Reviews for Beacon Game Launcher

Compatibility with NDS Emulators is broken as of now, Beacon is not able to launch the games with Drastic or MelonDS automatically and instead the emulators give an error. Please fix

fantastic. bring customizable grid size in app drawer, some more live backgrounds and this is perfect. would love to be able to resize the game covers.

The best minimalist emulation front end for my android phone! easy to setup and configure, no clutter or multiple settings. Best part is the gif support for animated screenshots per game in the background without needing an internet connection too. Supports my other purchased emulators such as pizza emulators and ppsspp gold. Very satisfied with my purchase, does what I want perfectly. I can show off my collection while also making my phone have console like feels. Thank you very much!

I absolutely love the app. my new favorite launcher. I do have a weird bug when trying to edit the names of games though. when typing, the name will revert back to what it originally was. small gripe, bur overall I love it.

generally good , I keep getting errors whilst scraping though. also there seems to be a bug while trying to edit the name to scrape. I am using an odin 2 pro. if the file name has "decrypted" in it. it is not possible to find the scraped files. also when trying to scrape if you edit the name and delete some of the characters they just reappear before you can scrape with the edited details

I heard/saw this through YouTube and I wanted to have home screen that's displayed games. I like how this is better than the android home screen where android apps are scattered around the screen. This makes my home screen of Ayn Odin portal 2. This Launcher has shown many clean and perfectly organized of each systems. The game art boxes pictures are well done 👍 excellent work and well worth the cost.

I like the Gallery View part, but it would be nice to have another option that allows centering the game Roms in the middle of the screen "But literally, the game should be selected in the middle of the screen, basically **centered**, not on the left side.", having it in a corner is not very comfortable, and having an "infinite loop" so that it has a better design, the rest is fine.

This is one of the best front-end launchers imo. a beautiful interface, very smooth operation. not overly complicated. Easy to configure settings and platform overrides. my only criticism is the scraping. works well on most titles, especially consoles. not so good on obscure games like MAME arcade games. but with a little bit of manual editing it's easily solved. so no biggie. I wish it was possible to disable the 'B' button for apps access. I don't need it and keep pressing by mistake.

Exactly what I've been looking for. I've tried others like Daijisho and Emulation Station but nothing compares to the polish and sleekness of this interface as well as the ease of use. Not a ton of customisation but whats there is already really great so not really a need to change too much. Simple and easy to set up, as well as having the best way to quickly access all your android apps as though using a normal android App Drawer, perfect for an Android based handheld.

Four stars. it would be a five with a few tweaks, but they're just down to my personal preferences. I would love to have he option to use icon packs for the apps screen. I also wish you could have multiple Android tabs within the game launcher, I like having one tab dedicated to native games and another with the core emulator apps, thought it would be in the custom tabs option but Android is currently missing. And lastly I'd love Android TV support as this would be great on my Shield

There is an issue with scraping that needs to addressed especially with Arcade games (MAME). The scraping algorithm doesn't recognize the roms names and scrapes box art for the wrong rom or it grabs box art from a console. For example, Ms. Pac-Man was scraped with box art from the Apple II version and Defender wasn't scraped at all. Bubble Bobble had the wrong box art. It was a pain going in and fixing these. Please look into this for the next release. Otherwise this is good launcher.

I was looking for a frontend to use on my Anbernic rg353p and beacon has all the features I need to scrape my collection, including mame roms with short names and PS1 games with awkward folder structures. The layout is clean and intuitive, color options are nice. I would like some more options for background color (charcoal or tan would be awesome) . If you're looking for a frontend to start your android emulator setup, skip the rest and give this a try. Trust me!

Edit: The custom launchers are very effective, and I'm more satisfied than I was. But the retroarch launcher is operating from a very truncated and out of date list. It's not seeing or calling the beetle cores that have replaced the mednafen cores in the naming style of retroarch, meaning many consoles are not quite playable. But this is now my front end. I'm very happy otherwise.

This is over due, ive had this for almost a week I think. This launcher is amazing! I was looking for something that wasn't just free, but still respectful. It's super simple to set up, works really well with your emulators and whatever app you'd like to launch a game from. It definitely deserves more attention and praise.. I highly recommend it!

There's a lot to like with Beacon; easy and no-fuss setup, being able to add 'custom' platforms, streamlined interface, and the ability to not just 'favourite' but also filter on these favourites. Scraping is also great, but am getting poor results on Switch titles when I select 1:1 artwork. About 50% don't match, and the rest use squashed case artwork rather than nice thumbnails. Would also love to be able to add my own 'tags', and filter on those tags (eg 'played'/'completed').

I think this launcher is great but I've stopped using it altogether, even after paying for pro, because it still isn't possible to add multiple ROMs foldes for each platform. I don't have room on my internal storage to fit all of my ROMs, so some have to be on my SD card, but then launcher won't let me see all my games. It's a deal breaker from me and other launchers don't have this problem. Dev, please fix this. It's been an open item in the discord since launch.

So I want to say that I really want to like this front end.I've been told how simple, minimal, and light weight it is, and it was true... mostly. I ran into trouble launching a few platforms, and after some research, I found I had to make a custom path to correctly launch, which i'm personally not too savvy in. So, if you're an advanced user, this could be decent, but for me, not so much. This app has a lot of potential, so I guess I'll keep it around.

i rarely buy apps but this takes the cake. love the ui and this is perfect paired with emulation. best game launcher, and best purchase I've done for my emulator set up. thank you and hope you keep this up! one tip is, it would be great to add sound effect when clicking through games just like we can add background music!

Beacon is an excellent game launcher but it has some pretty glaring bugs. I want to give it credit and say I really the UI and that it does a good job of looking and feeling modern. My main gripe is that it black screens when launching games via Retroarch if you do it too quickly between games. You need to wait a few minutes or clear the app cache for games to launch again correctly. If that was fixed I would give it 5 stars.

My main launcher !! if there's anything I could add, it would be to allow the wallpapers to appear after a brief second, like at most 1 full second after hovering over a game. while scrolling through them, the wave background can be there as default. another cool feature would be allowing us to add an audio track or video that plays when hovering over a game for over a second. think of how the PSP did this in the xmb menu! maybe have the rest of the library vanish when a game is in focus.