Show HN: RomM – An open-source, self-hosted ROM manager and player
94 comments
·June 11, 2025bogwog
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 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.
Edit: this is awesome btw, im definitely setting up a personal instance soon
gassi
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.
TomatoCo
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.
Arelius
> 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.
gassi
This is incredibly relevant to projects in this space, and we continue to hold discussions about what is and isn't tolerated in our community, and what features we should avoid building, in order to protect ourselves from legal attacks. One thing you'll never see integrated into the RomM is a way to pull/download ROMs from cloud services or website; you'll always need to provide the games to RomM directly, after sourcing them legally of course.
kaunta
This idea was explored by Joël Franušić and Adam Smith:
"Playable Quotes for Game Boy Games" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9JYOZWLMlo
MyPasswordSucks
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.
anthk
MAME/MESS just used GIF files for that.
bane
RomM is a great project! I've so excited to see the integrations coming along.
As somebody who's setup a lot of little retroboxes, the idea of doing it once and having my collection served off of my homelab to all my other devices is incredibly appealing. Web-based emulation has come a very long way. Still I prefer to play off of my individual devices many of which don't have good browser support.
Setting those systems up can take hours each, but being able to point something like a Batocera instance or an ES-DE setup at a server and have it self populate with roms, bios files, screenshots, etc, would be a dream. It sounds like this might be the future of the emulation ecosystem and it sounds amazing!
gassi
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.
M95D
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.
gassi
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.
wolrah
> 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.
udev4096
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?
doubled112
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.
gassi
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.
1oooqooq
retroarch downloads entire db of assets.
dawnerd
I'm using it mostly as a way to keep my copies of GOG games organized. I could use GOG's app, but the point of having fully offline copies is to not have them under the control of the people you bought them from.
Romm works really great for this too.
oersted
Side note: for those with large PC game libraries, Playnite is a godsend!
It has a similar UX as RomM, in fact it seems to be inspired by Playnite and has a plugin for it. It also uses most of the same metadata sources.
Playnite is quite mature and powerful now, with a rich ecosystem of extensions, data sources and themes. And even though I am not much of an emulator user, it was easy to hook up to any emulator and local ROM, like Breath of the Wild with Cemu or Pokemon Emerald on VBA.
Not to in any way suggest that you should use Playnite instead of RomM, it looks like a great app, just thought it would be relevant to mention.
gassi
I use both, Playnite and RomM are better together!
atrus
Thank you for being AGPLv3, and an extra big thank you for clearly laying out the needed directory structure. Sometimes it's not always clear. The docs in general are great!
gassi
Glad to hear it!
roger_
Been tracking this for a while and it really needs support for renaming and validating ROMs (e.g. with .dat files) to be called a “ROM manager”.
gassi
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.
roger_
Great, looking forward to it!
I’ve used RomCenter and other tools in the past and I’d love to see similar, comprehensive functionality in something more modern.
papercrane
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.
gassi
Igir is great! We've been sponsoring them for the last few months since many of our users find it helpful. There are docs on both ends for getting it to output a folder structure that's compatible with the app
https://docs.romm.app/latest/Tools/Igir-Collection-Manager/ | https://igir.io/usage/desktop/romm/#
sumtechguy
Have to dig and see if it handles retool items. Unfortunately retool has been basically abandoned. IGIR looked interesting until I realized it could not do parent/clone for redump like retool.
papercrane
Looks like it does support 1G1R with the --single option and can infer parent/clone information if it's not provided, like with redump DATs. You could also use retool to create a DAT with that information based on your preferences, but as you said that's probably not viable longterm since retool is no longer maintained.
indigodaddy
Tried the first NES game off the demo. Surprisingly playable/enjoyable on mobile (Android chrome)! I feel like even a few years ago that the experience in mobile browser on some random retro game site was not even close to this good? Is emulatorJS pretty new or does this project just have all the pieces working perfectly?
gassi
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.
1oooqooq
used on the archive.org rom files for more than a decade.
pipes
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.
gassi
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.
pipes
Thanks for this. If it's running libretro cores compiled to wasm, why is retro arch required? Is it a version of retro arch compiled to wasm?
garrettjoecox
Could you explain the benefits of using this over retroarch, lakka.tv, emulator station, EmuDeck (steam deck wrapper around some of these), etc.
Playing through a browser seems like a downside for me personally
zurdi
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)
garrettjoecox
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
gassi
Another way to put it is that those apps are only installed on a single device at a time, whereas with RomM setup on a server, so you can access your library from any device with a browser. There's a future where ES-DE and EmuDeck can pull games from, and push saves to, a central RomM server.
zurdi
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
gassi
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.
VonGuard
Been using this for a while. It's evolving rapidly and the team behind it is very responsive and passionate. Very excited to see this evolve over time! The only thing that it really needs going forward is more Retroarch cores ported to JavaScript, but that's an upstream problem.
gassi
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...
zurdi
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
zunk
This might be a stupid question. But can you have a general import folder were you just dump a rom and the app IDs it and moves it to the correct system folder?
I have this installed on my unRAID instance and haven't yet figured this out..
gassi
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.
asmor
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).
RomM is a self-hosted app that allows you to manage your retro game files (ROMs) and play them in the browser.
Think of it as Plex or Jellyfin for your ROM library: it automatically fetches metadata, artwork, and game information from online metadata sources to transform your folders into a browsable collection.
You can play games directly in the browser for consoles like the N64, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, and PlayStation 1, using the integrated web emulator (https://emulatorjs.org/). Members of the community have released integrations for Playnite (Windows), muOS (Anbernic handhelds) and Decky Loader (Steam Deck), with many more in the works.
The team has been working on RomM for just over two years now, and we're incredibly proud of what we've built so far. There's no company behind the project, just a bunch of friends building something together that we've wanted for a long time. And of course, the code is open-source and AGPLv3 licensed.
Check out the (kinda slow) demo running on an ultra-cheap VPS: https://demo.romm.app/