RetroNAS: Networking for Retrogamers

Taylor Jadin blogged about experimenting with RetroNAS as a tool to help organize the various devices he uses to play games on his various retrocomputing devices. He describes the tool in the following way:

It does a few different things, but it’s designed to be an all-in-one networking solution for Emulation and retro computing. You are intended to run it on a spare computer, Raspberry Pi, or in my case as a Virtual Machine on my existing home server.

I’m excited to see that it provides a somewhat easy to use method to share a ROM library across multiple devices.

It’s that last sentence that immediately caught my attention. I have several retrogaming setups at the moment including Batocera on a Raspberry Pi 4B; RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi 3B; and a Homebrewed 3DS. Being able to centralize my ROM library on one networked machine that syncs across these devices is very attractive. I have a hard time knowing which ROMs are where currently, and this would be both a fun excursion into networking as well as a useful organizational move. So to dig deeper on what is and is not possible with this setup I asked Taylor to jump on a ReclaimTV stream so we could discuss the finer points of using this solution. It does get a bit in the weeds pretty quickly, but I quickly learned RetroNAS can do a lot more than syncing ROMs. This networked can do everything from acting as a WaybackProxy to a WebOne host to a Gopher server. Maybe the blogging Renaissance of 2025 could happen on the Gopher net, as Taylor suggests.

Anyway, I have yet to dig in on this project, but I have a free Pi Zero that I am going to use  to get this installed and see if I can sync my ROMs once and for all.

This entry was posted in ReclaimTV, retrocomputing, Retrogaming, video games and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

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