I'm so happy bigger youtubers are starting to cover Beacon! This frontend is seriously underrated. :)

@josephuva

4 ай бұрын

It is definitely my favorite! I find it to be head and shoulders above the rest!

@EliasPfaiffer

4 ай бұрын

@@josephuva better than Emulation Station and Daijisho?

I started looking at this front end not too long ago and completely forgot about it. Seems legit

Beacon was definitely worth it for me. It's my favorite front end for my odin 2

@VividTheater

4 ай бұрын

Why do you like it over Daijisho?

@Spectrewave

4 ай бұрын

​@@VividTheater honestly i perfer the menuing, scraping and overall feel of it more

This made my day ❤ Thank you so much! Awesome review

@JoeysRetroHandhelds

4 ай бұрын

Great work!

been using this for a while and am loving it

Well, the name is a lot better than diajisho. Nice to see more frontend options for Android users.

I like it, looks cool, thank you Joey. Another banger.

Love beacon launcher - I'm not sure why but I gravitate towards it more than daijisho or ESDE. Plus setup is so easy! Which it had a search feature... I'm not sure how it would be implemented, but retroarch can save a screenshot along with the savestate. I would love if the NOW section could somehow grab the savestate screenshot from retroarch to create an onion os gameswitcher-like experience.

I'm currently using Launchbox for Android. I've been using their Desktop software for years so I'm a bit biased. I've got an Odin 2 pro on the way in the mail and when it arrives I'm going to give Beacon a try.

Another solid video mate!!!

U on a roll Joey!! Awesome content as always :D

Pretty good front end and is my primary front end for my Pocket air. I tried several front ends and the top ones were Daijisho, ES-DE and Beacon. Launchbox paid was terrible, it was slow and crashed a lot (might be better now but this was a few months ago). Daijisho was my main for my RP3+ and I loved it but the scraper sucked, and there was a lot of clutter (not a big deal). On my Pocket Air, Daijisho doesn’t register the triggers so I can’t tab consoles or quick scroll thru games so it was not the best one for me to use. Tried ES-DE and even though it was cool, it still can’t combine multi disc games and you can’t access the Android apps. Tried Russ’ idea of my Drawer and anyhome but those apps are garbage. Beacon has been my main on the pocket air. And it surprisingly has a lot of features but you want to play around to find of them. For example, I just realized today that it can combine multi disc games when syncing.

Thanks Joey! I love this frontend

Gonna try this with my RP4 pro, Daijisho constantly crashes for me

Congratulations, great video, is there any way to set background music?

Hi Joey, I've been watching your content a lot recently, question, if this is channel 3, are there other channels?

@JoeysRetroHandhelds

4 ай бұрын

Hahahaha. I love this. It's a reference to how we used to have to change to channel 3 to get SNES to work, or other retro consoles.

Looks fantastic! Can you use subdirectories for your ROMs? For example so you can put your GBA ROM hacks in their own folder?

@NeptuneSega

4 ай бұрын

If anything you can just make a GBA folder and make two subfolders under that named Regular and Hacks or whatever your naming conventions are

Beacon vs Daijisho: which one you choose and why?

Quien lo puede subir el apk de antemano gracias

I tried emulation station when it first launched on android and was subjected to the problems that came with the initial launch. I dont blame the dev by any means but at this point its hard for me to switch from daijisho. This does look like a good front end but im comfy with daijisho.

I guess the weakness of Beacon compared to say ES-DE is that while the visuals are simplistic, the setup of linking consoles to cores etc is much more complex than what most people would need from a front end. Any front end can be fiddily for people who really mess with things, but I think ES-DE does a lot of setting up for you in places the others don't. From what I personally see anyway. But visually I can see why some would choose this over others once setup.

@MithosDagon

3 ай бұрын

The setup of this is extremely easy lol, and was easier than ES-DE for me. ES-DE requires you put all the roms in the folders it creates, and is only easier if ES-DE has that specific emulator setup. If you want to try and get Yuzu to work again, you have to edit an XML file, while Beacon you just select the app and core (cores for Retroarch).

@z0h33y

3 ай бұрын

Out of the 3, Daijisho, ESDE, and Beacon. Beacon is by far the easiest to setup. Second would be Daijisho, and third would be ESDE.

Any idea on how to set up vita 3k games also I can't figure out how to get my 3ds games to launch they show but won't launch

Nice showcase for Beacon, although I don't see any advantages to this over Diajisho other than style preference I guess.

@z0h33y

3 ай бұрын

The biggest draw for these frontends is how simple they are. Alot of people just want something so simple and braindead that they can navigate it with their feet. They dont care about features, customization, or any of that. They just want big pictures, as little buttons as possible, and as little effort put in as possible. You might hear someone say, "Daijisho's scraper sucks", i can only argue from personal experience - Daijisho's scraper has impressed me a bunch of times when it found boxart for my romhacks. I could scrape 100 games for boxart, and it might have an issue with less than 5 games total, and its usually due to how the game itself was named (LOZ:OOT instead of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time)

I've had Beacon in my Play Store wishlist for a few weeks now. It looks good and the price is reasonable. What has kept me from buying it is some seemingly intrusive permissions and my concern about the information Beacon wishes to collect, as stated in the "Data Safety" part of its Play Store listing. They also have stated that they reserve the right to share that information with third parties. The privacy policy PDF linked on Beacon's listing says that the info they collect is non personal and is only used for analyzing crashes and making the launcher run smoother. Okay, fine, I guess. Daijishō doesn't collect any sort of data on its users though; and I'd have already bought Beacon if it were the same way. With Beacon, is there a way to opt out of the data collection or is it always going to phone home whenever one has an Internet connection? Where is the home it's phoning to? And, does any of this matter or am I just being paranoid? I enjoyed this quick look at Beacon. Thank you for making this video, Joey.

@BeaconLauncher

4 ай бұрын

I use some tools that tell me when the app crashes and what's the reason so I can fix the issues as well as some basic analytics like how many people use the app, how many people use a certain feature (eg. manually adding an image) so I know what features to prioritize.

@BeaconLauncher

4 ай бұрын

@@mattdavis9601 yes, and to be extra specific that tool is called Firebase, it's a very popular tool used for mobile apps, I would say 99% of mobile apps use it.

@mattdavis9601

3 ай бұрын

@@BeaconLauncher - I purchased Beacon a couple of hours ago from the Play Store and I really like it. You did an amazing job with your launcher. I just remembered making this comment, but I didn't quite remember how I phrased it. I wanted to come back and apologize in case I sounded like a jerk. After re-reading it I believe I did sound like a jerk and I'm sorry. I'd seen you around on Reddit and combined with your comments here I figured that you're a legit person. I have a bit of paranoia when it comes to personal info and my phone. Maybe a bit too much? I don't know. I got over it though when it comes to Beacon. It's just non-personal analytics and nobody else has reported any issues. In hindsight I believe I was concerned over a whole lot of nothing.

FIRST!!! (someone had to say it 😉lol)

What about launch box Androids front end that they offer?

Daijisho still #1.

Thanks for the review, but it's not running NDS (DraStic) ROMs. It just opens DraStic.

@JoeysRetroHandhelds

2 ай бұрын

That was fixed as of 1.7.1. Have you added your games to Drastic first?

@gladel

2 ай бұрын

@@JoeysRetroHandhelds I didn't add games under DraStic

I dont use retro arch just the playstore gba emulator. So for player app what do i pick?

@JoeysRetroHandhelds

4 ай бұрын

You would choose that app.

Joey, some old games using RetroArch require you to load multiple discs to play, how do you load part 2 of the disk during game play? I find that when I go back into the front end to load disc 2 the game restarts then asks for disc one again. Example: Night Trap 3DO

@JoeysRetroHandhelds

4 ай бұрын

Usually you use the emulator first to do so, then you can launch afterwards. It's in the Retroarch game menu for example.

@VividTheater

4 ай бұрын

@@JoeysRetroHandhelds😆You make everything look easy! Thanks!

hi, can you please add a tutorial for adding VITA#k games on beacon? Thanks a bunch!!

@JoeysRetroHandhelds

2 ай бұрын

Hm? Same steps. No different.

@jamblesm7949

2 ай бұрын

@@JoeysRetroHandhelds thanks for the reply! Actually it's harder on vita3k since games are being installed within the app and beacon can't detect vita games

@JoeysRetroHandhelds

2 ай бұрын

@@jamblesm7949 I have been using Vita through Beacon and follow the same steps here :) are you on the latest version? The only difference with vita is that it doesn't open the games directly, just opens vita3k. No way around it as far as I know, but that works just fine and games all show up.

@jamblesm7949

2 ай бұрын

I see, thanks for the help! [subbed]

I have an issue with some emulators like the N64 one where the emulator app opens but the game is not loaded. Unlike when i choose retroarch, the game loads automatically. Any ideas?

@JoeysRetroHandhelds

3 ай бұрын

Did you add all your roms to that emulator?

@capuman

3 ай бұрын

@@JoeysRetroHandhelds you mean if I have setup the emulator separately first? If so, then no.

@JoeysRetroHandhelds

3 ай бұрын

@@capuman Yep.

@BeaconLauncher

3 ай бұрын

Can you try different options from Platform > Advanced > File Handling?

ES DE for Android is the best

I guess it's better than steam link🤣🤣🤣

3 miseros dolares

Over🎁 🌼😄

It's alright but emulation station takes the win now.

So Joey. Just tried out Beacon. Had to refund it... Bro every platform has to be entered manually AND there's literally LESS THAN HALF of what Daijisho has pre loaded. Cores I have installed myself such as Fake08 aren't even showing up, so PICO8 isn't even possible to add. There's no Atari, no CHIP8, tic80, lowrezNX, Java2me..list goes on. it's a good attempt for a bate bones, but being charged 2 bucks is a joke for this low quality experience. I Instantly refunded it after addijg all the preset platforms and realized how many are actually missing. Daijisho just needs to update Retro Achievements and it'll be King again

@z0h33y

3 ай бұрын

Im of the opinion that if a frontend comes with a price tag, it should be expected to outperform the free options like Daijisho. But i dont think the developers see things that way.

@BeaconLauncher

3 ай бұрын

You can add whatever platform you want, just choose "Platform Type = Custom" and it lets you write whatever name you want.

@유황불못

Ай бұрын

ES DE for Android is the best