LaunchBox 5 brings home theater-style game management

Portable game manager LaunchBox has been updated to version 5.0 with Big Box Mode, a home theater-style view which allows you to browse your massive game database in all its full-screen glory (there’s a video here).

Big Box Mode is only available in the $20 LaunchBox Premium, sadly, but the free build also gets new features, including the power to automatically find images, videos, music and manuals and associate them with your games.

LaunchBox can now try to hide the console window when you launch an emulator. There’s no guarantee this will work, but the author says it’s particularly effective with MAME, MESS and Retroarch.

There’s a new platform management system which allows you to edit the platform list, along with its images and metadata.

New default settings for some emulators -- VisualBoyAdvanceM, Kega Fusion SG-1000 -- may improve reliability, and assorted high DPI-related tweaks should ensure it looks better, too.

LaunchBox 5 is a free package for Windows Vista and later. The DRM-Free Premium edition is $20 for a lifetime license, and covers installation on as many PCs as you like.