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Comment by garrettjoecox | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

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.

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

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.

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