaunchBox and Big Box.

The startup window has been revamped with a newer WPF-based design and clearer startup status messages, so startup feels less mysterious and more informative. Startup behavior has also been strengthened around settings persistence, splash-screen failures, and focus restoration once startup completes.

On shutdown, a new progress window shows what LaunchBox or Big Box is doing while closing. If shutdown hangs, there is now a force-close option, giving you a visible way forward instead of waiting without context.

14.0 also adds configurable Shutdown Applications, so apps can be closed automatically when LaunchBox or Big Box exits or when switching between them. This is useful for setups that rely on helper tools, companion apps, overlays, or other software that should close cleanly with your frontend.

Advanced users with multiple LaunchBox installs rejoice! We’ve also added the ability to detect and run separate LaunchBox installs independently without blocking each other, which is especially helpful for test builds, portable setups, or separate production and experimental libraries.

💿 New Premium 3D Cases and 3D Browsing Polish

Premium users get new presentation options: the 3D Double Jewel Case model and the new 3D Cassette Case model.

The 3D Double Jewel Case includes automatic spine handling and dual-spine options, making it a great fit for collections where double jewel cases are part of the look and feel you want to preserve.

The 3D Cassette Case adds straight-back, angled-back, and clear-case styles, portrait and landscape positioning, custom plastic and cover colors, and J-card spine artwork with fallback support for clear logos or plain-text titles.

3D model browsing has also been polished across the app. Drag handling feels better, carousel navigation is steadier, and behavior across multi-monitor setups has been improved.

🧰 More Improvements Worth Calling Out

14.0 also includes a healthy round of smaller improvements and long-requested fixes that are worth highlighting.

• More emulator choice during imports: Recommended emulator installation during ROM imports now supports multiple emulator options when more than one applies, allowing you to choose which supported emulator LaunchBox installs and configures for the selected platform.

• General performance and responsiveness: Game Details updates more smoothly while browsing large libraries, Related Games loads recommendations and thumbnails more efficiently, context menus open more quickly after startup and view changes, and managers such as Plugin Manager and Themes & Media Manager now open immediately while online content loads in the background.

• Controller fixes: Controller fallback detection no longer re-enables controller input after controller input has been disabled, and powered-off or disconnected DirectInput controllers no longer cause repeated phantom navigation when Use All Controllers is enabled.

• Play session history tracking: LaunchBox can now track play sessions more accurately, including cases where LaunchBox loses focus while a game or related application is still running. This gives you a more reliable record of when and how long you played.

Wrapping Up 🙌

It’s been a while since we bumped our version number, but we feel the amount of polish and changes that went into LaunchBox 14.0 warrants the increase. Although plenty of shiny new things, we wanted this released to focus on improving the everyday features and workflows you all rely on, and we hope you notice some of the changes!

Thanks as always to everyone testing, reporting, suggesting, and helping shape this one, we had a “long” beta cycle for this (beating the record for the most amount of beta rounds!), but we hope it was all worth it.

Happy Gaming!