Retro Game Cover Downloader

A modern Windows desktop application that automatically downloads missing cover art for your retro game ROM collection from the official libretro-thumbnails repositories.

Key features

• Multi-system support — discovers the available systems directly from libretro's thumbnail repositories.
• Smart scanning — compares your ROM files with the covers you already have and finds exactly what is missing.
• Batch downloading — downloads every missing cover in one click, with live progress and status messages.
• Rate limit aware — throttles requests to GitHub, falls back to cached data when limits are hit, and unlocks 4,900 requests/hour when a personal access token is configured (55/hour without).
• Resilient networking — exponential backoff retries, a 503 circuit breaker, branch fallback (main → master), and a Contents API fallback for raw.githubusercontent.com.
• Secure settings — your GitHub token and proxy password are encrypted with Windows DPAPI.
• Modern interface — Fluent Design dark theme built on WPF-UI.
• Diagnostics built in — structured logging, local error logs, crash reporting, and a background update checker.

Get started

1. Install the application on your Windows PC.
2. Follow the User Guide to set your folders and download covers.
3. Configure a GitHub token to unlock the full download rate.
4. Stuck? See Troubleshooting.

Explore the documentation

Page	What you will find
Getting Started	Requirements, installation, first run, and command-line usage
User Guide	The complete walkthrough of the interface and workflows
Configuration	Token, proxy, file extensions, data locations, and privacy
Architecture	How the application is built and how requests flow
Troubleshooting	Solutions for the most common problems
Development Guide	Build, test, and contribute to the source code
Release Process	Versioning, CI, packaging, and documentation publishing
FAQ	Frequently asked questions

Project links

• Source code: https://github.com/purelogiccode/RetroGameCoverDownloader
• Releases: https://github.com/purelogiccode/RetroGameCoverDownloader/releases
• Issues: https://github.com/purelogiccode/RetroGameCoverDownloader/issues
• Discussions: https://github.com/purelogiccode/RetroGameCoverDownloader/discussions
• Website: https://www.purelogiccode.com

License

Retro Game Cover Downloader is released under the GPL-3.0 license. See LICENSE.txt in the repository or download bundle for the full text.

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Copyright © Pure Logic Code. Made with care for the retro gaming community.