I’ve been messing around with launching applications through Steam because I like having my games accessible from one central hub, but one thing that bothered me with games I wanted to play in an emulator, was I had to launch the emulator GUI from Steam and then use that to navigate to the game.
So I looked into it, and discovered an easy solution. You just create a batch file(a text file with .bat in the name), and then put in you commands to launch the emulator and game.
For example, in GGPO KOF2002 you would do this:
Create a text file(right click, new, text document)
Put in the path to your emulator, example:
“C:\users\user name here\desktop\emulators\ggpo”
“C:\users\user name here\desktop\emulators\ggpo\ggpofba” kof2002
Then save as "kof2002.bat"
Double click the .bat file to make sure it launches the game correctly.
Put kof2002.bat into a folder called “kof2002”(or whatever you want). Put that folder somewhere out of the way, like in a new folder called “steam exes” in My Documents.
If you want your executable to have it’s own icon, you can take an image you want to use and then use this handy online converter to convert it into an ico file: http://image.online-convert.com/convert-to-ico
Then put that image into your kof2002 folder.
Now you need a simple program to convert a batch to an executable. I used this one: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bat2exe/
Simply input the path for your kof2002 folder and it will convert the contents into an exe file. The path will look something like this “c:\users\user name\my documents\steam exes\kof2002”. Anything in that folder is added to the executable, so make sure it’s only the batch file and the ico file you made.
Now you simply go into Steam, to add a non-steam game through the menu, and browse to your kof2002 folder.
I’ve only tested this GGPO and MAME, and they work alright. For other emulators that load isos and whatnot, you need to use different paths in your .bat file, but I haven’t messed with that yet. More info on that can be found here: http://misterslimm.wordpress.com/2012/06/23/using-steam-as-a-front-end-for-individual-games-in-emulators/
Here’s a video I just found that explains how to get the correct image to show in big picture mode: