Changelog

• improved UI animations
• faster downloads in parallel and multi-threaded image processing
• support for WebP and AVIF image formats
• 80% reduction in size of Nostlan’s graphic assets, same high quality
• converts images to WebP on the fly, reducing storage footprint

Open Box Experience

When was the last time you cracked open a game box, popped out the disc, and put it in a console?

Alas, it’s just so convenient to have thousands of games on a small hard drive.

Yet, I missed opening up game boxes and admiring the contents. Discs often had bespoke art you’d otherwise never see. It’s a nostalgic part of console gaming that other game launchers just don’t replicate. That’s why I created Nostlan back in 2018.

Nostlan version 3.0 is a big free update that enhances the open box experience and saves storage space!

More UI Animations

In v2.8, I added some new UI animations for selecting games, eliminating the dotted cursor which I always felt was artificial and detracted from the skuemorphic feel.

In version 3, game boxes flip open, revealing the open box view. Game discs, manuals, and memory cards now pop out of their game box when you navigate to them, amplifying the tactile feel.

Also when you open a game box, the navigation UI auto-hides for an unobstructed view. Mouse toward a screen corner to bring a nav panel back into view.

Faster Downloads

Nostlan v3 searches for game box assets for several games at once, rather than one at a time. I also implemented multi-threaded image processing, so generating thumbnails and compressing images is much faster.

Space Saving

Smaller image files, same high quality visuals!

Nostlan v3 supports WebP and AVIF image formats, which provide superior compression compared to PNG and JPG.

Nostlan v3 will convert hefty images it downloads to WebP on the fly. It’ll also convert images Nostlan v2 downloaded. If you have large game libraries this may take a while, but the storage savings are worth it.

Why not make Nostlan convert to AVIF? Well currently, hardware accelerated encoding of AV1 and AVIF is limited (only available on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series, Intel Arc, or AMD Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs), and software encoding at high quality can be slow. The jump from PNG to WebP is already a big win.

If you want to compress your own images in batch, the free avif CLI is excellent.

I took the liberty of converting Nostlan’s graphic design assets to AVIF format. I inspected every image myself to make sure there was no visual quality loss and reworked a few to balance quality and size. These assets used to be 187 MB and are now 30 MB total.

Nostlan’s database of GameCube disc images got shrunk from 471 MB to 61 MB.

More free updates coming soon, thanks to your support!