❗Problem

LaunchBox’s scraping system is primarily centered around official games and data from the LaunchBox Games Database and EmuMovies. However, modded content such as ROM hacks, fan-made games, and community mods is often underrepresented. Currently, users must manually import and organize these types of content, and many lack box art, metadata, or even proper naming conventions, making curation time-consuming.

💡Proposal

Add support for third-party scrapers and metadata sources to enhance LaunchBox’s ability to manage mods, ROM hacks, custom platforms, and even PC games not listed in the LaunchBox DB. Suggested sources include:

• ROM Hacks / Fan Games:

  • Romhacking.net

  • ModDB

  • GameBanana

• PC Game Metadata:

  • IGDB

  • MobyGames

  • theGamesDB

• Mod Metadata & Management:

  • Nexus Mods – useful for listing available mods or tracking mod installs

  • GameFAQs – metadata, descriptions, walkthroughs

Support both metadata scraping (e.g. title, description, release year, developer) and image scraping (e.g. logos, screenshots, fanart) from these sources where available. If possible, provide tagging or import options for game types like fan game, ROM hack, mod, non-game, etc.

✅Benefits

• Adds proper support for ROM hacks and modded content, with scraping from sources that specialize in them

• Helps users better organize fan games, prototypes, and homebrew titles

• Allows LaunchBox to support a broader library of content beyond traditional commercial releases

• Eases media management for platforms like SNES, Mega Drive, and GBA, where ROM hacks are especially common

• Bridges the gap between game management and modding tools like Nexus Mods

This feature would make LaunchBox even more valuable as an all-in-one frontend for both official and community-created games.