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'''Frontends''' are programs that address a quality-of-life issue that emulators may not fulfill.For example, some emulator developers skip the user interface portion of development by having the user launch them from the command line.This usually means opening Command Prompt in the folder where the emulator is installed and typing something like <code>emulator.exe game.rom</code>. From a usability perspective, this is not optimal; running emulators from a shell can be considered tedious if commands aren't already scripted by the user (and they can't be expected to know how to set up such a thing if their first time loading the program is a black window that pops up and then disappears). To avoid this, many emulators will try to incorporate some kind of ''graphical user interface (GUI)'' in their standalone builds. For the emulators that never receive one however, a separate frontend project usually emerges.
Frontends have different ''Graphical User Interface (GUI)'' types. Some use the ''[[wikipedia:WIMP (computing)|WIMP type]]'', that uses Windows, Icons, Menus and a Pointer (like a mouse), examples of these interfaces are [[LaunchBox]] and [[OpenEmu]]. Others are intended for viewing on bigger screen (like a TV or arcade cabinet), and have navigation mostly optimized for game pads or joysticks (they usually also work with keyboards), these types of interfaces are here referred to as ''HTPC'' - [[RetroArch]], [[HyperSpin]] and [[MAME|MAME's]] integrated frontend ''MEWUI'' are examples of this. There's also ''Touch'' interfaces which are intended for smartphones and tablet computers, mostly found in Android frontends.
