FE Launcher

A portable arcade frontend session manager for Windows 10+. For use with HyperSpin, AttractMode, etc.

Overview

FE Launcher is a rock-solid session manager that provides a variety of functionality allowing users to turn a Windows PC into a managed arcade machine.

It acts as a wrapper layer around any modern arcade frontend of choice, allowing you to launch pre-processes, run Lua hooks, and manage sessions on an OS level. If a pre-process or its children unexpectedly terminates, FE Launcher can automatically end or restart the session.

Features

• Reliably launch pre-processes and frontend process as a tracked session
• End sessions with the click of a button, or control when the session should end gracefully
• Script custom pre/post-session hooks with an integrated Lua interpreter
• Add custom scripts to tray menu for easy user access, e.g., a dependency installer

Installation

Important

FE Launcher is intended for recent versions of Windows 10 (1809+) and Windows 11.

FE Launcher is as a completely portable system tray application, distributed as a single binary. It is recommended to place the executable at the root of your arcade drive.

Upon first startup, FE Launcher will create a folder named felauncher in the current directory. This folder will contain the log and settings files, and a hooks directory for scripts.

Note

felauncher.exe requires administrator privileges to allow seamless process launching without UAC prompts and to manage startup tasks via Task Scheduler.

Development

The solution consists of 6 projects:

Project	Description
FELauncher.Host	Entrypoint/lifetime; encapsulates generic host, bootstraps core functionality, and registers DI services
FELauncher.Shared	Shared contracts and constants
FELauncher.Engine	The core implementation of the app's features
FELauncher.UI.Shell	Native system tray menu and Windows 10 notification functionality
FELauncher.UI.Desktop	WPF settings GUI
FELauncher.Tests	Unit tests

Building

Releases are built by publishing the FELauncher.Host project with the included x64.pubxml profile.

To publish with cli:

dotnet publish src/FELauncher.Host/FELauncher.Host.csproj -p:PublishProfile=x64

This will output the executable felauncher.exe located in the build folder bin/x64/.

Testing

Unit tests are located in the FELauncher.Tests project. xUnit is used for testing.

To run all tests:

dotnet test

Roadmap

v0.1

1. Ensure current feature set works as expected.
2. Write user documentation

Future Goals

1. Support CIFS login with Credential Manager and provide Lua API for managing symlinks in scripts.
2. Add support for multiple sessions.
3. Implement a sleep timer: e.g., Wait x minutes before ending session and shutting down or sleeping Windows.

Licensing

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.