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.
Y’know, I haven’t really thought about it, but genesis games are at most 4MB, usually much smaller. Most websites are bigger tbh (AI says the Google landing page is 2MB).
I was looking a while back at the Sega Channel and thinking about how to reproduce that kind of experience… … My mind is racing faster than I can type and I keep googling things, and I found this. https://github.com/gameyfin/gameyfin Maybe it’s something you could use? Otherwise I feel like the easiest answer is traditional emulators and a public, read only file share. Of course, a friendly user interface would need some work.
Someone else suggested gameyfin, and it does look like a nice user interface for native games rather than emulated, so I’ve added it to the list to research!