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.


Check out Romm. Not every romm can be streamed but think it meets your needs.
I haven’t set either up yet, but my leaning is more towards gaseous-project due to not having to sign up for an IGDB account.
I can second romm. it has EmulatorJS built in which will run most games in the web interface. there’s also an android app (maybe iOS too can’t remember) and they have apps for a few different handheld emulators. I have their app installed on MuOS on my RG35XXH and I can view my “cloud based” ROM library and download them straight to the anbernic’s local library.
Good point, Romm can integrate well with MuOS, Playnite and other client side software you and others can install onto their actual devices. I’ve used Playnite on my devices to manage the emulator side and download the ROMs from the ROMs server.
In theory, you could also try a sunshine server and moonshine client to steam the games from you’re server but guessing it would only work well over a local network, not over the internet to friends
Looks much better than my response lol. Thanks
It’s great to have options! Never heard of this one so will check it out too. That’s part of the fun isn’t it haha
This looks cool. So they never get a local copy of the game file, it always stays on my server side I think? It also seems to say that the system saves are not available yet but coming soon, which means if they were to play one day and pick it up a week later their progress would be reset; is that correct?