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QuickPlayWiki is the main source of end-user documentation for Quickplay, the multi-emulator frontend.

Welcome

Thanks for checking out QuickPlay, the Windows universal-emulator frontend. In case you're not sure what a 'frontend' is in retro-gaming, basically QuickPlay is a tool for managing and launching roms from many systems, from one program instead of using different emulators to launch their own roms. Its different to RetroArch, MAME, BizHawk, Mednafen and the like because QuickPlay's backend is about launching emulators and managing your games (whether they are arcade, home computer or console games). It doesn't try to itself be an emulator, so it launches all of those emulators, and many more.....QuickPlay is a also a Frontend of Frontends, meaning that it can pull in files from other emulation projects that have their own frontends for the systems and game formats they support. Why would you want this? In order to have all your games in one place so you can easily play, search, find and manage them from a single place: no single emulation project is ever going to support every system....

QuickPlay is different from other frontends because it has, upfront, an emulation-finding function: it scans your filesystem(s) for emulators, and then you scan your filesystem(s) for games and link them to the found emulators. You can be up and running in minutes.

QuickPlay is also a different proposition from the other huge monolithic frontends you can get on Windows: its doesn't want to be an immersive Media-Centre. Its very lightweight (the download is about 30 meg) and good for finding and searching and collecting, at the expense of itself suppporting GFX-heavy features (no wheels here!) and videos. Think of QuickPlay more as a playable catalogue of your games rather than an an arcade-machine that's always on attract mode. Its also very portable and easy to manage, so is a great choice if you want to have the same setup on multiple computers. It is very powerful yet very friendly. It supports many types of game sets, in particular MAME, the MAME softlists, the Good sets and GameBase collections, and things like PC Games, the RetroArch games and media players, Comic Book Readers, Game Music Players and more.

QuickPlay also has a unique and thorough approach to the age-old problems associated with playing CD/DVD based games on emulators, where the problems to solve include things like managing all the multiple CD/DVD image formats that are out there, mounting images as virtual drives (and how this sometimes makes games or audio work when just passing a .cue file to the emulator didn't), how to unpack CD/DVD images from archives, and how to pull the images from NAS boxes and unpack and play them locally. The QuickPlay MultiLoader solved all these problems, long ago....

If you have more than one emulator you use and more than one game you play on each, you're going to find QuickPlay useful.

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Contents

Welcome

FAQs

User Guides

MAME Guides

Guides for Specific Emulators/Sets/Topics

Technical Documents

Historical Guides