Tool Others F95Checker [WillyJL]

WillyJL · Jan 20, 2020

Tired of checking dozens of threads for game updates?
May I introduce you to F95Checker, an update checker and library tool that keeps you up to speed with your favorite games.

Features:

Blazing fast™ and reliable
Very easy to setup and use
Cross platform (windows, linux, macos)
Beautiful and customizable interface
Compact list, comfy grid and kanban columns view modes
2FA accounts supported
Alert and inbox checker
Track what versions you installed and played
Launch games straight from the tool
Custom labels, organize your library how you want to
Archive games to temporarily mute updates
Supported game details:
- Name, Version, Developer
- Type (game engine / type of thread)
- Status (completed / on hold / abandoned)
- Last update, last played and added on dates
- Description / overview and changelog
- Header images (including gifs)
- Download links and RPDL.net support
- Forum tags and personal labels
- Forum score (value out of 5) and personal rating (5 stars)
- Personal notes (textbox you can use however you want)
Sorting and filtering by most of above details, with multisort and multifilter support
Also supports media (animations, collections...) and normal threads
Custom games to manually add games from other platforms
Auto updating (the tool, NOT the games)
Background mode (periodically refresh in background and receive desktop notifications)
Many ways to add games, including a companion web browser extension

Download:
You must be registered to see the links

Compatibility:
Built with Python 3.11+ for Windows, Linux and MacOS.
Binaries are available for all 3 platforms, requiring no setup at all. If instead you want to run from source note that Python 3.11+ is required and you'll need to install the requirements with pip.

Installation:

Windows: Extract and run F95Checker.exe
Linux: Extract and run F95Checker
MacOS: Extract, right click F95Checker.app, select "Open" in the menu and click "Open" in the next popup *
Source: Make sure you have Python 3.11+, install requirements with pip3 install -U -r requirements.txt and run with python3 main.py (this file is marked executable and has a shebang, you might be able to just double click it!)

* If you get a message saying that the application is damaged and should be moved to the trash you need to: close the popup, open a terminal, navigate to the location of the F95Checker.app, type in xattr -d com.apple.quarantine F95Checker.app and press enter; after this the method above to open the app should work fine.

Browser extension:
The F95Checker browser addon allows you to easily add games to you desktop F95Checker library while browsing the forum in 3 ways:

Clicking the extension icon while viewing a thread
Right clicking a link to a thread
Right clicking anywhere on the background of a thread page

Also, it allows you to quickly see what games you have added to your list (and which tab) with convenient icons on the forum.
The extension is available for both major browser families (Brave and Edge count as Chrome, LibreWolf counts as Firefox):

Chrome: Open chrome://extensions/ in browser, enable "Developer mode", reload the page and drag browser/chrome.zip (from the tool folder) into the page
Firefox: Install from
You must be registered to see the links

Alternatively, you can find a guided install in F95Checker sidebar, in Extension > Install.
Please note that this extension is solely to aid the usage of the desktop tool, you still need the desktop application installed and running.

FAQ:

Crashes on start with GLError 'invalid operation'?

Update Windows, update GPU drivers, and if you have them update MSI AfterBurner and RTSS or just disable / remove them.
How do I use this tool? and How do the versions and checkboxes work?

After you have installed it using the instructions above, the day-to-day usage is quite simple. You need to add the games you want to track (more on this below) and every once in a while you hit the big "Refresh!" button to check for updates of your games. Each game has 2 main checkboxes, the "Installed" checkbox and the "Finished" checkbox; this should be quite intuitive: if you have a game downloaded on your system, mark it as installed, and once you have finished playing the content for that version mark it as finished. When a game receives an update you will get a popup about it at the end of the refresh. If the name changes (the game has been renamed by the developer) or its status changed (e.g. from normal to abandoned) you will get a popup about it. If a version number change is detected, however, along with the update popup there will also be an "Update Available" marker next to the game's name and the installed checkbox will be half selected. This is because the tool remembers what version you had marked as installed, so it will show you that you still have it installed, just not on the latest version. The finished checkbox will still be selected, because you had finished that installed version. In this state you can click the installed checkbox to mark the latest version as installed. Now the finished checkbox will be half selected instead, because the version that is now installed is not what you had marked as finished, indicating that there is now more content you haven't played yet. Essentially, remember that the "Installed" box means "Do I have the latest version downloaded?", and the "Finished" box means "Did I finish playing what I have downloaded?"
How do I add games to the tool?

There are quite a few ways:

- Open the thread in a browser, copy the URL, paste it in the tool's bottom textbox and click "Add!"
- Type a name in the bottombar, press enter and select from the options (this uses F95Zone's quicksearch)
- Using the browser extension (more info above)
- Using the "Manage > Import" section in the settings sidebar:
- - Thread links to paste multiple links at once
- - F95 bookmarks and watched threads to add the pages you saved on your F95Zone account
- - Browser bookmarks to import the bookmarks you saved in your browser
- - URL shortcut file for Windows web shortcut files
- - (For the last 2 you can drag the files into the tool window)

After adding the games make sure to refresh atleast once to fetch all the game information!
Can you make it download game updates? and Can you make it detect my game folders?

The main reason I decided to make this tool is because all the other alternatives were, in my opinion, too complicated to setup and did way more than what I wanted / needed. Most of this overhead I believe comes from trying to manage your game folders and files on disk, which introduces SO much complexity and room for error. That is what brought me to making my own program, which will NEVER download updates, manage your folders and so on. F95Checker is not a tool that manages your games, it is a tool that helps you manage your games yourself.
Where is my data stored?

F95Checker stores all it's data at:
- %APPDATA%\f95checker\ on Windows
(usually C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\f95checker\)
- ~/.config/f95checker/ on Linux
(usually /home/username/.config/f95checker/)
- ~/Library/Application Support/f95checker/ on MacOS
(usually /Users/username/Library/Application Support/f95checker/)
in a file named db.sqlite3, while images are saved in the images folder as thread-id.ext. The imgui.ini file stores some interface preferences, like window size and position, enabled columns and so on. Files named f95checker.json and config.ini are remainders from previous versions (pre v9.0 and pre v7.0 respectively). When opening v9.0+ it will attempt to migrate these old configs to the new database system, once that is done these old files will be ignored.
How do I customize the interface, the columns and the sorting?

Everything to do with columns and sorting can only be changed from list view but also applies to grid and kanban view. Each column has a header bar at the top, you can use those to customize the interface. You can drag the headers around to reorder the columns, you can drag the edge of some select columns to change their width (only works if other variable size columns are enabled). Left clicking on a header will sort the list by that column, holding shift while clicking a header will add a secondary sort (multisort). Right clicking on any header will allow you to enable or disable some columns and also gives you access to manual sort. When manual sort is enabled you can drag games (in list and grid mode, not in kanban view) to reorder them. Manual sort remembers the order if you disable and enable it again, but you will not be able to reorder the games if you have any filters enabled.
How can I try new features early?

When I implement new features or work on fixing bugs I submit directly to the
You must be registered to see the links
, so running directly from the source code there could prove unstable at times, and also requires a development environment with an updated Python install and all the requirements up to date. To make testing new versions easier, I sometimes issue beta builds. This usually happens when I make some significant change, or an important bugfix, and want to have some binaries that everyone can try easily and give me feedback. You can see the beta builds in the
You must be registered to see the links
; here you should look for entries with a green tick or a red cross icon. When you open one, scroll down to the "Artifacts" section, look for your platform and click on it to download. Keep in mind you will need to be logged into GitHub to download. If the entry had a red icon, that means that the build has failed for some platforms, but yours might be fine so check anyway.

Have a look at this visual guide if you still have doubts.

About the speed™:
F95Zone does not yet have a proper API serving the information needed by this tool, so the only way to gather them is by requesting the full game threads like a normal browser would. However this is not practical because it consumes a lot of network and computing resources, takes way too long and puts unnecessary stress on the forum servers. This tool makes a compromise: it makes small chunked requests to a dedicated API to check for new version numbers, and when an update is found it then fetches the full thread and scans it for all the game details. This is what allows F95Checker to quickly check thousands of games in a matter of seconds. However this will not detect many other changes, like status and description, so the tool will run periodic full rechecks once a week. When a full recheck happens you will see the status text in the bottom right corner saying "Running x full rechecks".

Progress and plans tracker:
Upcoming features and fixes are tracked on the