Changelog

Sound Canvas MIDI music + playlist screensaver fixes.

• Fix Sound Canvas music plays again. Games launched with a Sound Canvas variant (Descent, Lands of Lore, and many others) were running silent for some eXoDOS layouts — DOSBox Staging was set to use the fluidsynth Sound Canvas emulator, but we were looking in the wrong place for the SoundFont file. We now check the standard eXoDOS torrent location (eXo/mt32/), the older alternate location, and DOSBox Staging’s own soundfonts folder. MT-32 ROM lookup benefits from the same fix.
• Fix Soundtrack screensaver works for playlists too. Playing a playlist used to fall through to your default screensaver instead of the soundtrack slideshow. Now the mosaic gathers covers + linked-game art across every album in the playlist (albums without linked games no longer disappear), and the spinning vinyl label tracks whatever song is currently playing rather than staying pinned to the first album.

Build your own playlists from any imported soundtrack, plus two long-standing fixes for DOS games.

• New Music playlists. A new Playlists section under Soundtracks lets you build playlists from tracks across any of your imported albums. Right-click any track in an album and choose “Add to Playlist…” to drop it into an existing playlist or create a new one. The playlist detail view has Play All, reorder via the per-track menu, a cover collage built from up to four of the included albums, missing-track handling for albums that have moved, and Export as M3U if you want to take the playlist elsewhere.
• Fix Genewars (and other absolute-path DOS games) launch correctly. Around 80% of eXoDOS games mount C: at the game’s own folder; we were always mounting at the eXoDOS root and changing in. Most titles got away with it because they only used relative paths. Genewars and similar 1990s games hardcode C:\GENEWARS\ in their config files — with the wrong mount, those references pointed nowhere and the game silently sat at a black screen. We now read the original config and mirror its mount level.
• Fix Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny audio variants play. The SoundBlaster, MT-32, Sound Canvas, and CD Audio versions had no working directory recorded in our database, so the launcher couldn’t find LOLG.EXE and assumed it was on the disc. All six variants now correctly launch from WESTWOOD\LOLG3D.
• Fix Launch picker no longer shows duplicate versions. King’s Quest VI and similar Sierra titles were listing the same launch option twice in the version chooser. Cleaned up.

Three fixes for art, CD games, and first-time eXoDOS setup.

• Fix CD-mounted DOS games launch again. Titles whose dosbox.conf mounts a CD image with a quoted path (Metal Slug DOS port and likely a long tail of others) were quitting back to your Mac in three seconds. The path-rewriter now handles quoted CUE/ISO mounts cleanly.
• Fix Cover art lines up with the right game. Series like Mega Man and Super Mario Bros sometimes showed a different game’s box art — picked at random across launches. Image lookup is now an exact match instead of substring, with deterministic iteration order, so “Mega Man” gets Mega Man’s art (not Mega Man 2’s), and “Mega Man 5” doesn’t get poached by lookalike titles.
• Fix First-time eXoDOS setup runs reliably. Pointing NostalgiApp at a freshly-extracted eXoDOS torrent (with the metadata zips waiting in Content/) was being rejected as “Missing required folders” instead of triggering setup. And on network/NAS shares a stale internal “already extracted” marker would silently skip the actual extraction step, leaving the library permanently empty. Both fixed — first-time setup now Just Works on local drives, external drives, and NAS shares.

Soundtrack-aware screensaver, search, and full media-key control.

• New Soundtrack-aware screensaver. When a soundtrack album is playing and the screensaver kicks in (idle or shortcut), it switches to a music mode: a mosaic of the linked games’ art with a spinning vinyl in the center, a Winamp-style visualizer with peak-hold bars, and NostalgiApp branding cycling between the corners. Pause via media keys no longer dismisses it, and a 5-second warm-up prevents flashes when relaunching with the screensaver up.
• New Search Soundtracks. Type into the search bar with the Soundtracks pane selected and you get filtered albums plus a dedicated Songs section with cover, title, album, and a play button on every row.
• New Media keys, Touch Bar, Control Center. F8 / play-pause / next / previous / scrub all control NostalgiApp playback the same way they control any other macOS music app. Now Playing info (title, album, elapsed, art) flows through to system surfaces.
• New Linked-album autoplay. Click a game with a linked imported album and that album starts playing automatically — same way Media Pack tracks do.
• Speed Smoother startup on big libraries. Soundtrack folder scanning moved off the main thread. Fixes occasional launch hangs reported on b130.

Performance, polish, and a fix for cover-disk magazines.

• Improved Search no longer beachballs. Typing in the search bar on large libraries was occasionally locking the UI for a second or two. Group rebuilds now skip a redundant title-normalisation pass — the lag is gone.
• Improved Library scans don’t freeze the app on slow drives. The background “is this game installed?” check used to read folders one-by-one on the main thread. On external USB drives this could stall the whole window for 10+ seconds. Moved fully off-main.
• New Music player gets a seek bar. Drag through the empty space in the player to jump to any point in the current track. Tooltips on every button explain what they do (including the cryptic Autoplay one).
• Fix Cover-disk magazines now play. Hitting Play on an interactive issue (PC Gamer, Big Blue Disk, etc.) used to drop you in Finder. Now it boots DOSBox Staging into the magazine’s cover disk — Windows 3.1 launchers, mounted CD images, and all.

Two follow-ups to the Music Update.

• Fix Soundtracks: tracks refresh when switching between albums. Clicking from one album to another in the Soundtracks pane sometimes showed “No audio files found in this folder.” Fixed — each album now mounts cleanly with its own track list. The previous workaround (clicking another sidebar item and coming back) is no longer needed.
• Fix Drag-and-drop knows when you mean music. Dropping a folder of audio files onto the window opens the Soundtrack import sheet pre-filled with the folder and a default title (used to always open the ROM import wizard). Dropping any folder onto the Soundtracks sidebar item or the Soundtracks grid does the same, regardless of contents.

A whole new place in the sidebar for the music you bring yourself. Pair your favorite OSTs, CD rips, or fan remixes with games and listen as you browse.

• New Soundtracks library. Click Soundtracks in the sidebar and import a folder of music. Multi-disc albums via Add Disc…. Your audio files stay where they are — NostalgiApp keeps a reference, never copies them.
• New Link albums to games. An imported album can be tied to one or more games. The game's music button then plays your album instead of any eXoDOS-bundled track. Unlink from either side, with confirmation.
• New Cover art auto-fills from your audio. Skip the cover-image picker and NostalgiApp checks the audio metadata (ID3, iTunes, FLAC) for embedded album art and uses it automatically. Override anytime.
• New Imported albums in the ambient shuffle. The random 20-track background mix pulls from both the eXo Media Pack and your imported albums. Add a new album mid-session and the rotation refreshes — no restart needed.
• Speed Faster startup on Lite collections. The download-size index parse now runs off the main thread, removing a 300–700ms stall during library loading.

• Fix Copy-protected Windows 9x games now launch. Titles like The Unexplained that use C-Dilla CD protection now boot through to gameplay instead of erroring out at launch.
• Fix Each Windows 9x game launches in a clean state. Desktop shortcuts and display settings from a previous game no longer carry over into the next — every launch starts with a fresh Windows 98 environment.
• Fix Setup → Uninstall works on Windows 9x titles. Previously the uninstall would silently fail with “Game folder not found” for some games whose release year on disk didn’t match the catalog year.
• Speed Smoother window resizing. Resizing the main window after scrolling through the grid is back to being smooth instead of sluggish.
• Fix Plus a few smaller Windows 9x cleanup tweaks under the hood.

Top-to-bottom performance pass focused on huge libraries and slower drives. If you've been on a 50,000+ game collection or running off an external drive and felt scrolling get sticky lately, this release is for you.

• Speed Smooth scrolling at any library size. Tested on a 55,000-game collection on an external drive: roughly 10× less main-thread stalling in a hard scroll session. The grid, list, and Coverflow views all benefit.
• Speed Image lookups happen in the background. Cover art is fetched off the main thread, so disk reads never block scrolling — even when the thumbnail cache is cold or the collection lives on slow storage.
• Speed Right-click menus stay snappy. The Delete All Images dialog and View Images sheet no longer scan the disk on every redraw — they only do the work when you actually open them.
• Speed Faster startup status check. The post-launch installation check that scans your eXoDOS folder no longer fires hundreds of UI updates while it runs; the library settles in one update at the end.
• Speed Lighter sidebar. The Favorites count uses a direct counter instead of filtering the whole library on every render.
• Speed Caches kept warmer. Image folder listings, per-game image sets, and platform-category checks are all memoized now, so the same lookup never pays the same cost twice.

No feature changes — just speed.

• Fix Box art shows whole, not cropped. The grid and Coverflow now display the entire box image inside its platform-shaped frame instead of clipping the parts that don't match. Portrait DOS jewel cases stopped losing their top edges, landscape SNES close-ups stopped losing their sides. Letterbox/pillarbox space is transparent so the card material shows through.
• Fix Hover doesn't shove the box upward. The frosted-glass overlay used when you hover a grid card was inflating the cell and pushing the box art to the top of an oversized stack. The overlay is now pinned to the box-art frame, so hovering just frosts the image in place.

• Fix iCloud Sync now actually works in the published release. The previous release-build DMG could turn the toggle on but every iCloud action silently failed in the background — favorites, notes, ratings, and save games never made it to the cloud. Sync your data across every Mac signed into your Apple ID.
• Fix ROM scrapes pick the right title. Some sequels (e.g. Super Mario Bros. 3, Mega Man 4, Final Fantasy IV) were silently scraping the original game in the series. The matcher now respects punctuation differences and trailing sequel numbers, on both ROM Import and the per-game Scrape Metadata button.
• Fix Delete All Images → Scrape Metadata refreshes everything. Previously the new art only showed in the side panel — the grid tile and the gallery thumbnails kept the old art until you restarted the app. Now all three update together.
• Fix Spotlight launches the game. Selecting a NostalgiApp result from Spotlight now actually opens the matching game instead of just bringing the app to the foreground.
• Fix Menu bar refreshes correctly. Recently Played and Favorites in the status-bar menu now reflect the current state every time you open the menu (previously they were frozen at whatever the library looked like when the menu was first built). Favorites are also sorted alphabetically. Settings… from the status-bar menu opens reliably.
• Fix Genre sort button is clickable again. The Alphabetical / Most Games sort menu in the sidebar's Genres header used to overlap the macOS scroll-bar gutter, so clicks landed on the scrollbar instead of the menu.
• Fix Toolbar adapts to narrow windows. Resizing the window narrower used to clip the title count, sort picker, and grid-size button past the left and right edges. The view-mode tabs now jump to their own row when there isn't enough horizontal space.
• New Manual RetroAchievements match. If automatic matching picked the wrong game, the game detail view now has a per-game RetroAchievements ID override editor (synced via iCloud).
• New Edit Metadata in ROM Import covers everything. The wizard's Edit Metadata step now covers Title, Publisher, Developer, Year, and Genre — both per-row (pencil button on each ROM) and as a batch sheet via Edit Selected. Imported ROMs write the values into the platform XML so they survive without scraping.
• New Drag & drop ROMs and multi-select files. Drop ROMs (or whole folders) onto the main window and the ROM Import wizard picks up automatically. The folder picker now also accepts files, folders, or any combination of both.
• New Per-platform box art aspect ratios. SNES, Game Boy, NES, Genesis, jewel cases, big-box DOS, and Apple II all draw with their natural shape now instead of being squished into a one-size-fits-all portrait frame.
• New Drag-to-install DMG. The disk image now opens with the app on the left and an Applications shortcut on the right, so installation is one drag.

• New Win9x launch debug capture — opt-in toggle in Settings → Diagnostic Logging. When on, captures the source DOSBox-X config, the generated config, the launch script, and intermediate launch variables to ~/Library/Logs/NostalgiApp/, and pauses Terminal before and after the launch so you can inspect output. Off by default — enable only if support asks.
• Fix eXoWin9x games on case-sensitive drives. If your eXo collection lives on an external drive formatted with a case-sensitive filesystem (case-sensitive APFS, exFAT, NTFS via Paragon, SMB/network shares), Windows 9x games now launch correctly. Previously Windows would boot but stop with a Path not found error from Setup.vbs before the game appeared.
• Fix eXoWin3x DOSBox Staging launches on the same volume types now pick up the per-game config (resolution, fullscreen, etc.) instead of falling back to defaults. The same case-sensitivity fix was also applied to the ScummVM game database lookup.

• New iCloud Sync. Your favorites, play counts, play time, last-played dates, notes, star ratings, progress, custom playlists, ROM metadata edits, and emulator save games now sync across every Mac signed into your Apple ID. Turn it on in Settings → General → iCloud Sync. Game files, images, and emulator settings stay local.
• New Edit Metadata in Batch Operations. Set Genre, Publisher, or Developer on many ROM games at once: Library → Batch Operations… → pick Edit Metadata (ROMs only), fill any of the three fields, hit Execute. Leaving a field blank leaves it alone.
• New Sortable Genres sidebar. The old split between eight featured genres and a “More genres” disclosure is gone. Genres are now one consolidated list, with a sort toggle in the section header — Alphabetical (default) or Most Games.
• Change Batch Operations moved from the Game menu to Library (where it conceptually belongs — the operation acts on multiple games). Keyboard shortcut is unchanged: ⌘+⇧+B.
• Fix Right-clicking a ROM game and choosing Delete All Images… or View Images no longer silently does nothing. The confirmation dialog and image viewer now appear as expected.

• Fix Sierra-style CD reissues like Jones in the Fast Lane (Enhanced CD-ROM) now launch correctly when the game's wrapper batch lives in a disk subfolder rather than on the CD.
• Fix Audio variants honored. Picking a specific variant (Game Blaster, Sound Blaster, MT-32, etc.) from a game's launch menu now respects that choice — the launcher follows the game's own run.bat menu options, including the in-DOSBox audio configuration the eXo authors set up for that variant.
• Fix Sierra SCI / LucasArts SCUMM games are no longer auto-rerouted to ScummVM. Picking a DOS variant from the eXoDOS launch menu now actually plays in DOSBox. Install eXoScummVM as a separate collection if you want the ScummVM versions; the recommendation remains as informational text on the game detail view.
• Fix Screensaver auto-fires after the configured idle timeout. The setting in Settings → Screensaver (1 / 2 / 5 / 10 / 15 / 30 minutes) now actually does something — previously it only opened from the manual menu item.
• Fix Quieter logs. Cancelled RetroAchievements lookups (when you scroll past a game before its lookup finishes) no longer surface as errors. Soundtrack and video extras no longer trigger a 30-second “no emulator process found” warning after playback.

• Fix Arrow-key navigation in the grid and Coverflow views now works reliably. Previously, focusing the search bar, sidebar, or any sheet could leave arrow keys silently dead until the app was relaunched.
• Fix Coverflow 3D box covers — more games render with their proper transparent silhouette. The fix in 1.0.8.7.12 only healed one image type per game, so games whose grid view used Box-Front kept the older flattened Box-3D in the cache. Existing covers heal the first time you scroll past them in Coverflow — for an immediate one-shot fix, open Settings → Storage → Rebuild 3D Box Thumbnails.
• Fix RetroAchievements points and rank now refresh after a play session and persist across app launches. (#60)
• New ROM import — one ScreenScraper call per game. Importing a folder with multiple regional or revision dumps of the same game (Amiga, console No-Intro/TOSEC sets) no longer fires off a separate ScreenScraper request per variant — siblings share a single metadata fetch.
• New Import one version per game — optional toggle on the import wizard's final step. When on, keeps just the best dump from each set of siblings (USA > World > Europe > Japan, prefers later revisions and verified-good dumps). Multi-disc / multi-tape releases are exempt so e.g. Final Fantasy VII Disc 2 is never silently dropped.
• New Reset Play Stats — both per-game (right-click on a game) and global (Settings → General → Reset All Play Statistics). Wipes play count, total play time, last-played date, and the Recently Played list. Notes, ratings, favorites, and progress are untouched.

• Fix Coverflow 3D box art now renders with its proper transparent silhouette instead of a white rectangle behind it. Existing cached covers fix themselves the first time they appear on screen — no need to clear your thumbnail cache.
• Fix Smart Collection editor labels are readable when a dark theme is active on macOS Light mode. (#57 follow-up)

• Fix Windows 9x and Windows 3.x games launch correctly with the bundled DOSBox-X. Previously the launcher could print “DOSBox-X not found” in Terminal even though Settings showed it as detected.
• Fix Playlists section now appears for eXoDOS Lite installs with a partially-set-up playlists folder. (#51 follow-up)

Smart Collections and Playlists feedback sweep.

• Fix Settings → Emulators → BIOS now separates required and optional missing files, so the counts match the per-platform indicators. (#59)
• Fix Playlists section now appears for eXoDOS Lite users. (#51)
• Fix Strategy genre shows its icon in the sidebar. (#52)
• Fix Smart Collection editor labels are readable in Light mode. (#57)
• New Smart collections can combine multiple values of the same field — pick several developers, genres, or decades at once and they're matched as “any of these”. (#53)
• New “Title contains” smart-collection filter — e.g. every game whose title includes “Castle”. (#55)
• New Create your own playlists. Tap + on the Playlists section header, then right-click any game (or a selection) → Add to Playlist. Right-click a game inside one of your playlists to remove it, and right-click the playlist itself to rename or delete. (#56)

Responsiveness + BIOS data + media-playback polish sweep.

• Fix No more beach-ball opening the detail view for games on slow external drives. Diagnostic traces caught two main-thread blockers: (a) the gallery's video-thumbnail generator was calling AVAssetImageGenerator.copyCGImage synchronously — on a slow drive this stalled the UI for 30–100+ seconds; (b) the Play Music button's “does this game have music?” check ran a synchronous filesystem enumeration on every body re-render. Both now run off the main thread and the music check is cached per-game. (reported as Alone in the Dark on a Seagate 5TB drive)
• Fix Sidebar section collapse/expand is responsive on the first click. Button nested inside a macOS List Section header gets its first one or two taps absorbed by the List's row/selection machinery. The chevron + title is now one content-shaped tap region, and the hit target grew from 10pt to 12pt.
• Fix BIOS MD5s match Libretro's canonical values. bios7.bin (Nintendo DS) corrected to df692a80a5b1bc90728bc3dfc76cd948 (#49). dc_flash.bin (Sega Dreamcast) corrected to 0a93f7940c455905bea6e392dfde92a4 and flipped to optional — the main flycast_libretro core doesn't require it; only the gles2 variant does, which isn't available on macOS RetroArch (#50). Full audit cross-referenced every MD5 in the database against libretro-super's .info files; the other 10 entries that map to libretro docs all match exactly.
• Fix Install no longer errors out on archives with truncated central directories. A subset of eXoDOS zips (Stargunner, Bubble Bobble in the wild) ship with partial central directories after interrupted bulk copies on exFAT. 7z recovers the local-file-header payload but exits non-zero. If the destination folder ended up with real game files, install now accepts it as soft-success and surfaces a warning instead of failing outright.
• New Pause media when NostalgiApp is in the background. Two toggles in Settings → Music → Playback behavior: Pause preview video (default on — stops the looped gameplay clip playing under a running DOS game) and Pause background music (default off — leaves the soundtrack playing across apps; flip on if you'd rather it pause whenever NostalgiApp isn't frontmost).

Feedback sweep from GitHub issues #41–#48.

• Fix Gameplay preview videos now play in the detail-view gallery for Lite collections. The video-file matcher now indexes Videos/<platform>/ case-insensitively, handles LaunchBox's filesystem conventions (“: ” rewritten to “ - ”, articles moved to the end, year-in-parens), drops the negative URL cache so post-install downloads surface without an app restart, and falls back to a tolerant fuzzy match (strips year parens + leading/trailing articles) that catches edge cases like “Bugs Bunny Hare-Brained Adventure, The (1990).mp4”. (#41)
• Fix Achievements settings dialog no longer has a blank band at the top or clipped text. Tab switched to .formStyle(.grouped) like every other settings sub-tab; long paragraphs use .fixedSize so they wrap instead of truncating. (#42, #45)
• Fix About panel description uses the full tagline and no longer truncates. Dialog grew to 380×540. (#44)
• Fix “+” button in the sidebar “My Collections” header no longer sits under the scroll bar. (#46)
• Fix Decade counts agree everywhere. The top “80s/90s/2000s Classics” tiles and the bottom “1980s/1990s/2000s” rows used to return different totals because only one code path respected Hide Adult Games. All sidebar badges now share a single filtered snapshot. Also removed the redundant decade tiles from Smart Collections — decades live solely in the Decades section at the bottom of the sidebar. (#47)
• Fix RetroArch custom BIOS locations are detected. retroarch.cfg parser now resolves :\ and :/ (RetroArch's “relative to config dir” prefixes) and expands $HOME / $USER. When auto-detection still picks the wrong path, there's a new manual BIOS directory override in Settings → Emulators → BIOS that wins over the cfg. The BIOS scanner logs the resolved path so any remaining edge cases are diagnosable. (#48)
• New Customize Sidebar. Each top-level sidebar section now has a chevron to collapse/expand, and a footer button opens a Customize Sidebar sheet where you can drag to reorder sections and toggle any of them off. Order and per-section expand state persist across app launches. Reset-to-default is one click. (#43)

Install hotfix.

• Fix Install no longer extracts over an already-installed game. The cached installedGameIds.json is loaded eagerly at launch and the filesystem verify pass runs in the background — on slow-IO drives (USB / external SSDs) the user could click Install during that gap on a game whose folder was already on disk, triggering an extract from an archive that might be corrupt or truncated. Install now checks the data folder first; if content is present, it refreshes the cache and skips the extract.
• Fix Truncated/corrupt ZIPs surface a human-readable error. The error pane previously dumped the raw 7-Zip diagnostic output (“p7zip Version 17.05 ... ERRORS: Unexpected end of archive ...”), which read like an app bug. The error now detects the common truncation signatures from ditto, unzip, and 7z and shows: “The archive on disk is incomplete or corrupt — re-copy the .zip from your eXoDOS source and try again.”

Big polish release.

• Changed Full-size art viewer opens at 175% by default and no longer auto-hides controls. The previous 100% default made eXoDOS and NES art feel unreadable on open, and the 3-second auto-hide timer on the on-screen buttons left power users pressing Escape and reopening the viewer just to page through art. Controls now stay visible until you dismiss them with space or a single tap.
• Fix Playtime tracking is accurate again for direct-launched emulators. Sessions for DOSBox, RetroArch, and MAME now pin to the actual emulator Process via terminationHandler, so the moment the emulator quits the session ends — no more 30-second ps-scan windows, no more runaway fallbacks that could inflate playtime by hours. Quitting NostalgiApp mid-session synchronously credits the in-progress game before exit. The ps-scan fallback (used only for Terminal-launched flows) now ends the session with zero credit if no emulator is detected, instead of waiting forever.
• Fix ROM uninstall actually uninstalls. The old flow followed an eXoDOS folder path that was nonsensical for ROM games — best case it errored out. ROM uninstall now removes the <Game> entry directly from the platform XML and leaves the ROM file on disk so you can re-import later.
• Fix Re-importing a ROM from a moved folder no longer creates a duplicate. Dedup now matches by normalized title as well as path.
• Fix Region and language tags strip cleanly from imported titles. Game (USA) (En, Fr, Es).nes now imports as Game. The filename parser was only stripping the first parens group; it now loops through every region-looking group.
• New Metadata editor for ROM games. Pencil icon next to the title opens a sheet for title, release year, developer, publisher, and genre. eXo-style games stay read-only — their titles feed into archive fuzzy-matching during install and renaming would break reinstalls.
• New Bulk selection in the grid. Cmd-click to toggle, shift-click to range-select. With 2+ games selected, the context menu offers “Uninstall N Games” and “Toggle Favorite on N Games”. The old cmd-click “open full-size viewer” shortcut was removed in favor of standard macOS selection semantics.
• Fix RetroArch and MAME honor the per-game Display Mode picker. Fullscreen launches pass -f to RetroArch and omit MAME’s -window flag; Windowed does the reverse. Previously the setting was silently ignored on ROM games.
• Fix Coverflow actually uses the window. Cover art scales to ~72% of the available height (3:4 aspect) instead of the old fixed 200×280. Trackpad 2-finger horizontal swipe now navigates the carousel — DragGesture couldn’t catch those events, so we added a local NSEvent monitor scoped to the view’s lifetime.
• Fix “No cores found” no longer appears in Settings on every relaunch. The installed-cores panel auto-scans on appearance instead of waiting for an explicit Check click.
• Fix Vita3K firmware detection. Checks four candidate vs0 paths plus a user-configurable vita3kFirmwarePath UserDefaults override, instead of a single hard-coded path. Users with firmware installed outside the default location will stop seeing the “firmware not found” false-negative.
• Fix Other polish. View-mode tabs (List/Grid/Coverflow) register on the first click. Gallery thumbnails letterbox instead of cropping screenshots. Selection shows a progress spinner in the gallery while the filesystem enumerates, instead of the misleading “No images available” flash. The ROM import wizard pre-fills your last-used folder. The “Play the Quiz” menu item is gone.

Two fixes caught by user reports.

• Fix Detail view platform tags match the grid again. A stale-closure bug in GameDetailView caused the variant selector to render one selection behind — so a game like Loom would show the previously-selected game’s platforms in the header and information panel, and clicking a variant tag would jump to the wrong game. The group is now always recomputed against the currently-selected game.
• Changed Dependencies panel simplified. Removed GNU sed, wget, and Bash 5+ rows from Settings → Emulators → Dependencies and the first-run checklist. These were holdovers from the legacy shell-script launcher and haven’t been used at runtime since the independent launch path shipped. Only aria2 (bundled) and Python 3 (optional) remain. If you’d seen these flagged on 1.0.8.7.4, you can ignore them — they were never actually required.

Sidebar UX refresh, a new Synthwave theme, an in-app user guide, and a batch of “state change doesn’t redraw” fixes caught in user reports.

• New Custom smart collections — a new “My Collections” section in the sidebar. Click the + button to build your own filter by developer, publisher, genre, or decade (e.g., Studio = Capcom, Decade = 1990s). Right-click any row to Edit or Delete.
• New Synthwave ’84 theme — deep indigo sky with magenta and amber horizon glow and a vanishing-point grid, applied to both the main window and the Coverflow backdrop. Switch from Settings → Appearance.
• New CRT scanline overlay — optional non-interactive overlay toggle in Settings → Appearance for users who want that old-monitor look. Plays nicely with every theme.
• New Help → User Guide… now opens a proper in-app window backed by the live guide at nostalgi.app/guide. Responses are cached so you can read the guide offline after the first load, with a retry card shown on network failure. External links in the guide still open in your default browser.
• Changed Genres consolidated into one section. The curated 8 genres (RPGs, Adventure, Action, Puzzle, Strategy, Simulation, Sports, Shooter) and the full alphabetical list used to be two separate areas, which was confusing. They’re now the same section — the curated 8 with icons at the top, everything else behind a “More genres” disclosure below.
• Changed Playlists section is now collapsible — matches Decades and More genres. Defaults to collapsed so the sidebar isn’t cluttered on first view.
• Changed “Studios” renamed to “Top Studios” to clarify that the list is the auto-generated top-25 developers by game count (not a hand-curated list).
• Fix No more flicker to “All Games” when changing game state under a filter. Marking progress, toggling Favorite, or editing notes while viewing Favorites / a Smart Collection / a search filter used to flash the full library for a frame before snapping back. The filter-cache invalidation now preserves the previously computed filtered result as a stale fallback while the recompute runs in the background, so the grid stays on the current filter throughout.
• Fix Favorites sidebar count updates the moment you toggle a favorite. Previously it only refreshed on relaunch — the count was reading from a per-game flag that toggleFavorite deliberately skips updating (to avoid an AttributeGraph crash on 55k-game libraries). The count now reads from the canonical favorites set, which is live.
• Fix “With Notes”, “Highly Rated”, and Progress (Playing / Beaten / Completed) counts update live. Adding a note, rating a game, or marking progress used to leave the sidebar badges stale until you clicked another game. AppState now forwards the user-data-version signal to SwiftUI so the count recompute fires immediately.

Polish release. Two hang fixes caught by the diagnostic logger, one soundtrack UX fix, and an expanded per-game core override for RetroArch users.

• New Per-game RetroArch core override now works for any ROM platform, not just Arcade. Any game on a platform where you have two or more compatible cores installed (e.g., Game Boy with gambatte_libretro + mgba_libretro) gets an inline Core picker in the detail header. Pick a specific core for one game without changing the platform default. The picker stays hidden when only one compatible core is installed — install a second from RetroArch’s Online Updater to surface it.
• Fix Duplicate “Arcade” tag in the game detail header — the platform name and the Arcade indicator were rendering as two separate tags.
• Fix Sub-second hang when opening the sidebar, Settings, or Statistics views on large libraries. The installed-games count was recomputed by filtering the full 55k-game array on every SwiftUI body re-eval. It’s now cached and refreshed only when the games array itself changes.
• Fix Up to 1.4-second hang when opening Settings → General. The thumbnail-cache-size scan was running synchronously while the pane loaded. Moved off the main thread; the row briefly shows “calculating…” before the size appears.
• Fix Hitting Play on a soundtrack now works even when background music is disabled in Settings. Previously the soundtrack was extracted and loaded but playback bailed silently on the music-disabled guard. The explicit Play action is now treated as consent — music auto-enables so the soundtrack actually starts. Same fix applies to soundtrack archives in Extras and the Screensaver.

Follow-up to 1.0.8.7.1 targeting a favorite-toggle beach-ball on large libraries and the stray “setup required” prompt that fired on legitimately extracted media packs.

• Fix Toggling a favorite no longer beach-balls or crashes on large libraries. The old code republished the entire in-memory games array on every toggle, cascading into a SwiftUI update so large it overflowed AttributeGraph. Favorite state is now sourced from a dedicated set; list rows mark themselves .equatable() so SwiftUI dedupes unchanged rows on selection and filter updates.
• Fix “Setup required” prompt no longer fires for users whose Content folder holds media-pack archives (DOSMagazines.zip, DOSSoundtracks.zip, Mag!AppleIIGS.zip, etc.). Those archives ship with inconsistent root layouts (some eXo/..., some Images/..., some Magazines/...) which made the old path-inspection check unreliable. Media packs are now treated as optional extras and no longer drive the setup modal.
• Fix Linux-specific variants (DOS_linux_*.zip) excluded from media-pack detection, matching the non-linux preference the XO metadata check already had.
• New Setup detection emits a single summary log line (needsSetup=YES — reasons: ...) naming the exact trigger, so any future setup-prompt report is trivial to diagnose.
• Fix Marker-file write failures on read-only / SMB-weird-permission volumes now log a clear warning instead of silently causing an infinite setup-prompt loop.
• Fix First toolbar / filtered-groups read after library load no longer stalls the main thread — GameGroupManager’s normalization cache is pre-warmed off-main right after load.
• Fix GameDetailView uses LazyVStack so off-screen sections don’t create AttributeGraph nodes until scrolled to — reducing per-selection-change AG pressure on very large libraries.

Hotfix for a persistent “setup required” prompt on launch.

• Fix The “setup required” prompt no longer returns on every launch for users with a Mag!AppleIIGS.zip (or any Mag!*.zip magazine pack) in Content/. The grandfather check was looking at <collection>/Magazines/, but the archive’s actual extraction destination is <collection>/eXo/Magazines/ — so the app never recognised what it had already extracted.
• Fix Setup now writes a .<zipname>.extracted marker after every media-pack extraction (Soundtracks, Videos, Magazines, Books, Catalogs, Mag!*) so a successful setup reliably stops the next launch from re-prompting, even if the grandfather path heuristic can’t resolve it.
• Fix Marker-write failures (read-only volumes, permission quirks) now log a clear warning instead of silently swallowing the error.

This release rolls up everything since 1.0.8.6.

Stability

• Fix Multi-second beachball when opening a game detail view on large libraries with “Group duplicate games” enabled — the variant-detection code was re-scanning the entire filtered library on every SwiftUI layout pass. Now cached per selection.
• Fix Details pane no longer snaps narrower (or blows out to a single-column grid) when the search field activates.
• Fix Large remote/iCloud Drive collections no longer stall the UI during initial indexing — heavy I/O is deferred and batched.
• Fix Sidebar badge counts stay accurate when platform filters change.

Compatibility & Launch Fixes

• Fix No more hard requirement for gsed — the app now falls back cleanly when GNU sed isn’t installed, so Macs without Homebrew extras can still run games.
• Fix Authored dosbox.conf files in game folders are trusted as-is instead of being partially rewritten. Games with hand-tuned configs launch correctly again.
• New Auto-detects the new Media Pack archive layouts that eXo started shipping in early 2026.
• Fix Community game-fix lookups are hardened against malformed server responses.

RetroAchievements

• New Login UI in Settings → Services → Achievements. “Connect to RetroAchievements” button reliably opens the right tab.
• Fix ROM hash matching improved — more games are recognised by the RA server on first launch.
• Fix Play-time tracking is credited to the right game and variant.

Diagnostics

• New Opt-in diagnostic logging under Help → Diagnostics. If you ever hit a beachball, enable it, reproduce, and upload — the logs include the exact blocking call captured live via Mach APIs, not just the idle runloop.

Other

• New ScreenScraper region preference with proper fallback behavior.
• New “Delete all images” action and a parental “Hide adult games” toggle with PIN lock.

• New RetroAchievements login in Settings → Services → Achievements. Achievements appear in the detail view for supported ROM games (NES, SNES, N64, Genesis, PSX, etc.)
• Fix ScreenScraper now prefers English/US box art, screenshots, and logos over German/French/Japanese versions
• Fix Empty space in Settings → Services layout

• Fix Games that failed to launch because their executable was on the mounted CD drive (e.g., Syndicate Plus)

• Fix “Download Full” button leading to a 404 page — now downloads the torrent and opens it in your torrent client directly
• Fix Folder picker reopening after cancelling a Lite download

• Fix CRT shader not working — was using DOSBox-X shader name for DOSBox Staging, now uses native crt/vga-1080p with machine-type awareness
• Fix CRT setting overridden by game’s own glshader config (e.g., glshader=sharp)
• Fix Multiple games not installing with “Archive not found”

• Fix Collection setup failing on SMB/network volumes with “Resource busy” error
• Fix False “setup required” prompt after update for pure eXoDOS collections without Win9x
• Fix Progress bar stuck at 0% during setup on slow volumes — now shows per-archive progress
• Fix Variant selector not appearing when a platform is selected in the sidebar
• Improved SMB/network volume optimization: cached setup status, batched directory scans, lower-priority background I/O

• New Native 86Box emulator support — Win9x games requiring 86Box (Quake, CyberSpeed, etc.) now launch directly
• New 86Box 5.3 (universal) bundled inside the app — no manual install needed
• New VHD differencing disks created natively in Swift, replacing the Windows-only makevhd.exe
• New DOS games with ScummVM exceptions (LSL3, Sierra SCI, LucasArts SCUMM) now reroute to ScummVM automatically
• New Same-platform game variants (e.g., “Standard” vs “DVD Edition”) now group together with a version selector
• Fix Win9x game install extracting the wrong game when title doesn’t match folder name
• Fix Variant selector not appearing in game detail view

Three emulators are now bundled inside NostalgiApp.app, eXoWin9x is fully supported, and collection setup is more robust than ever.

New Features

• New eXoWin9x collection support — 665 Windows 9x games now playable
• New DOSBox Staging 0.82.2 (universal) bundled — covers eXoDOS
• New DOSBox-X 2026.03.29 (universal) bundled — covers eXoWin3x and eXoWin9x
• New DREAMM 4.0 bundled with permission from Aaron Giles — covers eXoDREAMM
• New Settings → Emulators rows now show which install is currently in effect
• New ScummVM and GZDoom now have user-configurable custom paths
• New Win9x fullscreen support with proper scaling
• New Multi-disc CD swapping for Win9x games (F11+D)
• New Win9x games requiring 86Box or PCBox now detected with clear “not yet supported” message

Bug Fixes

• Fix Standalone eXoWin9x collection import — XML fragments now properly merged
• Fix Collection setup skipping EXT/OPT archive extraction when dosbox.txt was already present
• Fix Self-heal game fixes stripping the “call” batch prefix from executable names
• Fix Working directory resolution for DOS games with nested paths
• Fix Bundled DOSBox-X not being detected — app now falls back to bundled emulator before Homebrew
• Fix Collection merge dropping the eXo/emulators folder
• Fix Clear repair alert when Win9x base VHD is missing instead of cryptic error
• Fix DREAMM custom path setting was being saved but never read by the launcher
• Fix Win9x launch scripts now regenerated each launch to pick up current display settings
• Fix Grid view scroll position jumping when selecting a game

Notes

• Note Detection chain still prefers user-configured paths and /Applications installs over bundled versions
• Note App download grew from ~25 MB to ~105 MB for the bundled emulators
• Note 86Box support added in 1.0.8.1; PCBox emulator support planned for a future release

• Fix Download matching wrong game when multiple games share the same base title (e.g., “Deadline” 1982 vs 1996)
• Fix Archive not found for games with Roman numeral I in title (e.g., “Sentinel Worlds I”)
• Improved Replace Help menu item with Discord Community link

• Fix Games with nested subfolder executables failing to launch (e.g., Pinball Fantasies)
• Fix Wine+ECE games launching in a tiny window in fullscreen mode
• Fix Wine+ECE games ignoring the app's fullscreen setting
• Fix Window frame not persisting across reboots (rewritten with plain file storage)
• Improved Show informative alert when a game requires Wine+ECE but it's not installed

• Fix Star Control II launching with copy protection (now uses .COM instead of .EXE)
• Fix BIOS scan searching wrong directory, causing all files to show as missing
• Fix Window size persistence improved across system reboots
• Improved BIOS scan now shows detailed diagnostics: expected vs actual MD5, file sizes, searched directories
• New Add PS2 (PCSX2) to BIOS file database
• Improved BIOS platform status shows gray instead of misleading green when no files are present

• New WorthyPunks gaming stats sync integration
• Improved RetroArch: Detect custom folder settings from retroarch.cfg (cores, system/BIOS, saves, states, shaders)
• Improved Support Mag! prefixed archives and strip quarantine xattrs from extracted media
• Fix Window size not persisting across reboots

• Fix GSplus installation failing due to dead Homebrew cask URL (apple2.gs server returns 404)
• Improved GSplus is now downloaded directly instead of relying on Homebrew

• Fix Apple IIGS games now use the user-configured MAME path from Settings instead of only checking hardcoded locations
• Fix MAME path changes in Settings take effect immediately
• New Warn users when their game collection is on a read-only volume

• Fix Ultima Underworld 1 & 2 not launching (SoundBlaster and MT32 versions)
• Fix Game archive search failing for titles with Roman numerals (e.g., “II” vs “2”)
• Fix ZIP extraction failing for some eXoDOS archives by adding 7z fallback
• Fix Apple IIGS magazine index PDFs not opening individual issues

• Fix Incorrect cover art showing for some games due to fuzzy image matching false positives
• Fix Image cache poisoning causing missing thumbnails after scrolling
• Fix Images not loading after adding a new collection

• New eXoAppleIIGS collection support — 460 Apple IIGS games playable via MAME
• New Automatic MAME ROM extraction and patching for modern MAME compatibility
• New Apple IIGS game installation, launch, and uninstall via native in-app archive handling
• New MAME install prompt with Homebrew command copy and brew.sh link
• New macOS keyboard hints for games that reference numpad keys
• New GSplus as alternative Apple IIGS emulator — install and switch via Settings
• New Auto-detect GSplus installation with one-click Homebrew install
• Fix MAME now quits properly with Escape key (added -ui_active flag)
• Fix DOSBox-X games no longer fail to launch due to incorrect working directory for relative paths
• Fix DOSBox-X SDL2 crash workaround on macOS (SDL_FRAMEBUFFER_ACCELERATION=opengl)
• Fix Collection merge now copies XO metadata marker files to prevent re-triggering setup
• Fix Smarter setup detection when metadata is already extracted but marker file is missing

• New Splash screen now shows loading progress bar and status messages during startup
• Improved Game library cache extended to 30 days — no more unnecessary full reloads after a week
• Improved Removed diagnostic logging from disk image cache (cleanup from Build 68)

• Fix Thumbnail disk cache now works reliably across app restarts — no more re-loading images from source every launch
• Fix Pre-cache now finds significantly more game images (XO metadata images with -00 suffix, fuzzy name matches)
• Fix Clear Cache button in Settings now updates the displayed size immediately

• Improved Faster app startup — the splash screen loads quicker and the library appears sooner
• Improved Smoother scrolling and navigation — reduced unnecessary UI refreshes throughout the app
• Improved Sidebar counts and game details load instantly instead of recalculating each time
• Improved Game lookups across the app are now significantly faster, especially for large libraries
• Fix Battle Tank: Kursk to Berlin and other floppy disk games now launch correctly

• Fix Cloud Save sync now works across machines — saves synced from one Mac can be restored on another
• Fix Cloud Save preserves subdirectory structure when syncing collection game saves
• New Added Restore button to cloud sync UI for downloading saves from cloud
• Fix Cloud scan now discovers saves that exist only in cloud (synced from another machine)
• New Added Win9x game support to cloud save scanning
• Fix Image cache toggle in Settings no longer reverts after toggling
• Improved Directory scan results cached on first access — subsequent image lookups are instant
• Improved Increased thumbnail cache limits (5000 items, 200MB) for smoother scrolling
• Improved Disk cache enabled by default for faster browsing on external drives
• Improved Background thumbnail pre-caching after collection load

• Fix Cloud Save now recursively scans subdirectories to find saves inside nested DOS drive structures
• Fix Thumbnail disk cache keys are now case-insensitive, preventing cache misses from path case differences

• Fix Thumbnail disk cache now reliably loads existing cached images instead of regenerating on every scroll
• Fix Detail pane no longer forces excessive width on smaller screens (13" MacBook Air)
• Fix Cloud Save scan no longer over-counts save files when the game ZIP archive is empty or corrupted

• Fix Seeding toggle in Settings now persists correctly when clicking outside the Settings window
• Fix Significantly faster thumbnail loading from disk cache — replaced slow decode+resize with efficient single-pass CGImageSource API
• Fix Grid view no longer jumps around when clicking on a game card

• Fix Layout settings (view mode, grid size, sort order) now persist between launches when changed from the main window
• Fix HSplitView divider positions (column widths) now persist between launches
• Fix Cloud Save scan no longer reports 0 games when clicked before background install check completes
• Fix CoverFlow now loads thumbnails instead of full-size images, significantly improving scroll performance

• Fix eXoDOS Lite games no longer show "Not Available" — download button now appears correctly
• Fix CoverFlow no longer causes window layout to bounce when navigating between games
• Fix Cloud Save scan now detects save files in eXo collection game folders

• Fix ~338 games with Roman numerals (Dune II, King's Quest VI, Ultima IV, etc.) now correctly match the version database for proper executable and audio config
• Fix DOS internal commands (VER SET, MODE, KEYB) no longer misdetected as game executables
• Fix Install/Play/Download buttons now show instantly on launch instead of after 5-minute background scan

• Fix Search typing no longer lags or causes grid scroll jumps
• Fix Coverflow arrow buttons now work correctly
• Improved Faster game detail view: O(1) game lookup and async media loading with video URL caching
• Fix Case-insensitive game detection for consistent matching

• Improved Massively faster thumbnail pre-caching: directory pre-scan eliminates millions of filesystem calls on USB/external drives
• Improved Concurrent thumbnail generation (8 parallel tasks) for faster completion
• Fix Seeding no longer restarts after being disabled during background torrent preparation

• Fix Disk thumbnail cache no longer gets wiped when refreshing the library or sidebar
• Improved Pre-caching can now be safely stopped and resumed without losing progress
• Improved Spotlight indexing now skips re-indexing on launch if the library hasn't changed

• New Disk thumbnail cache: cache thumbnails on your local SSD for faster browsing when your collection is on an external or network drive
• New Pre-cache all thumbnails at once from Settings → General → Image Cache
• New Auto-detection of slow image loading with prompt to enable caching
• Fix Crash when selecting DREAMM games (e.g. Monkey Island 2) caused by blocking the main thread during emulator detection

• New Universal binary: now runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs
• New Bundled aria2c: download-on-demand works without Homebrew

• Improved Games now show "Checking..." instead of "Not Available" while install scan runs on startup
• New Added search filter to batch operations view
• New Wired up batch operations sheet and Shortcuts integration

• Fix Fixed Gobliiins, Gobliins 2 and other Coktel Vision CD games not launching
• New Added BAT file parser to auto-fix games with absolute CD path references
• Fix Fixed batch uninstall not finding game folders (path resolution bug)
• Improved Batch uninstall now uses canonical path resolution for all platforms
• New Added Batch Operations to Game menu (Cmd+Shift+B)
• New Added Shortcuts integration (App Intents for Shortcuts app)

• New Added option to disable post-launch feedback prompt ("Don't ask again")
• New Added toggle in Settings to re-enable post-launch feedback
• Improved Better extraction error messages (shows actual reason instead of generic failure)
• Improved Removed unused placeholder toggles from Settings

• New First stable release