Changelog

• new high quality image databases for GBA, N64, NES, PS2, Sega Genesis, and SNES sourced from The Cover Project
• new builds made for Windows arm64 and Linux arm64
• added “flip” button to flip a game’s box, so you can see the back cover

New Image Databases

Nostlan’s main source for cover art, The Cover Project, recently started requiring human verification, so Nostlan wasn’t able to download covers automatically.

I’ve created some new image databases to fix this problem!

If you’re stuck with no covers or want to download high quality game art images in AVIF format, simply delete the “images” folder, which Nostlan downloads images to.

Open the Nostlan menu and click “Edit Game Library”, then click “Rescan All Games”, and it’ll get all new images!

Note that at this time, Nostlan still can’t download covers for PSP, Xbox, and Xbox 360 game libraries. Check on my progress and stay tuned for v3.2.

Filling the Open Box View

While there’s a plethora of cover art databases, I’ve had to scour the internet for images of discs and cartridges. So it was great to find three new sources!

New Source for PS2 Discs

“Kirkland’s Manual Labor” is an incredible resource for game manuals and also PS2 game discs.

The author, Steve Kirkland, responded to my request for permission to use the assets he made:

That looks like an awesome launcher- finally some presentation over just functionality. It is the perfect home for my somewhat raw assets ;)

The PS2 discs scans are a mixed bag for sure, some scans are soft/blurry and have color issues. But Kirkland scanned the most popular PS2 games at high resolution and quality, so he’s being a bit modest.

Check out the open box of Rez, a PS2 classic!

New Sources for NES and SNES Cartridges

I also found NES carts and SNES carts by Kondorito and Hyperspin community content creators.

It took my computer 3 hours to download those images, due to them being in dozen part RARs, with a one download at a time limit, and severe rate limiting on Hyperspin. Oof!

Improving Nostlan’s Image Database

The internet isn’t permanent: sites change, throttle speed, or even go offline.

But thousands of man hours went into creating these resources for the public benefit, and it’d be a shame for them to be lost, forgotten, or underutilized.

I think part of my job developing Nostlan is to act as a curator and librarian: organizing and preserving these assets for future generations to enjoy.

Nostlan’s Game Art Sources

GameTDB, is “a collaborative database of games for anyone to use in any game-related project” that’s designed like an API. Folders are organized by system, game media, region, and game ID, which makes it easy for Nostlan to download game art automatically.

                       sys/media/region/gameID.ext
https://art.gametdb.com/3ds/cart/US/AREE.png

But other sites weren’t designed for this purpose.

For example, The Cover Project (TCP) is a public resource for printable replacement covers. Each cover simply has it’s own unique ID, dictated by upload order, with no relation to the console or game ID.

./download_cover.php?src=cdn&cover_id=17697

Scraping TCP to match their cover IDs to game IDs took a lot of work, but the results were worth it!

Trouble is that TCP recently started requiring human verification to download images. This was probably done in an attempt to decrease server load, and I want to respect that, so Nostlan users won’t download directly from TCP anymore.

I scraped all the full cover images from TCP, converted them to AVIF, sorted them by game ID, and uploaded them to Nostlan’s new image databases on GitHub. That way you can get them on Microsoft’s dime instead.