Cool idea, would be a fun POC or weekend project. The team behind EmulatorJS (https://emulatorjs.org/) has made it stupid easy to inject the player into a static website (or multiple players with iframes), with a preloaded game and custom settings.

I think you could make your fair-use defense a lot stronger by stripping the ROM. Shouldn't even be that hard! Only let it run for a few seconds, record all the memory accesses, zero everything that wasn't hit.

> Legally perilous maybe, although my non-lawyer brain sees that as fair use, especially if the emulator doesn't let you play the full game. Idk, but it'd be a unique thing on the internet.

IANAL, but I think what a lot of people don't understand is that "fair-use" is a defense. Which basically means you have to be prepared to argue in in court. A lot of potential fair-use is quashed before it gets to that point.

It's also a balancing test, which means that it's very fact/context dependent, and subjective, which results in for a lot of cases, you really won't know until you actually get to court.

This idea was explored by Joël Franušić and Adam Smith:

"Playable Quotes for Game Boy Games" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9JYOZWLMlo

The database idea is neat, but I'm not really sure what the web emulator part adds besides bloat. Either an animated .GIF or an HTML5 object with buttons to click to demonstrate, e.g., standing horizontal jump trajectory vs running horizontal jump trajectory would not only be less overhead, but much more immediate.

MAME/MESS just used GIF files for that.

I love your vision and enthusiasm! You seem to have a solid setup already and a great use case for a future version of RomM.

What fortunate timing! Our next release will including a new, local-only "API" that uses Launchbox's GamesDB (https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/) as the metadata source. The entire database is loaded into Redis and games are matched on exact file names, so no data is ever sent to any cloud providers.

https://github.com/rommapp/romm/pull/1515

> Fetching anything from the internet means some cloud knows what games I'm playing. It's a privacy risk. Games played are very revealing to personality type, and probably lots of other individual info

It seems like OP already replied with an upcoming feature to entirely eliminate your concern, but I would also point out that this doesn't mean the cloud service knows what games you're playing, they just know what games you have which for many gamers are two very different things.

That's especially true for those with a large enough ROM collection to be interested in tools to manage and simplify access to their libraries. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of potential users have collections that are exponentially larger than the list of games they actually play, in many cases some variety of a "complete" collection.

Use a goddamn VPN or Tor if you don't like being profiled. We live in the era of mass surveillance. It is obvious that everyone is being profiled all the time. It's a meta-data aggregating player, how the fuck do you think that works?

It is optional. If you don’t configure the integrations it won’t fetch anything from the internet.

It looks much less impressive without cover art though.

retroarch downloads entire db of assets.

Glad to hear it!

I use both, Playnite and RomM are better together!

1000% agree, and we're planning to do just that with Hasheous (https://hasheous.org/), a "free service that matches MD5 or SHA1 hashes of ROMs and digital games with metadata providers". There's a cloud version hosted by the project creator, or you can spin up your own instance and source the .DAT files.

Your comment piqued my interest, as that would be a required feature for me to use something like this.

It looks like they do support integrating with a tool called Igir to handle validating and naming ROMs using DAT files.

https://docs.romm.app/latest/Tools/Igir-Collection-Manager/

The project that powers the in-browser emulator is EmulatorJS, which use RetroArch's libretro cores compiled to WASM. More info on the process here: https://emulatorjs.org/docs4devs/buildingraw

I believe it's running RetroArch, as when you load a corrupt file or start without selecting a game it displays the RA menu. If you want to dig deeper you can check out their github or ask in their Discord, the team have been wonderful to work with.

EmulatorJS.org is a complete, open-source rebuild of the closed-source emulatorjs.com, and has now surpassed the performance and feature set of the original emulator. Their team continues to make strides with the experience on mobile, and we'll make sure to keep RomM updated as new releases come out.

used on the archive.org rom files for more than a decade.

This is a self-hosted solution, unlike all those sofware you mention. You will install this in your server through docker and you will manage your ROMs library with a clean interface. Being able to play in the webUI itself is an extra since we just integrated emualtorjs (from emulatorjs.org)

Ideally you would use both, and the community would build integrations that allow, say, EmuDeck to pull games from the server onto your Steam Deck and sync saves back to the server.

I usually play on Windows with Playnite (https://playnite.link/), and the plugin (https://github.com/rommapp/playnite-plugin) allows Playnite to pull and display the list of games for each system, after which I can install the ones I want to play onto my PC.

We just added support for Doom and Amstract CPC in today's patch release! It's been available upstream for a while now so we just had to enable it. There's also a new update for EmulatorJS coming soon (currectly in beta testing), and I've been thinking of releasing a custom image with the nightly/beta build for testing...

Thank you for your kind words! And yeah, the emulation part is more in the emulatorjs team roof, they are doing a great job too

That's not possible (yet), you can upload a ROM from the web UI (button in the navbar) but you need to select the platform it belongs to. When we implement hash-based matching with Hasheous (https://hasheous.org/) you'll be able to upload a bunch of ROMs, or throw them into an import folder, and the ones that are detected correctly will be moved to the "right" platform folders.

I use igir for this. It's a bit of work to setup though.

(Pro tip: Use the {datName} template token instead of --dir-dat-name if you use clean with single DAT files, or the "only delete from folders we touched" rule doesn't apply, learned the hard way).

Sadly no. We had sqlite support long time ago but it became way too hard to maintain as our database arquitecture grown, so right now we only support mariadb and postgres

Hi! for some platforms like switch where the games have a Title ID we first try to match against a static file RomM already has loaded and fallback to metadata providers (igdb, screenscraper and mobygames for now) searching by filename

Hosted as in self-hosted, as in run on a server with Docker/Proxmox/Unraid and accessible via a web browser, as opposed to running locally on a single device.

The solution isn't ideal for those who hoard entire romsets, but it's great for those of us who curate their collections down to a more manageable size. That can be anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand games, and the metadata sources are fairly robust at that scale.

I assumed it meant that the emulator is written as a ROM that loads itself.

But that's probably not what it means. Kids throw words around meaning all sorts of strange things these days.

If/when someone builds an Android app we could easily port it to Android TV with some tweaks for controller and remote support. However playing the games gets a bit tricky, as the built-in player might struggle with the low-end hardware used in many consumer smart TVs.

Of course! we are excited about the post and we want to answer any question regarding RomM. Answering you:

1. That's exacty what RomM (among other things) does. You will have a Jellyfin/Plex interface from where download your games 2. Right now we match using the name of the file, but we are planning to add match by hash thaat will increase the accuracy even more. If it doesn't match anything, you are able to match it manually from the interface in a very user friendly way. 3. Yes, our API docs are integrated into RomM itself, so any RomM instance you can access will show the docs. It can be your own instance, or the demo site one for example (https://demo.romm.app/api/docs) or (https://demo.romm.app/api/redoc)

Apart from that, we have some integrations with different systems, like a plugin for playnite or an app for muos or portmaster to avoid download from the browser itself but from a native client (https://docs.romm.app/latest/Integrations/Playnite-plugin/) and (https://docs.romm.app/latest/Integrations/muOS-app/). A lot more integrations are in the works

At it's core it's a system for organizing and displaying your collection of retro games (ROMs). Instead of navigating through folders or manually moving games from a hard drive to whatever system you want to play on, you can load them into RomM, navigate to the app and download them from the browser.

You can share it with your friends so they can access your library, use the plugins to download games directly onto some platforms (without a browser), or play older systems in the browser for a quick session.

At some point we'd like to handle save file sync between devices so you can stop playing on one device and pick up where you left off on another!

I've been working on integrating RomM into Lutris (https://lutris.net/) for a while, but it's not ready yet since I haven't had time to finish it. Not as a plugin but directly in the main Lutris repo: https://github.com/gantoine/lutris/tree/romm-game-service

It would allow you to store your games on the server, sync the list in Lutris, and install them when you want to play them. I'd like to get a working POC to demo to the Lutris team soon-ish. Oh and if anyone sees this and would like to help get us there, contributions are always welcome!

You can thank the EmulatorJS team for that, they're really killing it: https://github.com/EmulatorJS/EmulatorJS

Could be worse, it could be "blazing fast!"

We're building this app for us, our friends and our community, and if we collectively find it beautiful, then it's objectively beautiful. :)

We put a lot of effort in making it responsive and aesthetically beautiful dude! Sorry to sorry to hear that you dislike it