Gary’s Note: This article is intended as a companion piece to the video tutorial located here.

One of the best parts of a Linux handheld, be it a Steam Deck or something like the RG351P, is the unified front-end experience. It’s one of the things people comment the most that they miss when it comes to an Android handheld or an x86 handheld. Luckily if you have the ROG Ally or Ally X, Armoury Crate has your back.

Right out of the box, Armoury Crate does a pretty good job with PC games you’ve installed from all the usual suspects. Steam, Epic, EA, even stuff from Xbox Game Pass – They all get detected seamlessly for the most part. It’s also easy to add loose executables, be they older games you’ve moved from PC to PC, or emulators themselves. What’s apparently missing right out of the box though, is how to add emulated games as their own distinct entries. This feature isn’t really missing, it’s just buried a little deeper, and it’s kind of obtuse, so I decided to make a guide to show you how to add individual games from Switch all the way down to Dolphin.

Our magic weapons in the fight for a seamless frontend are batch files. Unfortunately, Armoury Crate doesn’t have the ability to process commands at the end of the executable path. If it did, we could just paste a line of text after each game and be done. The way around this is to use batch files. They’re super easy to do, and you can just copy and paste most of it, so don’t worry. We’ll have you up and running in a jiffy

First off is Switch. You’re going to want to create a new text document in your Switch emulator folder and rename it as gamename.bat.

You’ll want to enable the view setting in windows to let you change extensions, or else this won’t work.

Once you rename it as filename.bat and delete the txt extension, Windows will give you an alert popup. Click yes to rename the file.

Open the text file and type:

start C:\YOUREMULATORPATH\EMULATOR.exe -g “C:\YOURROMPATH\GAMENAME.nsp”

You’re going to want to replace the ALL CAPS text above with the path to your emulator and your rom file. You can do this by locating the file in Windows, right clicking on it, and selecting “Copy as path”.

Make sure that the first part of the line DOESN’T have quotation marks around the emulator path. The second part DOES need the quotation marks. The “-g” part is telling the computer to open up the exe, and then use the exe to then open up the file in the second part of the line. You can also add “-f” after the “-g” to force your emulator to open it in fullscreen mode. That would look like this:

start C:\YOUREMULATORPATH\EMULATOR.exe -g -f “C:\YOURROMPATH\GAMENAME.nsp”

Your next step is to save the .bat file and then go into Armoury Crate.Once you’re in Armoury Crate, go to Manage Library, and then hit the L button or R button to go into File Explorer. You can’t link directly to the batch file, so I always just select the emulator’s exe file and move on.

Hit okay, and then select the emulator and hit the X button to go to game options.

Select game info and click Edit in the top right corner of the screen. In the spot where it says Launch CMD, just copy the path to your batch file. You can change the game title to the title of your game and add the release date on this screen.

You can also download a box cover or other art and add it as the game art on this page.

Now you just hit done and, weirdly enough, you’re done. Press B to go back and you should see the entry for your game. Select it and launch to verify that it works. You might see that bat file flash for a second, but the game should load.

These basic steps are repeatable for all your standalone emulators – the only difference will be the batch files. I’ll list the different systems below and their corresponding batch templates.

PS3: (add –no-gui in between paths)

start C:\YOUREMULATORPATH\EMULATOR.exe –no-gui “C:\YOURROMPATH\GAMENAME.BIN”

Xbox360: (nothing in between paths)

start C:\YOUREMULATORPATH\EMULATOR.exe “C:\YOURROMPATH\GAMENAME.iso”

Citra: (nothing in between paths)

start C:\YOUREMULATORPATH\EMULATOR.exe “C:\YOURROMPATH\GAMENAME.3ds”

Dolphin: (needs /e in between paths and /b at the end)

start C:\YOUREMULATORPATH\EMULATOR.exe /e “C:\YOURROMPATH\GAMENAME.wbfs” /b

PS2: (Same as PS3)

start C:\YOUREMULATORPATH\EMULATOR.exe –no-gui “C:\YOURROMPATH\GAMENAME.iso”

PPSSPP (needs “–fullscreen” or it will launch in windowed mode)

start C:\YOUREMULATORPATH\EMULATOR.exe “C:\YOURROMPATH\GAMENAME.iso” –fullscreen

Are there any emulators I’m missing? Did something not work for you? Let me know! I tested these on my machine, but there’s always the chance I copied something wrong or made a typo!