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.

      • ArchEngel@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        16 days ago

        Its much closer to a Dropbox/google cloud folder with game installers in it than it is to some of the other suggestions.

        Like Steam or Epic or GOG, you click download, and it downloads the game files and installer, which you can then use to play the game.

        So in the case of ROMs you would be better off with the other options, as this would just download the ROM file, and you would then have to figure out your own emulation situation from there.

        • WR5@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
          2·
          16 days ago

          Ah okay gotcha. It’s still a pretty nice user interface for them to browse and download so it may be a good option for native games rather than emulated. Thank you for the suggestion!

  • njordomir@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    16 days ago

    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!

    • WR5@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      1·
      16 days 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).

    • WR5@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      2·
      15 days ago

      Thank you for the suggestion! Unfortunately it seems to be Windows application only, and I’ve recently made the switch to Linux.

  • mrnngglry@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    16 days ago

    What about Sunshine and Moonlight? This is something I’ve been mildly interested in for a while but never took a deep dive.

    • WR5@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      2·
      16 days ago

      I’ve never used it. Would multiple people be able to play at the same time? From what I understand of this, the server is what is actually running the game and the client is just basically remote viewing that game. So if more than one person wanted to play at the same time from the server it would not be able to provide both? Or is that just incorrect information.

  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    16 days ago

    what you’re looking for is a multi-tenant game server. only two ways to get that, virtualization or containerization.

    you’ll need a really really beefy server for it either way if you want more than 2 people playing simultaneously.

    since steam works on Linux you might have some luck with steamos on docker.

    you can run multiple instances people connect to and stream all from the same “library”. this means you could technically be able to have halo running across two instances from the same executables. though YMMV since steam may be signing those exes per account.

    alternative is to use something like unraid which has recipes for this exact problem. they use a combination of virtual boxes that use GPU passthrus. probably a larger overhead since it’s a full windows VM running, but you can run pretty much everything on steam in it.