App Details
sLaunch is a fast and beautiful home replacement for your switch
Screenshots
Changelog
v1.5.6
- Folders: X on a game > Collections files it in a folder, and each folder shows its first four games in every layout
- Hide games you never play (X > Hide); Theming > Show hidden games brings them back
- The menu recovers from a crash on its own instead of stopping the console with an error, with widgets and anti-aliasing off until it runs cleanly
- The menu stops drawing while the console sleeps, which should fix freezes after waking up
- Closing a game waits for it to really exit, so the next game always starts
- Uses less memory on big libraries, especially in Deck
- OpenGL build: fixed white icons in Grid, Line, Cover and Flow
- Theming > USB file transfer can switch file transfer off
- Theming > Start as user boots straight into an account
- Sharper text with anti-aliasing on
v1.5.5
- Search in every layout: press Y and type a name
- Collections: sort your games into folders (turn on in Theming > Collections)
- Deck layout looks more like SteamOS: game art behind the shelf, a Collections tab in the library
- Anonymous online count - a random ID and the version, nothing else (Theming > Online count)
- Fixed labels missing inside scrolling grids with anti-aliasing on
- The update check now tells you on the home screen when a new version is out
v1.5.3
- Fixed the console not starting on system update 23.0.1: sLaunch's background service is now built for Atmosphère 1.12.0
- Requires Atmosphère 1.12.0 or newer
If the console still hangs on the Nintendo Switch logo after updating, other background modules built for Atmosphère 1.11 can cause the same hang: disable them (rename their atmosphere/contents//flags/boot2.flag) until they're updated.
v1.5.2
- Game art behind the shelf like the PS4: Steam screenshots or SteamGridDB key art, downloaded when missing (Theming > Background art: Off / Game icon / Screenshot)
- PS4 Shelf keeps the games you passed visible on the left
- Soft sound when the cursor moves (replace slaunch/sounds/move.wav to change it)
- Fixed games that pick their own players asking for the user again and again
- Sleep requests are logged in daemon.log, to help track down black screens after idle
v1.5.0
- New Shelf style like the PS4 home screen, Shelf is now the default layout (the Xbox 360 style is still in Theming > Shelf style)
- Moved to SDL3 + Vulkan: smoother 60 fps scrolling and effects
- Screen timeout settings (handheld and TV) in Theming
- Fixed games crashing on launch (2002-1002) when their save data didn't exist yet (6)
- Shows a message instead of crashing when there's no space left for a game's save data
- Switching accounts now launches games on the right account
- Album list shows capture dates, fewer repeated box art lookups, logs no longer grow forever
v1.4.1
- Much better loading speed for "Flow" and other modes
- Fixed homebrew and logging issue (FS)
v1.4.0
- USB file transfer - plug into a computer on the menu to copy files, with progress shown
- File manager: browse the SD card, copy, move, rename and delete
- Album plays video clips, with a full photo viewer and slideshow
- Music has a full player: album art, track list, seeking, repeat, shuffle, volume
- Flow is real 3D - solid boxes with lighting, reflections and printed box scans
- Box art from GameTDB, full box scans included, with a region choice
- SteamGridDB is optional now; box art downloads show their progress
- Box art loads in the background - no more stutter landing on a game
- Grid looks like Windows 10 Mobile tiles; Shelf like the Xbox 360
- New Ocean background, Retrowave hills, and every background runs on the GPU
- Simpler first-run setup, with a gallery to pick your layout
- The theme editor saves when you close it
- Fixed: red and blue swapped, crashes on bad images and big ROM libraries, choppy clip audio
- Fixed: some games showing another game's Steam news
Install
Copy the contents of slaunch-v1.4.0-sd.zip to the root of your SD card, or
run sInstaller.nro from the homebrew menu.
v1.3.0
Two people can now share a console without sharing a menu, and homebrew can
hand over to other homebrew.
Settings are per user
Everything you choose belongs to the Switch account that chose it - theme and
your own custom themes, font, icon pack, UI mode, layout tuning, tile sizes and
colours, favourites, manual order, renamed entries, hidden system entries,
pinned homebrew, widget placement and music. They live in
slaunch/config/users//
with a name.txt inside holding the nickname, so you can tell the folders
apart from a PC. Content stays shared, because it is content: themes/,
icon_packs/, fonts/, music/, widgets/, covers/, lang/. So does
anything that belongs to the console rather than a person - the SteamGridDB
key, the homebrew donor title, takeover.txt.
Updating loses nothing. The first account to open the menu inherits your
existing slaunch/config/ files, first-run setup included, so it sees exactly
what it saw before. The originals are copied rather than moved, so downgrading
still finds them, and a marker stops a second account from inheriting them too
- new accounts start on the defaults and go through setup once.
Homebrew that launches homebrew
An .nro handing over to another one works as it always has. What it could not
do is change the terms it runs under: homebrew started from the Homebrew menu
lives in an applet slot with a small heap, and no process can promote itself to
a full-RAM application. So the daemon now watches a drop box:
sdmc:/slaunch/hb_queue/.req mode=app | nro=... | argv=... | donor=...
Any homebrew can write one with plain stdio - the format and a ready-made
writer are in libs/sCommon/include/sl/sys/HbLaunchRequest.hpp. The daemon
takes it the moment the homebrew that queued it exits, never while it is still
on screen, and chains straight into the next launch instead of bouncing through
the menu. Leave donor= out and it uses the donor set in Homebrew > Set donor.
Requests are one-shot and deleted as they are taken, so a bad one costs a
launch rather than a boot loop.
To get this for homebrew that knows nothing about sLaunch, create
sdmc:/slaunch/config/hb_chain_app.txt containing 1, and every chainload out
of an applet slot is handed to the daemon, so what hbmenu opens runs with full
RAM. It is opt-in because it changes where those launches happen: you come back
to sLaunch rather than to the homebrew you came from.
Arguments now survive a launch as well - they used to be collected and dropped.
Also
- NetSurf is filed under Network- in XMB, next to the browser, instead of
sitting with the rest of the homebrew.
- An optional content filter for the covers and news the menu fetches, off
unless slaunch/config/content_filter.txt says enabled=1. See
docs/CONTENT_FILTER.md: docs/CONTENT_FILTER.md.
- The crypto, countdown and quote widgets are back in the build - a clean
build had been quietly shipping without them.
Install
Copy the contents of slaunch-v1.3.0-sd.zip to the root of your SD card, or
run sInstaller.nro from the homebrew menu.
v1.1.0
Firmware compat
rendering fixes
v1.0.0
Grid rebuilt as a tile wall: three tile sizes, per-entry colour, home widgets embeddable as live tiles, adjustable columns and rows.
Widgets receive the height of the box they are drawn in and lay out to it.
Adds a desktop simulator (projects/sMenu/sim) that builds the shipping sources against a stubbed libnx for Linux and Windows.
Locale files brought to full coverage.
Install
Copy the contents of slaunch-v1.0.0-sd.zip to the root of your SD card, or run sInstaller.nro from the homebrew menu.
v0.9.0
sLaunch v0.9.0
The coverflow release. There is a new UI mode that draws your games as 3D boxes
you can turn around, XMB has been rebuilt to match the real thing and is now the
default, and the menu no longer freezes for a few seconds every time you press
HOME.
Flow - a new UI mode
A shelf of 3D game boxes, in the spirit of WiiFlow and Aurora.
- Real boxes with a front, a back and two edges, not rotated flat covers. Turn
one around with the right stick and you can read the back of the case.
- Box art is fetched automatically from SteamGridDB. Put your API key in
Theming > SteamGridDB key and covers appear as you browse. Art is saved to
slaunch/covers/ and only fetched once per game.
- Two images across the top of the back of each case.
- Reflections, and a Nintendo Switch box wrap printed over every box.
- Games and homebrew live on the shelf; everything else (Settings, Media, Power)
is one press of Minus away.
- Flow layout is yours to tune.- Theming > Flow layout gives you box size and
thickness, spacing, turn angle, camera distance and depth falloff, adjusted
live against the shelf itself and saved to slaunch/config/flow.txt.
If you have no cover for a game yet, its box shows the game's own icon rather
than sitting blank.
XMB, rebuilt
XMB is now the default layout, and it is a much closer match to the real thing:
the left-anchored geometry, the uneven row spacing, the fade as rows pass behind
the category bar, and the same proportions throughout.
- Every submenu now wears the XMB look too, instead of dropping you into a
different-looking list.
- The Homebrew category lists every .nro on your card, not only the ones you
pinned.
- Album and Music are now one Media category, with a built-in screenshot viewer
(A for fullscreen, Y hands off to the system album).
- The ribbon background was rewritten: it is a real surface now, with layers at
different depths and colours, its own motion per layer, up to 12 layers, and
free vertical placement.
Everywhere else
- Language- can be set by hand under Theming > Language instead of only
following the console.
- Icon background opacity- slider in the theme editor.
- Minimal is the default icon pack, and it is complete: new gear, music,
games, homebrew and media icons. The old "settings" icon was a wifi symbol.
- New sounds: confirm, click and back. Drop confirm.wav, click.wav and
back.wav (or .mp3) into slaunch/sounds/. startup replaces opening.
Fixes
- The menu is usable immediately.- Widget loading, the audio mixer and the
sound files used to run on the main thread right after the first frame, which
froze the menu for several seconds every time it appeared. That work now runs
on a worker.
- Fully transparent colours were being drawn fully opaque, so an opacity of zero
meant "solid" and every fade that reached zero flashed. Fixed.
- Untextured shapes were not drawn at all on this renderer, which is why parts
of a box could look see-through.
- The album viewer scrolls smoothly instead of jumping.
- Backing out of a screen opened from Flow's menu returns to that menu instead
of dropping you on the shelf.
- Flow no longer runs the console out of memory. It was holding around 145 MB of
decoded image data, which starved other screens of the memory they needed and
left them rendering black - opening a theme to edit it was the easiest way to
see it. It now holds about 19 MB.
Notes
- The images on the back of a box are SteamGridDB "heroes" - wide key art, not
screenshots. SteamGridDB does not host screenshots, so real ones need a
different source.
- Cover matching is by name, so an occasional wrong edition is expected. Replace
the file in slaunch/covers/ to fix one by hand.
v0.8.0
The cross-media bar comes to sLaunch. New XMB mode (Theming > UI mode) does the PSP thing properly: categories ride a bar across the screen, your games hang below the selected one, and the whole thing is touch-driven - tap a category to open it, drag the column to flick through, tap an entry twice to launch.
Two long-standing annoyances are gone. Closing a homebrew now brings you back to the menu instead of relaunching the homebrew forever, and Restart / Power off now actually restart and power off instead of leaving the console in a weird half-asleep state.
Icon packs are in: drop PNG sets into slaunch/icon_packs// and switch between them in Theming > Icon pack. A clean Minimal pack by @meepcat55 ships in the box. Themes also gained an icon background colour, so packs sit right on any look.
sLaunch now speaks Russian, Japanese, German, Spanish and Chinese - it follows your console's language automatically, and slaunch/lang/template.txt is there if you want to add yours. Korean and Chinese consoles get their proper system font too, and a full Noto Sans CJK is bundled under Theming > Fonts.
Also: dragging anywhere now moves the content under your finger (not the cursor), taps in submenus land where you actually tap, and the welcome screen slimmed down to a quiet two lines that fade in and out.
Install:- run sInstaller.nro, or extract slaunch-v0.8.0-sd.zip to your SD root. Reboot after.
v0.7.0
sLaunch now says hello. On boot (and right after setup) you get a welcome screen that greets you by your Switch profile name over the opening jingle, with a different line each time. Don't want it? Theming > Welcome screen.
You can also clean up the menu now - every system entry (Album, Browser, Settings, Power, Homebrew...) can be shown or hidden in Theming > Menu entries. Theming itself stays put so you can always get back.
New Random game entry: it rolls through your library like a slot machine, lands on something, and launches it.
Setup got restyled to match the rest of the menu instead of looking like its own thing.
