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Game Library for Friends and Family (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hello all! I have never selfhosted before, but I have a pretty extensive digital library of videogames (ROMs from a couple dozen retro systems among other executables) that my friends have expressed interested in having access. What's the ideal software for giving them access to the library hosted on my drives? I'm picturing something like a selfhosted Steam where they see all of the games and can search via retro system, game tags, by name, etc. and each of could keep track of separate user accounts by playtime, favorites, recently played, etc. I use RetroArch and a few standalone emulators myself connected to RetroAchievements, so I figured they would need to download any emulators on their ends and then just pick and play the games as they see fit without having to have their own copies of the games.

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[–] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

I would check out Recallbox. It's quite polished feeling and looking. It can run on a raspberry pi, or something more powerful. You mention accessing the files and I liked the SMB access because I could just cut and paste my new ROMs over from the PC or phone. I imagine you could set up a script to do this automatically or just expose a read only SMB server for your friends to access. If your games are older, like Atari or Sega Genesis this would work great. If you have big ROMs like Gamecube or Xbox, then you'll probably need a different solution since copying entire romsets to the device itself may not be practical.

I have seen a DIY Steam-ish software floating around, hopefully someone pitches in to get you that link as well.

I hope your project goes well!

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 6 months ago

    Thanks! I'm trying to limit their need to download the entire library again. I mean I could just buy some large SD cards and make copies of the library and give them, but that doesn't feel like an ideal solution. Someone mentioned Romm which looks good, though I'm curious how to handle larger files too (up to like PS2 and even modern games).

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