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Show HN: RomM – An open-source, self-hosted ROM manager and player

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Re: Show HN: RomM – An open-source, self-hosted ROM manager and player

#51

Post by gassi »

pipes wrote: post #49

Looks lovely. Thanks for creating this. If you have time: Does it (or can it) run emulators natively? I'm trying to get my head around js emulator, how is that libretro? Is libretro compiled to wasm? Is it running retro arch underneath or have you managed to implement the libretro API? I love and hate retroarch. Its menus are ridiculous but it's still easier than managing multiple emulators.

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.

Re: Show HN: RomM – An open-source, self-hosted ROM manager and player

#52

Post by Arelius »

bogwog wrote: post #14

I had an idea once but not the time nor motivation to build it: a database of game design with links to gameplay snippets. So for example an article on "2D platforming" that discusses the implementation in Super Mario, and includes a "demo" button which launches a web emulator with a save state that demonstrates a specific jumping section of the game. Legally perilous maybe, although my non-lawyer brain sees that as…

> 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.

Re: Show HN: RomM – An open-source, self-hosted ROM manager and player

#53

Post by gassi »

M95D wrote: post #46

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, and that means the temptation to gather this data and sell it to advertisers is very high.

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

Re: Show HN: RomM – An open-source, self-hosted ROM manager and player

#54

Post by gassi »

doubled112 wrote: post #47
M95D wrote: post #46

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, and that means the temptation to gather this data and sell it to advertisers is very high.

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.

Even if we could bypass calling the API directly, just fetching, storing or loading images from IGDB or SSFR would "leak" some data in those calls. In theory you could block the container's access to the web, then identify and upload cover art for every game by hand.

Re: Show HN: RomM – An open-source, self-hosted ROM manager and player

#57

Post by zurdi »

garrettjoecox wrote: post #33
zurdi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I think I might just be too far from the target audience to understand this. I don’t see any of the other options as non “self hosted”, they aren’t backed by some cloud infrastructure owned by a company, those are all locally running apps on your device

As Gantoine said, the main difference is that you can't access any of those tools from other device, only from the one where it's installed

Re: Show HN: RomM – An open-source, self-hosted ROM manager and player

#58

Post by anthk »

bogwog wrote: post #14

I had an idea once but not the time nor motivation to build it: a database of game design with links to gameplay snippets. So for example an article on "2D platforming" that discusses the implementation in Super Mario, and includes a "demo" button which launches a web emulator with a save state that demonstrates a specific jumping section of the game. Legally perilous maybe, although my non-lawyer brain sees that as…

MAME/MESS just used GIF files for that.

Re: Show HN: RomM – An open-source, self-hosted ROM manager and player

#59

Post by zurdi »

pdntspa wrote: post #42

Can we collectively stop using the word "beautiful" for app descriptions. It is so overused and now effectively meaningless. Besides, beauty is supposed to be in the eye of the beholder, not the creator trying to put words in other peoples' mouths. If you are aiming for 'beauty' (whatever that actually means), then build it to a high standard and let other people find the words on their own accord.

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

Re: Show HN: RomM – An open-source, self-hosted ROM manager and player

#60

Post by TomatoCo »

bogwog wrote: post #14

I had an idea once but not the time nor motivation to build it: a database of game design with links to gameplay snippets. So for example an article on "2D platforming" that discusses the implementation in Super Mario, and includes a "demo" button which launches a web emulator with a save state that demonstrates a specific jumping section of the game. Legally perilous maybe, although my non-lawyer brain sees that as…

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.
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