RocketLauncher What Is It

What is RocketLauncher?

1. RocketLauncher was designed to integrate seamlessly with a large number of different emulators.
2. RocketLauncher provides an easy way of running different emulators, games and configurations with a powerful FrontEnd application like HyperSpin, RetroFe, GameEx, and many others.
3. To make it easier for new users to launch emulators and games/applications. You never compile any of RocketLauncher's modules. This is important to remember. They are not meant to be run as stand-alone scripts.
4. Only require setting up rom paths and emulators across multiple Front Ends once. You are free to try many front ends or keep multiple installed and switch between them, but launch everything the same setup! Because RocketLauncher handles launching, you do not need to have, whatever front end you use, handle this. This also frees the Front End devs to concentrate on their product, rather than worrying about launching emulators which is a very tedious process considering emulators are constantly updated and often requires changes to launch them.
5. Add many features to emulators that the original devs did not give access to. For example, per-game configurations, bezels, global pause, media access to a game's assets from within the game itself. The list goes on and on.
6. A community based on making highly customized solutions to handling emulators.
7. RocketLauncher is modular. This means that each system has a different mini script that users can download on a per emulator basis. A new user can simply download the module for the emu and that's it. New modules will be found by using RocketLauncherUI's update feature.
8. RocketLauncher has a GUI counterpart called RocketLauncherUI. This makes editing RocketLauncher settings super easy and fast.
9. RocketLauncher uses Plugins to know how to read database and media data from your Front End.
10. RocketLauncher is a command line program that Front Ends call to launch emulators for cleaner launching and exiting. RocketLauncherUI can be used as a Front End on its own to test and launch your games and applications from.

How to start?

In order to use RocketLauncher without issues, you only need to read the RocketLauncher Clean Install or RocketLauncher Updating an Install from v2 pages.

History of RocketLauncher

A little bit of history:

HyperLaunch 1 (2008)

When HyperSpin was launched it used a simple autohotkey script to launch every emulator.

HyperLaunch 2 (~2010)

After a while this script became to huge to handle, so BadBoyBill improved the autohotkey script to separate the emulator scripts between different files.

HyperLaunch 2.1 (~2010)

Djvj appeared in the scene and improved a lot the autohotkey script to launch emulators and introduced the idea of the fade loading screen to hide the ugliness of the emulator opening and the time until the game was ready to be played.

HyperLaunch 3 and HyperLaunchHQ (~2012)

Then djvj, brolly, and bleasby started to include multiple features to HyperLaunch. Improvements on the loading screen, introduction of the exit screen, bezels, pause, multigame, instruction cards, keymappers handling (with ghutch help), an improved way to handle emulators modules and system options that would avoid any user to have to edit any script files ever again, and finally an entire new GUI to handle all the HyperLaunch options named HyperLaunchHQ. At the time we used a git page to update all files and fix any bugs as fast as possible. Multiple frontend support was now a goal and decided to be the future of HyperLaunch. No remaining code existed from the original hyperlaunch2 codebase besides the legacy gui when launched directly.

HyperLaunch 3.1 (May 2014)

The HyperLaunch team split off from HyperSpin to their own website as it didn't make sense to live on a frontend's homepage and support other frontends. Much of this reasoning was due to the fact HyperSpin had not saw a proper update in years. HyperLaunch3 basically had a life of its own. The amount of features and the support for multiple frontends made the guys responsible to handle HyperSpin, for their own reasons, ask djvj to change the name of the program to do not call back to the HyperSpin brand.

RocketLauncher 1 (2015)

• HyperLaunch became RocketLauncher
• HyperLaunchHQ became RocketLauncherUI
• HyperPause became Pause
• www.hyperlaunch.net became www.rlauncher.com

Much was done since the rename became obligatory to us. A new automatic update feature was included on the RocketLauncherUI to make sure you always have the better version at your disposable, with all fixed bugs, improved emulators support, better fade animations, support for any screen orientation and rotation,... The program was renamed and RocketLauncher was born together with RocketLauncherUI (HyperLaunch HQ also cease to exist)

In the HyperSpin side of things, they decided to include the outdated hyperlaunch2 version on their install files to offer an alternative and to be independent of RocketLauncher.