Launcher help

The launcher is the desktop half of Soullinked: it pairs to your identity, verifies your games, wires up the emulator, and keeps every run in its own folder. Windows-first, because that is where the emulator lives.

Pairing

The launcher never asks for your token. From the home page, open Pair a launcher: the site shows a QR code and a short pairing code. Scan or type it in the launcher and it mints its own device credential, stored in the operating system's keychain — codes last five minutes and work once. One identity can pair as many devices as you like, and rotating your token cuts every old credential loose at once.

The ROM library

You bring your own games — the platform never downloads, uploads, or touches a game file. Point the launcher's library at your ROM folder and it verifies each dump locally against the No-Intro fingerprints: a green check means a clean, known-good copy; a bad dump gets a named error instead of a mystery crash three hours in. Only the hash of a verified dump ever leaves your machine — a fingerprint, not a byte of the game.

The doctor

When something feels wrong, run the doctor — one click in the launcher's native panel. It re-verifies the installed tools against their pins, checks that the emulator is present and the bundled Java actually runs, reads the ROM library, probes the local proxy port, sanity-checks your newest run folder (including that saves land), and pings the server. Every check comes back green, yellow, or red with a plain hint, and the whole thing copies as a text report — scrubbed of paths, tokens, and anything else that is yours — for when you ask for help.

The SmartScreen speed bump

The Alpha installer is not yet Authenticode-signed, so Windows will show "Windows protected your PC" the first time. Click More info → Run anyway — once, at install. Updates are a different story even in Alpha: every update manifest is cryptographically signed and verified before a byte is applied. OS-level signing lands with the public Beta.