Icarus Launcher

Your retro game collection, beautifully organised.

Icarus Launcher is a portable Windows app that brings all your retro games together in one place. Point it at your ROM folders, let it scrape box art and metadata automatically, and browse your library the way it deserves — with cover art, screenshots, ratings, descriptions, and achievement tracking.

No installation. No bloat. Just extract and run.

✨ Features

🗂 Multi-system library Add as many systems as you like — consoles, handhelds, computers, arcade. Each system points to its own ROM folder and emulator. Icarus scans everything automatically and keeps your library up to date.

🎨 Three view modes

• List — clean and compact, great for large libraries
• Grid — cover art wall, pure visual browsing. Hide the info panel for a full-screen cover experience
• Carousel — large card view, perfect for couch gaming with a controller

🖼 Automatic scraping Icarus pulls box art, screenshots, logos, descriptions, release years, genres, publishers, player counts and community ratings from multiple sources:

• Libretro — fast, offline, no account needed
• IGDB — high quality art, free API account required
• LaunchBox Game DB — community ratings and rich metadata

Scrape your entire library in one go, or scrape individual games on demand.

🏆 RetroAchievements integration Connect your RetroAchievements account and see achievement progress directly in the launcher for any supported game.

⭐ Favourites & Collections Star your favourite games for quick access, or build custom collections that group games from any system together.

🎮 Full gamepad support Navigate, launch, scrape and manage favourites entirely from a controller. Works with any XInput-compatible gamepad.

🎨 Themes & fonts Six colour themes (Cyberpunk, Vaporwave, Arcade Cab, Classic, Handheld, ChipTune) and a choice of fonts to make it feel like yours.

💾 Fully portable Everything lives in the app folder. Copy it to a USB drive and your entire library goes with you.

🖥 System Requirements

• Windows 10 or later (64-bit)
• An XInput gamepad (optional)
• A Twitch account for IGDB scraping (free, optional)
• A RetroAchievements account (free, optional)

🚀 Getting Started

1. Extract the zip anywhere
2. Run IcarusLaunch.exe
3. Click Actions → Add System to add your first console
4. Press F5 to scan for ROMs
5. Go to Actions → Update Game DB then Actions → Scrape All to fetch art and metadata

Full setup guide included in README.txt inside the zip.

📝 Notes

Icarus Launcher does not include or distribute ROMs, emulators, or copyrighted content. You must provide your own ROM files and emulators.

Made with ❤️ by Icarus Lab