At the risk of going against the consensus..
My ideal launcher would be something like this:
- Smart phone styled grid of square icons (see the game
Memo as an example of how this could look)
- Icons grouped into "pages" that can be flicked left/right with the shoulder buttons (each page could be named, eg "AGA Games 1/2")
- Full name of the game only displays when you're hovering on the icon
- Press BLUE or another button to launch text file viewer to temporarily view docs
- If it's not too difficult, some way of manually altering tooltypes? eg enabling WHDLoad trainers etc
- Navigate with joystick or mouse
My rationale would be:
- Tried, true and modern launching system
- Efficient use of space. If configured like Memo above 48 icons could fit on a single screen, if I recall correctly AMSCD32 shows 30 games on a PAL display and around 25 on an NTSC display
- As opposed to screenshots, you could load a large number of icons into RAM so once the launcher's ready, it doesn't need to access the disc again
- Reasonably quick navigation as you'd be able to move the cursor in eight directions, quicker still if you have a mouse