Your arcade collection,
finally under control.
A fast, native GTK launcher and ROM manager for FinalBurn Neo. Browse 25,000 games instantly, verify every set against the official DAT files, and rebuild the broken ones automatically. No terminal required.
Built for the FinalBurn Neo emulator
Bootcade is a front-end: it finds, verifies and organises your ROM sets, then hands them to FinalBurn Neo, which does the actual emulating. FinalBurn Neo is a separate project with its own team. Bootcade can download the latest release for you.
On Linux, we go one step further: FinalBurn Neo's own team no longer maintains the SDL2/Linux build, which had quietly stopped generating game lists for a couple of systems (Game Boy Advance, Bally Astrocade). We track their upstream daily and publish our own build with that fixed, so every system is covered out of the box.
The library
Made for collections that no longer fit in a file manager
Even very large collections stay quick to browse. Bootcade only loads what you are looking at and rescans files that actually changed, instead of starting from scratch every time.
List & cover grid
Two views, switchable from the header, with a configurable number of cards per row. Cover art loads in the background so scrolling never stutters.
Instant search
Matches titles, ROM short names, manufacturers and years as you type, across the whole catalogue.
Stackable filters
Mix filters however you like: Arcade + Original, SNES + Homebrew. Active filters appear as removable chips.
- System, manufacturer, year, source
- Aspect ratio, orientation, ROM status
- Original · Clone · Hack · Homebrew · Bootleg · Prototype
Favourites & history
Star the games you keep coming back to. The launcher records how many times you played, how long your last run was, your longest one, and the total.
Artwork, fetched for you
Preview and title screens are downloaded automatically and cached, with a detail dock you can pin to the bottom or the right.
Launch & controllers
Starts FinalBurn Neo directly with joystick support on, optional
-fullscreen and -integerscale, and reusable controller profiles.
Browse online
Browse 29,000+ games from your browser
Every system the launcher supports, indexed straight from the official FBNeo DAT files. Search by name, filter by system or release type, and download the DAT or artwork for a set. No install required to look around.
Scores
Your score comes straight from the game
When you finish a run, Bootcade reads the score written by the game itself. There is nothing to type no typing a number in, no screenshot to upload. Compare it with everyone else on the leaderboard, from the launcher or from the web catalogue.
Nothing to do
Games that can be ranked carry a Highscore badge. Play one, quit, and your score is on its way. The launcher compares the score table before and after your run, so what gets published is the score you actually earned, rather than the default entries already stored by the game.
Time played, per game
Bootcade keeps your last session, longest session and total play time for every game. That history survive a DAT update, unlike almost everything else in a rebuilt catalogue.
Off until you say so
Score sharing is opt-in. Nothing is sent until you choose a player name and enable it. Sending a score also publishes how long you played, which is a habit rather than a game statistic. Offline, scores are kept and sent later instead of being lost.
ROM management
ROM auditing and rebuilding, built in
Every ROM is verified by recomputing its CRC32 against the official FinalBurn Neo DAT files : never by trusting a filename or the value stored in the archive.
- Audit ROM integrity using DAT CRC verification
- Detect missing, corrupted and incomplete ROMs
- Rebuild ROM sets automatically from your existing library
- Import ROMs recursively
- Generate missing-ROM and audit reports
- Surface clone / parent info straight from the DAT
- Find duplicate ROMs across your library
- Every set is verified before it lands in the outbox
Real CRC verification
Every entry of every archive is decompressed and its CRC32 recomputed, then matched against the DAT. A corrupt archive cannot lie its way to “available”.
Library audit
Tells you which sets are broken and which file is at fault, with four distinct verdicts.
- OK : right name, right data
- Wrong name : right data, misnamed
- Corrupt : present but wrong content
- Absent : not in the set at all
Inbox → outbox rebuilder
Drop downloads in an inbox and hit Analyse. Complete sets are relocated, broken ones are rebuilt from pieces found in your downloads and in your existing library.
Your library is never written to
It serves only as a read-only pool of parts. Results land in a separate outbox mirroring the DAT layout, so the worst case is a folder you can delete.
zip, 7z, rar, tar
Reads whatever you downloaded : solid 7z archives included, drained in a single pass. Always writes clean, flat ZIP sets, the only format the emulator loads.
Incremental scanning
A local SQLite database with a content-addressed cache. Rescans only touch files whose size or timestamp moved; a DAT update re-checks only the sets that actually changed.
Exportable reports
Save the missing-ROM list or the full audit as a text report, grouped by system, with CRC and size for every file you still need.
DAT tooling
Generate DAT files straight from your FinalBurn Neo binary, refresh the database, or download the latest FBNeo release : all from inside the app.
Linux gaming PCs & SteamOS
Built for Linux gaming setups
Built for Linux gaming machines and living-room SteamOS boxes: a real desktop interface you drive with a keyboard and mouse, and a controller ready for the game itself.
SteamOS & Steam Machines
SteamOS is Arch-based with a read-only system partition, so Flatpak is the
supported way to install desktop software there. The Flatpak bundle drops straight into
Desktop Mode, no system unlocking and no pacman required.
Keyboard and mouse to browse, pad to play
Searching 25,000 games is a job for a keyboard, so that is what the launcher is built around. Games start with joystick support already on, and controller profiles are saved and reused.
Two clicks from list to game
No nested menus to wade through: search, click, play. Add the launcher to Steam as a non-Steam game and it is reachable from Game Mode too.
Download
Choose the package that suits you
Every package is built automatically from a tagged commit by GitHub Actions,
and published with a SHA256SUMS file you can verify.
AppImage
One portable file that runs on any distribution. Nothing to install, every dependency bundled. Mark it executable and double-click.
Download AppImage.deb package
Native install with dependencies resolved by apt, plus a desktop entry in your application menu.
Download .debFlatpak
Runs isolated on the GNOME runtime, with access to your ROM folders and removable drives.
Download .flatpakTarball
Binary, assets and translations in a .tar.gz. Extract it wherever
you like : you supply the system libraries.
After downloading the AppImage:
chmod +x fbneo-launcher-*.AppImage && ./fbneo-launcher-*.AppImage
For the .deb: sudo apt install ./fbneo-launcher_*.deb
You will also need the FinalBurn Neo emulator itself : the launcher can download the
latest release for you from its Settings panel.
From source
Three commands on Debian or Ubuntu
# 1 : dependencies sudo apt install -y build-essential cmake pkg-config \ libgtkmm-3.0-dev libpugixml-dev nlohmann-json3-dev \ libcurl4-openssl-dev libzip-dev libarchive-dev \ zlib1g-dev libsqlite3-dev # 2 : build git clone https://github.com/battousai90/fbneo-launcher.git cd fbneo-launcher && cmake -S . -B build && cmake --build build -j$(nproc) # 3 : run cd build && ./fbneo-launcher
Want the packages instead? ./scripts/package.sh produces the AppImage,
the .deb, the tarball and the Flatpak bundle into dist/ : the very same
script the release workflow runs.