For a while now I’ve been building something to scratch my own itch, but I want to sense check if it something others others may use.
I run a lot of different retrogaming platforms, many of the capable of loading media over SMB, and I’v always hated having to maintain multiple, often only slightly different, sets of media for each platform.
So like many other people I set up a NAS with a a forrest of symlinks, but it was always messy, hard to maintain, hard to share, and didn’t cope with zipped vs unzipped, merged vs not etc.
So I’ve built an entire file system to invisibly translate between what I have and what each platform expects to see. So I only ever need one set of downloaded media for each system I’m using/emulating.
I also built a pack-based downloader, to help find the right content for each system/platform, metadata extractor, query based mapping system (which means if you want a folder that automatically shows all the Japanese ps1 CD images released in a given year, or any other query based on the metadata it’s harvested, no problem). It also transform files on the fly (so you keep everything zipped and if a platform needs it unzipped, it’ll do that on the fly) and even has plugin system for fancier transforms (for example you can get Apple 2MG files working a mister by transforming them to DSK by the plugin stripping the header and renaming them).
Oh and everything is config driven and those configs designed to be shared. Wether you want to add a new ‘pack’ of media downloads, add support for a new emulator (I’ve only started on MiSTer, RetroBat, RetroPie and Mame so far), or some wacky folder layout for your content, it’s all configurable.
I’ve crammed some other bits in there too.
I put together a short video explaining it, but screwed the output res so you couldn’t read a lot of the screenshots, so I put together a super simple slide deck and tagged the video into the last slide.
Now it’s getting close to a version I feel ok to share with others (I.e when I won’t screw you over by changing the config file layout, again), I thought I’d gauge interest in it before wasting time tidying it up, locking down file formats and started worrying about backwards compatibility etc.
You technically CAN pull it from github now (though only the dev branch, main is months out of date) but please don’t until I formally release it, as I don’t want to waste your time if you configure stuff and I change the config format.
That slide deck and video BTW