Slipcase

A game collection browsed on screen is a wall of flat rectangles. The same collection on a shelf is a row of boxes you can see the thickness of — and it looks enormously better.

Slipcase turns the first into the second. Give it a flat 2D cover image and it renders a photorealistic 3D box: front face, spine, top edge, correct proportions, proper lighting and a soft shadow underneath.

What it does

• Knows what the box should look like. Every case type is modelled at its real measurements in millimetres — a SNES cardboard box is 30 mm deep, a Blu-ray case 12.5 mm, a Game Boy box is small and surprisingly chunky. Around fifteen case types are built in, covering everything from NES cartridge boxes and Genesis clamshells through DVD and jewel cases to DS, 3DS, PSP and Vita.
• Builds a spine when your cover does not have one, which most scraped cover art does not.
• Finds the artwork for you. It can search the usual cover-art sources directly, so you are not hunting for images by hand.
• Renders it cleanly. Everything is drawn at double size and scaled back down, which is what stops the edges of the box looking like a staircase.
• Outputs what your frontend actually wants — PNG with a transparent background, sized for RetroArch's thumbnail system or LaunchBox's larger 3D box art, at the same viewing angle those libraries use.

It processes a whole folder at a time, not one cover at a time.

Where it stands

It runs, and there is no download yet. It works and it has a test suite; what it does not have is a packaged build, which is the remaining work rather than a change of mind. For now you run it from a copy of the source.

It is built with Python and Qt, and downloads images only from a fixed list of known art sources over HTTPS, with a size cap, because "fetch this URL and decode it as an image" is not a thing to leave open-ended.

When it ships, it will be a Linux download like the rest. The repository is public and linked at the top of this page.