I've been lucky in my incessant poking at the developers of all kinds of gaming projects, programs and sites recently.

I'm sure by now you'll know that I've done this with plenty of devs: from Heroic and Lutris, to RomM and RetroDECK. With plenty others as well. My aim is to chat to the people who create the things you all know and love, and might use yourselves. I feel that it can be rare to hear from those devs. Rare that they get any of the spotlight, so my series of these interviews is my attempt to change that!

This time I've befriended and chatted to the dev who runs the site called EmuReady, which is a site dedicated to compatibility reports - what emulators, devices and settings work best for emulated games.

The developer, Producevity, was kind enough to agree, and I'll share the full little Q&A I did with him here, in its entirety and without me picking and choosing quotes from him.

However, if you're more interested in an article format, I wrote one up and shared it on Gardiner Bryant's site (which you can find here with this link! - he's been kind enough to let me submit lots of articles and interviews on his site, and posts them there)

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THE BEGINNING:

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Can you tell me about how the idea for EmuReady first came to you? What pushed you from "this should exist" to actually building it?

This might sound weird, but I have never been into gaming, this changed about a year or 2 ago when I tried the game Elden Ring. Maybe not the best game to start with, but it really showed me the art of games and storytelling. After discovering the world of gaming, I felt like I had missed out on so much, especially the games from my childhood that somehow never interested me back then.

Natually, I started looking into retro gaming and emulation. A lot of emulators not being as mature and stable, the compatibility Google Sheets were a decent solution the community came up with to share this information.

That said, Google sheets suck for information like this, allow me to list a few.

• They are not easily searchable
• Everyone and their dog has their own version of a sheet, for every emulator, every device, every configuration, etc.
• The same people (and their dog) are constantly updating these sheets. Having no archive meant that usefull information would get lost.
• There is no room for discussion and most importantly, no room for verification of the information.

So I started building EmuReady, being pretty new to this community I asked around and received a lot of useful feedback. In particular, Ryan Retro's community and Ryan himself has been very helpful.

Was it something you made for yourself at first, or did you always imagine it as a public tool? And are you still running it solo...or have others joined you behind the scenes now?

I never intended to use it myself, which may sound weird, but I personally enjoy the tinkering process and it may even be more fun than playing the games themselves. But since Reddit is filled with people asking for help regarding emulation, it's clear that not everyone enjoys the tinkering process and just want to enjoy their games. I like making things, and emulation quickly turned into a passion. So I might not be the target audience, but I do understand the target audience and this was my way of giving back to the community.

Currently, the development side is mostly done by me, there has been a couple PR's from the community, which is a way developers can contribute code to the project.

However, there is a lot of moderation work that needs to be done, and I am very grateful for the help I get from the community in this regard. A user by the name of Drackool has been a great help in moderating the site, since every single report needs to be verified by a human before it can be added to the site to ensure the quality of the information.

Then of course, there is the community itself. Once a report is approved, it's up to the community to verify the information. EmuReady has a voting/verification system in place, where users can vote on the accuracy of the information. If a report gets enough votes, of gets verified by one of the developers of the emulator the report is for, it will be marked as verified and show up higher in the search results.

The community contributions seem to be growing fast lately, with more reports coming in every day. That must be exciting to watch those numbers grow!

Yes, it absolutely is! I did not expect the site to grow this fast, it almost started to stress me out since this hobby project started to cost me 50-60 euros a month in server costs. It's very exciting to see that we get 10k to 20k unique visitors a day, and as long as I can afford it, I will keep the site running and improving it.

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COMMUNITY:

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Have there been any standout moments or bits of feedback in your short site-life so far that stuck with you?

Yes, there have been a few, but one in particular. A user on Reddit suggested something like a "trust system".

This is probably the most complex part of EmuReady and I won't go into too much detail here, but there are essentially a lot of systems in place that work together to ensure the quality of the information on the site. Voting is a big part of this, but also the amount of contributions, and what information a user has contributed.

A benefit of this sytem is that it slowly allows EmuReady to become self-sustaining, since the more trusted a user is, the more permissions they gain. Being able to edit reports for typos, and having their reports automatically verified, are just 2 examples of this.

Do you feel like the people using EmuReady “get” the vision you had when building it, or has the community helped shape that vision in unexpected ways?

There are a lot of people that do, and use it exactly as I intended it to be used. There are also users who fail to see the benefit of this over the 7392468 different Google Sheets that are out there.

A lot of these users changed there mind, but EmuReady is an alternative, and in my opinion, a better alternative to Google Sheets. People can just use what they prefer, and I am happy that EmuReady is an option for them.

By all means, for anyone unaware on what EmuReady is, tell them how they can help!

EmuReady is a community-driven platform that allows people to find, share, vote/verify and discuss game compatibility for their specific device and emulator. If you are a developer, the project is Open Source and the community is doing a great job of submitting GitHub issues, so if you see something that you think you can implement or fix, you are more than welcome to do so!

As for other people, simply using the platform helps a lot, but the most valuable thing you can do is vote/verify reports to let other know if the information is accurate or not. If you find a report that is incorrect, you can downvote it and if a report matches your experience you can upvote it. This way EmuReady can prioritize the most accurate reports and show them higher in the search results.

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THE FUTURE:

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I noticed you recently added support for PC games, which seems like a nice move, to really be an all-in-one site.

That's a funny story, haha. I was personally arguing against this, but the community was very vocal about it. I was worried that it wouldn't provide enough value because of the sheer amount of different PC configurations, it just isn't as reliable as a report for a specific device with the exact same hardware.

That said, I don't see EmuReady as my platform anymore, it's a community platform and with the amount of people asking for it, I decided to give it a try. Unfortuately, about 2% of all the searches and submitted reports are for PC, the other 98% is still for handheld devices, which still contain PC handhelds like the Steam Deck, GPD Win, ROG Ally, etc.

Maybe it needs a bit more time to grow, but I am happy that we have it now and I am sure it will be useful for some people.

What are your current goals for the site? And what are the wild, dream features you’d love to build one day?

The site is mostly feature complete, but as with any project, done doesn't really mean done. I recently added a lot more quality of life features and some neccessary features to present EmuReady as a more mature platform. For example, it's very likely that there are also a lot of users that are minors, so I added a way to report inappropriate content and a NSFW filter to hide NSFW content. So only users that opt-in to see these games will see them, and the rest will be hidden by default.

Could you see something like an Android app, emulator integrations, or even personal game libraries happening? Basically, what does your “perfect future version” of EmuReady look like?

Absolutly! And this is the part I am most excited about. The Android app is already in the works and I have been closely working with the developers of "Eden" (Switch Emulator) and Winlator (x86_64/windows emulation on Android) to make an integration with EmuReady. This will allow users to find a compatibility report and with a single click, open the game in the emulator with the correct settings applied. This is a feature that I am very excited about and I think it will be a game changer for a lot of users. The goal is essentially to make emulation as easy and accessible as possible, so that anyone can enjoy their favorite games without having to worry about the technical details.

This will require a lot of work, and it is work that needs to be done on a per-emulator basis. I am currenlty making the implementation for Eden and Winlator, but I am also open to working with other emulator developers to make this a reality for their emulators as well.

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YOU:

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Tell us all about you! Is this your first project like this?

It's not my first project, I have been a software developer for about 15 years now and I love to build things.

This is however my first project relaled to gaming and emulation, and I am very happy that it has been so well received by the community.

(I HAVE to ask this one) – give us your fav games, maybe a top 5 or 10 retro game list?

Well, I don't have a huge library since I only started gaming about 2 years ago, but I can give you a list of games that I have enjoyed so far:

1. Elden Ring
2. Portal 1 & 2
3. Subnautica
4. Hollow Knight
5. Undertale
6. Cyberpunk 2077

As for retro (or older) games:

1. The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (GBA)
2. GTA: San Andreas (PS2)
3. Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain (PS1)
4. Gravity Rush (PS Vita)
5. Hotline Miami (PS Vita)
6. Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES)
7. Super Mario 65 (N64)

Are you an avid handheld SBC collector, like some are?

This feels like a self report, since I just mentioned that I only started gaming about 2 years ago. Don't tell my wife but I have a few handhelds, I currently own:

• Anbernic RG35XX-SP
• Anbernic RG35XX-H
• Anbernic RG40XX-H
• R63A
• Sony PlayStation Portable
• Sony PlayStation Vita
• Retroid Pocket 5
• Steam Deck OLED

And one final thing of note, which he told me in chat after the questions and answers were sent back and forth:

Something I should have mentioned: all money donated goes to server costs, everything above that gets donated to other emulator developers and people in the community like TheGamesDB

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If you'd like to see more of EmuReady, and what it is and does:

• Here is their website

• And here is their GitHub

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I know this one's rather short, but again, I'm sharing this to get the full answers from my questions when chatting to Producevity. If you're a gamer who loves SBC handhelds, then you might have some experience with what settings worked best on which devices. I know EmuReady would love you to contribute your findings to the site.

I do have more articles/interviews coming with other developers in the coming week or two, as well. So, I'll share here as they happen (if you'd like)

...and I'm curious, anyone use, or submitted info on here to EmuReady?

If you want to follow along with my gaming words, you can find me on Mastodon, too:

I'm sure you'll know by now that some time ago I did a full interview-ish effort with the dev team behind RomM. RomM - three our of five of the team gave me answers on their history of the project, emulation as a whole, self-hosting, ROMs and building what they did.

That RomM Project is an open-source, self-hosted application that's designed to organize and give you a nice, clean and pretty way to view and play your retro video game collections. Its got a clean, responsive web interface that allows users to scan their ROM libraries, then grabs the metadata from sources like IGDB, MobyGames, and Screenscraper, and playing games directly in your browser via built-in EmulatorJS support.

It supports over 400 gaming platforms (seriously), accommodates various naming conventions, multi-disk games, and custom tags. It even integrates with tools like Playnite and muOS, and upcoming features include device syncing for games, saves, and emulator settings.

I reached out to the team again about their new release for RomM - RomM 4.0.0, which also included at the same time a full Android app made by a community member. They agreed to share their thoughts and experiences putting it together with me, and while 24 or so hours ago I shared a full 'article' I wrote on this, based on these answers they gave me, I'm sharing their full answers here on Lemmy with you.

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I write these little interviews, Q&As and articles with devs from all kinds of gaming, Linux and Steam Deck projects and programs. Its fun for me, and I love to help people get a peek behind the curtain, and get to know who is behind these bits of software they might know and love.

I've previous shared interviews on Lemmy with:

• The RomM Project (like I mentioned!) in general
• The solo dev behind Minigalaxy
• A PC game repacker (piracy!)
• The dev who runs a Switch piracy FreeShop
• Independent Linux & Gaming journalist, Gardiner Bryant
• The creator and dev of Lutris
• The team who make Heroic Games Launcher
• With RetroDECK

Do be warned, this is a little rough, since I intended to cherry-pick the quotes for an article, there might be some general statements from one dev, then some direct answers to direct questions from another.

Regardless, I do hope you enjoy this!

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With danblu3:

About the Android App:

Our main goal is to have RomM reachable from any platform, we want to be the centre piece of your retro library and an android app has always been an idea in the devs head. That said, the Android app is not something we claim (fully) an amazing user by the discord name of "MattSays" actually made the application and just dropped it into our discord one day without warning, we did have a very basic and functional version from a user called "samnwella" which did do the job, but it was clunky and I know they won't mind me saying this. MattSays dropped it and the UI was there, the functions was there, everything. It was gorgeous even from a 1.0 release. Community reaction has been positive, bugs have been raised and already squashed, and in relation to the RomM team both Zurdi and Arcane have reached out to MattSays for further discussion, it's currently being branded as the official Android connector app for RomM and as for team status for MattSays, that is up in the air. The future? It's definitely bright for the Android app, the dev is very keen and even wants to get save syncing up and running. Imagine this flow: Going into ES-DE and with the recent Android app launch update you open the RomM android app, using your controller you scroll to a game you fancy playing, press A and that's it, downloaded, you exit the app, back to es-de, scrape the game and play. No removed SD cards, no plugging into your PC, no dealing with SMB users or NFS perms, just, done. Dusted. The future is very bright for this app.

About the new 4.0.0 release:

Right. So. 4.0 4.0 from many different point of views is huge, from preservation enthusiasts, from retro nerds, from the people who just want a retro fix and the completionists, 4.0 is HUGE. Before I go on to say what 4.0 is let me explain about hash matching, I'll make this very simple and it's possible I might get something a little bit wrong here or there but the theory is correct. A hash is like a signature, and each ROM (file) has a unique signature, some people way back when began groups to dump these games in the name of preservation and put all this together into a library called .dats, these .dats files store a unique signature and this unique signature will match to a game name, it's development date, if it was ever released to retail etc etc. Two of the biggest names of these groups is NoIntro and Redump, they both specialise in different media formats but with them combined they built a "digital bible" of what game is what signature, with 4.0 we finally introduce hash matching with the help of two incredibly skilled developers. Why is hash matching better, why am I so excited?

• It's faster, much much faster. Right now when a ROM is scanned into RomM it breaks apart the file name, removes the (tags) and then sends an API call to the metadata agent of your choice with the name, even though we began to get a high success rate it relied HEAVILY on your files being named correctly.

With hash matching, ROM reads the unique signature of the file and is told near instantly what the game is and what data is needed to be scraped, without wasting time doing a fuzzy match.

• It's more accurate

The fact we can now match on hash means that you could have a game named "TLOZ: AltP.zip" which is a snes game from way back when and you named it like for ease of use, you load it into RomM and are confused why it doesn't match, you know it's the legend of zelda! But RomM does not, because of the weird name you chose, like come on? It's one of the best games, give it the full name! Anyway, with hash matching it'll look inside and see the game file, extract and work out the signature and instantly match it against the matching signature online, pulling all metadata and information it needs, without you needing to rename your whole collection.

• It's prettier - Now we have confidence in what your matching, we've made SteamgridDB a metadata agent, it was before but we left it to user decision. Now that we are confident in the matching we can pull gorgeous artwork for the matched games directly from SteamgridDB, and we still give user the choice if they want to change it.

Now that is out the way, I want to give a huge shout out to Yukine for making Playmatch and FlibbleHexEyes for making Hasheous both these technologies have been implemented in RomM and honestly they are flawless. Yukine has been a regular around discord and I'm pretty sure he began working on hash matching pretty damn quickly just for his own benefit, he then released a small tool which caught the eye of the RomM team, a few conversations later and here we are with it as a service. It's essentially a 2 in 1 service where it does the hash matching through a lighting quick database and then proxies that over to IGDB to pull the relevant metadata from their servers, all in record time compared to our API to IGDB route. Then onto FlibbleHexEyes, people who are around the self hosting scene might recognise the names, and yes he is the lead dev and creator of Gaseous, I would say a competitor but not really only because of how well we get on with him, the self hosted space is large and there is enough room for all of us, no point sniffling creativity! It's another hash matching service (we go from 0 to 2!) and it's similar in the vein of playmatch, just on its own location and maintained directly by Flibble.

Without these two amazing devs 4.0 would not be as huge as it is now. We have more news as well! In 4.0 we introduced launchbox support, this is essentially an offline database that is downloaded every day and used for matching. It does not do hash matching but it does fair better with ROM hacks on testing, it's also very good for people who want to control exactly what is coming in and out of their server as it does not need an API key and the queries are ran locally (until we go to LB to collect the art) Something that might have been missed is that we also support retro achievements! This is purely display purposes but if you have a matching hash, 9.9/10 you have a matching retro achievement and it will update your status on how your doing when it resyncs, it's a nice little QoL feature and we even show the difference between hardcore and soft core achievements. Want to help contribute? Well now it's now easier then ever with an official devcontainers RomM container, which will be explained further in the release notes but the environment is contained in the container, just pull it and start developing, no setting up extra libraries and so forth. 4.0 is huge for RomM. It's deserving of the major number and this has lit a fire under the dev team, I'm sure there will be a small hiatus between updates to let them recover but as we always keep saying. We're just getting started.

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With Yukine (community member and contributor:

What changes are you making?

The main changes for RomM 4.0 besides adding new Metadata sources (like LaunchBox) is the integration of Playmatch and Hasheous I've created the Pull Request to add Playmatch Support into RomM and arcane added Hasheous support a little bit later Playmatch (and Hasheous too) is a Microservice which does Hash based matching for Roms, it incoperates DAT files from Groups such as No-Intro and Redump and keeps a database of those Roms with a mapping to external Gaming Databases such as IGDB, right now only IGDB is support but i plan to add other Gaming Databases such as Screenscraper, MobyGames, Launchbox, SteamGridDB and more

How was your experience, making these changes with RomM?

The Pull Request to RomM wasn't really all that hard, even me who doesn't usually do or write python was able to integrate it quite easily into RomM that said there was work the RomM Team did before my change was merged to ensure that the logic runs in the correct order What i mean by that is that in RomM 3.10.x it used to be so that the resolution step of Metadata was running before the calcuation of hashes When you integrate services which require you to send the hashes of files for the metadata provider resolution you usually want these hashes calculated which before wasn't possible because Matching of Metadata Provider was running before the hash calculation step After arcaneasada changed that and did some other side work the Playmatch PR was quite fast ready to be merged, i think it took less than 2 weeks to get it merged into RomM

How long has this release been 'in the works' for?

As i said above the PR itself was only ~2 weeks of work but Playmatch itself was quite a lot more work I've started Playmatch back in June 2024 (over a year ago already ) as a side Project of mine, at the time RomM was quite a bit more immature especially the Metadata Matching part, i personally have quite a big Rom collection and when only ~40% of all games got a match on IGDB i was quite annoyed because i didn't want to go through my whole collection and manually match all the unidentified games to get the nice looking metadata for them Out of annoyance i thought how i would fix that, thinking about other Projects who also use Metadata Providers i checked out how they solved it and then i also found Hasheous at the time which basically was @FlibblesHexEyes Solution to the issue. After checking it out i decided that while i know C# and i think he did a good Job i wasn't quite sure if i would've solved it this way and the database structure of it wasn't quite speaking to me (when i thought about performance and how many req/s it would likely get) so i decided that i could probably write a small microservice myself and i oriented myself at Hasheous but also at Skyhook which is a Metadata API Sonarr uses and how they solved a lot of issues with that

What can the users, both existing and new, expect from this 4.0.0 release?

Generally speaking 4.0 with Playmatch and Hasheous enabled should improve Automatic Metadata matchinig a lot. When users enable them they will be queried for each rom and if either has a metadata match in there database it will be used This makes RomM a lot less reliant on Rom Names and exact naming matches and basically kills the naming requirement completely assuming the Rom Hash is in either Playmatch and Hasheous (usually if your ROM matches the No-Intro or Redump DAT thats the case) and has a Provider match in either. Playmatch does by default automatically try to match ROMs it gets from the dat files to IGDB but sometimes that also fails when for example the ROM name is localized and on IGDB there is no Alias for that name. Playmatch also allows users to "suggest" manual mappings for No-Intro/Redump roms, if a rom was not automatically mapped due to naming issues i described before users can now use a Discord Bot to suggest a mapping to be added to Playmatch, after an Admin (currently thats me) reviews it and approves it it'll be added to playmatch and RomM can make use of it This Discord Bot is also added to the RomM Server so that users can do the suggestion there if they like to, this also helps out the whole community (so when the next person then checks playmatch for the same hash it already has a mapping!) which is generally the ideal state that the community can "maintain" a mapping database themself

Any significant difficulties? Anything you're particularly proud of with this release?

There were a lot of difficulties to be fair but thats normal Playmatch is written in Rust which is a Memory Safe Language and a very fast and performant language too. When i initially thought about how i would create Playmatch i had a few key aspects in Mind.

It needs to be fast and handle a lot of http req/s when a lot of RomM users run library scans

It should keep a low memory usage so i can run on a small VPSIt should have a good Database ORM because i dislike writing raw SQL queries in code generally My choices were between Rust, Golang and C# but i decided for Rust because the HTTP Server Actix im using has decently fast benchmarks, the language can run a http api on only a few MB ram and also the Database Driver im using (SeaORM) is great and very fast for database queries Playmatch does a lot of things automatically by now, it can automatically download & import dats and after import also automatically try to match unmatched games to IGDB for example the matching logic is also decently smart, the datting group No-Intro for example has a cloneof id relationship set in there dat file, basically if a game like Pokemon Emerald has multiple versions (different regions, Demos, Betas etc) they write it down in the dat file with an id and a clone of id field, Playmatch can make usage of that and use it for matching, if any game gets matched playmatch automatically matches the games parents and of the parent other child games as well so that if i manually match lets say No-Intros German Pokemon Platin ROM playmatch will check the database and see that other roms (Like the Italy Pokemon Platin Rom) is a clone of the same parent (The Europe or USA Pokemon Platin Rom usually) and then apply the same mapping to it as well For automatically matches this is a great benefit, like if one of the different region name is either the Direct Name or an Alias of the Game on IGDB then we can match all versions of a game This fixes the issue for localized rom naming a lot as well, if you use any Rom Manager or tool which renames your ROMs to match names from No-Intro/Redump dats this will now not make the Identify step of RomM fail because the name is localized and not like that on IGDB and also if one region gets matched now all region gets matched! this makes it less annoying to manually match as well when instead of 20 matches for all different versions (Regions, Beta, different Revisions) of Pokemon Platin you just match any of it and Playmatch does the other one fully automatically Another big issue generally is compression, RomM does not enforce any format when accepting ROM files for Platforms, users usually want to compress there roms if possible to save space zipping Roms is one way but usually the compression rate is not that good especially for newer consoles with for example encryption (which decreases compression rate by a ton) so most Homebrew Communities have developed own formats to compress ROMs a few examples are Wii / Gamecube raw format is .iso and the a common compression format is .rvz which is supported by Dolpin Emulator Wii U Raw format is .ISO but the common compression format is .wux A lot of Disc based system Emulators support .chd files which is a format the MAME team developed with a very good compression rate DAT groups such as No-Intro and Redump usually only create dat files for "RAW" or original formats so if you want to compress your roms it will not be matching to Playmatch anymore as Playmatch only holds rom data which is from a DAT group Luckly the Community already has made DAT files for a few of those formats but depending on the format and compression used these formats might have some randomness depending on what compression level and settings are used Playmatch currently has community dats for .rvz, .wux and decrypted PS3 Games

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With FlibblesHexEyes - community member and contributor:

Hey! So, just to clarify I'm not part of the Romm team, though I do work closely with them.

I work on Hasheous (https://hasheous.org/), which provides hash based ROM matching to metadata providers as well as metadata proxying.

Hasheous came about from my other project called Gaseous Server (which is similar to Romm - started about the same time) where I noticed a major point of friction for users was matching their ROM files to metadata providers such as IGDB.

This led me to begin the Hasheous project where a user adding a ROM to their ROM Manager of choice (Hasheous was always designed to be client agnostic and not favour one client over another).

The idea here is that when adding a ROM, instead of the user having to manually say that file is "Choplifter", the client (Romm or Gaseous), would reach out to Hasheous and say "do you know what this file with this SHA1 hash is?" and Hasheous would respond with information about the ROM and where the client could find metadata such as summaries, and cover art.

Which led to solving a further point of friction for users which is that many metadata providers require an API key - and an often convoluted method to generate them - which led to Hasheous having the ability to proxy some metadata providers.

This allows users of Romm (and others) to have a completely friction free experience when adding ROMs to their libraries. It's this part that I'm particularly proud of.

It's taken me about a year to get Hasheous to where it is today. By far the biggest issue is that of data integrity. Hasheous relies on DAT providers (such as TOSEC and NoIntro) who all name games slightly differently. The same is also true of the metadata providers. Examples include that a DAT might name a game with a dash, which the metadata provider might use a colon. Individually these are reasonably easy to match, but at scale it gets a lot harder. So building out a community contribution method (to fix bad matches) that is abuse resistant was also a challenge.

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With MattSays - community member and developer responsible for the Android app:

Yeah sure! You may want to know why I decided to make this app. I recently got into retrogaming handhelds and in particular Android retro handhelds, and I also discovered the existence of RomM. However, to my surprise there wasn't an app that could easily handle all of my rom collection without having to go to my browser and manually do all the steps required to just play my desired games. So I developed a client that could improve the usability of RomM on Android without too much hassle and shared all of this with the charming community that instantly tested it and gave me precious feedback.

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And that's that!

Well, like I said, perhaps a little rougher than my regular efforts at these, but the contents in the answers really did deserve to be read through, but anyone interested. I love how passionate about gaming, self-hosting and emulation the team (and contributors) are in RomM. It makes me smile to see!

You can find more on The RomM Project with these links:

• Their official website
• Their GitHub
• Their Discord

And don't forget, if you like this kind of gaming nonsense I share, you can find me on Mastodon, where I tend to post every day:

I'm sure you'll know by now that some time ago I did a full interview-ish effort with the dev team behind RomM. RomM - three our of five of the team gave me answers on their history of the project, emulation as a whole, self-hosting, ROMs and building what they did.

That RomM Project is an open-source, self-hosted application that's designed to organize and give you a nice, clean and pretty way to view and play your retro video game collections. Its got a clean, responsive web interface that allows users to scan their ROM libraries, then grabs the metadata from sources like IGDB, MobyGames, and Screenscraper, and playing games directly in your browser via built-in EmulatorJS support.

It supports over 400 gaming platforms (seriously), accommodates various naming conventions, multi-disk games, and custom tags. It even integrates with tools like Playnite and muOS, and upcoming features include device syncing for games, saves, and emulator settings.

I reached out to the team again about their new release for RomM - RomM 4.0.0, which also included at the same time a full Android app made by a community member. They agreed to share their thoughts and experiences putting it together with me, and while 24 or so hours ago I shared a full 'article' I wrote on this, based on these answers they gave me, I'm sharing their full answers here on Lemmy with you.

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I write these little interviews, Q&As and articles with devs from all kinds of gaming, Linux and Steam Deck projects and programs. Its fun for me, and I love to help people get a peek behind the curtain, and get to know who is behind these bits of software they might know and love.

I've previous shared interviews on Lemmy with:

• The RomM Project (like I mentioned!) in general
• The solo dev behind Minigalaxy
• A PC game repacker (piracy!)
• The dev who runs a Switch piracy FreeShop
• Independent Linux & Gaming journalist, Gardiner Bryant
• The creator and dev of Lutris
• The team who make Heroic Games Launcher
• With RetroDECK

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Do be warned, this is a little rough, since I intended to cherry-pick the quotes for an article, there are some general statements from one dev, then some direct answers to direct questions from another.

Regardless, I do hope you enjoy this!

---

---

With danblu3:

About the Android App:

Our main goal is to have RomM reachable from any platform, we want to be the centre piece of your retro library and an android app has always been an idea in the devs head. That said, the Android app is not something we claim (fully) an amazing user by the discord name of "MattSays" actually made the application and just dropped it into our discord one day without warning, we did have a very basic and functional version from a user called "samnwella" which did do the job, but it was clunky and I know they won't mind me saying this. MattSays dropped it and the UI was there, the functions was there, everything. It was gorgeous even from a 1.0 release. Community reaction has been positive, bugs have been raised and already squashed, and in relation to the RomM team both Zurdi and Arcane have reached out to MattSays for further discussion, it's currently being branded as the official Android connector app for RomM and as for team status for MattSays, that is up in the air. The future? It's definitely bright for the Android app, the dev is very keen and even wants to get save syncing up and running. Imagine this flow: Going into ES-DE and with the recent Android app launch update you open the RomM android app, using your controller you scroll to a game you fancy playing, press A and that's it, downloaded, you exit the app, back to es-de, scrape the game and play. No removed SD cards, no plugging into your PC, no dealing with SMB users or NFS perms, just, done. Dusted. The future is very bright for this app.

About the new 4.0.0 release:

Right. So. 4.0 4.0 from many different point of views is huge, from preservation enthusiasts, from retro nerds, from the people who just want a retro fix and the completionists, 4.0 is HUGE. Before I go on to say what 4.0 is let me explain about hash matching, I'll make this very simple and it's possible I might get something a little bit wrong here or there but the theory is correct. A hash is like a signature, and each ROM (file) has a unique signature, some people way back when began groups to dump these games in the name of preservation and put all this together into a library called .dats, these .dats files store a unique signature and this unique signature will match to a game name, it's development date, if it was ever released to retail etc etc. Two of the biggest names of these groups is NoIntro and Redump, they both specialise in different media formats but with them combined they built a "digital bible" of what game is what signature, with 4.0 we finally introduce hash matching with the help of two incredibly skilled developers. Why is hash matching better, why am I so excited?

• It's faster, much much faster. Right now when a ROM is scanned into RomM it breaks apart the file name, removes the (tags) and then sends an API call to the metadata agent of your choice with the name, even though we began to get a high success rate it relied HEAVILY on your files being named correctly.

With hash matching, ROM reads the unique signature of the file and is told near instantly what the game is and what data is needed to be scraped, without wasting time doing a fuzzy match.

• It's more accurate

The fact we can now match on hash means that you could have a game named "TLOZ: AltP.zip" which is a snes game from way back when and you named it like for ease of use, you load it into RomM and are confused why it doesn't match, you know it's the legend of zelda! But RomM does not, because of the weird name you chose, like come on? It's one of the best games, give it the full name! Anyway, with hash matching it'll look inside and see the game file, extract and work out the signature and instantly match it against the matching signature online, pulling all metadata and information it needs, without you needing to rename your whole collection.

• It's prettier - Now we have confidence in what your matching, we've made SteamgridDB a metadata agent, it was before but we left it to user decision. Now that we are confident in the matching we can pull gorgeous artwork for the matched games directly from SteamgridDB, and we still give user the choice if they want to change it.

Now that is out the way, I want to give a huge shout out to Yukine for making Playmatch and FlibbleHexEyes for making Hasheous both these technologies have been implemented in RomM and honestly they are flawless. Yukine has been a regular around discord and I'm pretty sure he began working on hash matching pretty damn quickly just for his own benefit, he then released a small tool which caught the eye of the RomM team, a few conversations later and here we are with it as a service. It's essentially a 2 in 1 service where it does the hash matching through a lighting quick database and then proxies that over to IGDB to pull the relevant metadata from their servers, all in record time compared to our API to IGDB route. Then onto FlibbleHexEyes, people who are around the self hosting scene might recognise the names, and yes he is the lead dev and creator of Gaseous, I would say a competitor but not really only because of how well we get on with him, the self hosted space is large and there is enough room for all of us, no point sniffling creativity! It's another hash matching service (we go from 0 to 2!) and it's similar in the vein of playmatch, just on its own location and maintained directly by Flibble.

Without these two amazing devs 4.0 would not be as huge as it is now. We have more news as well! In 4.0 we introduced launchbox support, this is essentially an offline database that is downloaded every day and used for matching. It does not do hash matching but it does fair better with ROM hacks on testing, it's also very good for people who want to control exactly what is coming in and out of their server as it does not need an API key and the queries are ran locally (until we go to LB to collect the art) Something that might have been missed is that we also support retro achievements! This is purely display purposes but if you have a matching hash, 9.9/10 you have a matching retro achievement and it will update your status on how your doing when it resyncs, it's a nice little QoL feature and we even show the difference between hardcore and soft core achievements. Want to help contribute? Well now it's now easier then ever with an official devcontainers RomM container, which will be explained further in the release notes but the environment is contained in the container, just pull it and start developing, no setting up extra libraries and so forth. 4.0 is huge for RomM. It's deserving of the major number and this has lit a fire under the dev team, I'm sure there will be a small hiatus between updates to let them recover but as we always keep saying. We're just getting started.

---

---

With Yukine (community member and contributor:

What changes are you making?

The main changes for RomM 4.0 besides adding new Metadata sources (like LaunchBox) is the integration of Playmatch and Hasheous I've created the Pull Request to add Playmatch Support into RomM and arcane added Hasheous support a little bit later Playmatch (and Hasheous too) is a Microservice which does Hash based matching for Roms, it incoperates DAT files from Groups such as No-Intro and Redump and keeps a database of those Roms with a mapping to external Gaming Databases such as IGDB, right now only IGDB is support but i plan to add other Gaming Databases such as Screenscraper, MobyGames, Launchbox, SteamGridDB and more

How was your experience, making these changes with RomM?

The Pull Request to RomM wasn't really all that hard, even me who doesn't usually do or write python was able to integrate it quite easily into RomM that said there was work the RomM Team did before my change was merged to ensure that the logic runs in the correct order What i mean by that is that in RomM 3.10.x it used to be so that the resolution step of Metadata was running before the calcuation of hashes When you integrate services which require you to send the hashes of files for the metadata provider resolution you usually want these hashes calculated which before wasn't possible because Matching of Metadata Provider was running before the hash calculation step After arcaneasada changed that and did some other side work the Playmatch PR was quite fast ready to be merged, i think it took less than 2 weeks to get it merged into RomM

How long has this release been 'in the works' for?

As i said above the PR itself was only ~2 weeks of work but Playmatch itself was quite a lot more work I've started Playmatch back in June 2024 (over a year ago already ) as a side Project of mine, at the time RomM was quite a bit more immature especially the Metadata Matching part, i personally have quite a big Rom collection and when only ~40% of all games got a match on IGDB i was quite annoyed because i didn't want to go through my whole collection and manually match all the unidentified games to get the nice looking metadata for them Out of annoyance i thought how i would fix that, thinking about other Projects who also use Metadata Providers i checked out how they solved it and then i also found Hasheous at the time which basically was @FlibblesHexEyes Solution to the issue. After checking it out i decided that while i know C# and i think he did a good Job i wasn't quite sure if i would've solved it this way and the database structure of it wasn't quite speaking to me (when i thought about performance and how many req/s it would likely get) so i decided that i could probably write a small microservice myself and i oriented myself at Hasheous but also at Skyhook which is a Metadata API Sonarr uses and how they solved a lot of issues with that

What can the users, both existing and new, expect from this 4.0.0 release?

Generally speaking 4.0 with Playmatch and Hasheous enabled should improve Automatic Metadata matchinig a lot. When users enable them they will be queried for each rom and if either has a metadata match in there database it will be used This makes RomM a lot less reliant on Rom Names and exact naming matches and basically kills the naming requirement completely assuming the Rom Hash is in either Playmatch and Hasheous (usually if your ROM matches the No-Intro or Redump DAT thats the case) and has a Provider match in either. Playmatch does by default automatically try to match ROMs it gets from the dat files to IGDB but sometimes that also fails when for example the ROM name is localized and on IGDB there is no Alias for that name. Playmatch also allows users to "suggest" manual mappings for No-Intro/Redump roms, if a rom was not automatically mapped due to naming issues i described before users can now use a Discord Bot to suggest a mapping to be added to Playmatch, after an Admin (currently thats me) reviews it and approves it it'll be added to playmatch and RomM can make use of it This Discord Bot is also added to the RomM Server so that users can do the suggestion there if they like to, this also helps out the whole community (so when the next person then checks playmatch for the same hash it already has a mapping!) which is generally the ideal state that the community can "maintain" a mapping database themself

Any significant difficulties? Anything you're particularly proud of with this release?

There were a lot of difficulties to be fair but thats normal Playmatch is written in Rust which is a Memory Safe Language and a very fast and performant language too. When i initially thought about how i would create Playmatch i had a few key aspects in Mind.

It needs to be fast and handle a lot of http req/s when a lot of RomM users run library scans

It should keep a low memory usage so i can run on a small VPSIt should have a good Database ORM because i dislike writing raw SQL queries in code generally My choices were between Rust, Golang and C# but i decided for Rust because the HTTP Server Actix im using has decently fast benchmarks, the language can run a http api on only a few MB ram and also the Database Driver im using (SeaORM) is great and very fast for database queries Playmatch does a lot of things automatically by now, it can automatically download & import dats and after import also automatically try to match unmatched games to IGDB for example the matching logic is also decently smart, the datting group No-Intro for example has a cloneof id relationship set in there dat file, basically if a game like Pokemon Emerald has multiple versions (different regions, Demos, Betas etc) they write it down in the dat file with an id and a clone of id field, Playmatch can make usage of that and use it for matching, if any game gets matched playmatch automatically matches the games parents and of the parent other child games as well so that if i manually match lets say No-Intros German Pokemon Platin ROM playmatch will check the database and see that other roms (Like the Italy Pokemon Platin Rom) is a clone of the same parent (The Europe or USA Pokemon Platin Rom usually) and then apply the same mapping to it as well For automatically matches this is a great benefit, like if one of the different region name is either the Direct Name or an Alias of the Game on IGDB then we can match all versions of a game This fixes the issue for localized rom naming a lot as well, if you use any Rom Manager or tool which renames your ROMs to match names from No-Intro/Redump dats this will now not make the Identify step of RomM fail because the name is localized and not like that on IGDB and also if one region gets matched now all region gets matched! this makes it less annoying to manually match as well when instead of 20 matches for all different versions (Regions, Beta, different Revisions) of Pokemon Platin you just match any of it and Playmatch does the other one fully automatically Another big issue generally is compression, RomM does not enforce any format when accepting ROM files for Platforms, users usually want to compress there roms if possible to save space zipping Roms is one way but usually the compression rate is not that good especially for newer consoles with for example encryption (which decreases compression rate by a ton) so most Homebrew Communities have developed own formats to compress ROMs a few examples are Wii / Gamecube raw format is .iso and the a common compression format is .rvz which is supported by Dolpin Emulator Wii U Raw format is .ISO but the common compression format is .wux A lot of Disc based system Emulators support .chd files which is a format the MAME team developed with a very good compression rate DAT groups such as No-Intro and Redump usually only create dat files for "RAW" or original formats so if you want to compress your roms it will not be matching to Playmatch anymore as Playmatch only holds rom data which is from a DAT group Luckly the Community already has made DAT files for a few of those formats but depending on the format and compression used these formats might have some randomness depending on what compression level and settings are used Playmatch currently has community dats for .rvz, .wux and decrypted PS3 Games

---

---

With FlibblesHexEyes - community member and contributor:

Hey! So, just to clarify I'm not part of the Romm team, though I do work closely with them.

I work on Hasheous (https://hasheous.org/), which provides hash based ROM matching to metadata providers as well as metadata proxying.

Hasheous came about from my other project called Gaseous Server (which is similar to Romm - started about the same time) where I noticed a major point of friction for users was matching their ROM files to metadata providers such as IGDB.

This led me to begin the Hasheous project where a user adding a ROM to their ROM Manager of choice (Hasheous was always designed to be client agnostic and not favour one client over another).

The idea here is that when adding a ROM, instead of the user having to manually say that file is "Choplifter", the client (Romm or Gaseous), would reach out to Hasheous and say "do you know what this file with this SHA1 hash is?" and Hasheous would respond with information about the ROM and where the client could find metadata such as summaries, and cover art.

Which led to solving a further point of friction for users which is that many metadata providers require an API key - and an often convoluted method to generate them - which led to Hasheous having the ability to proxy some metadata providers.

This allows users of Romm (and others) to have a completely friction free experience when adding ROMs to their libraries. It's this part that I'm particularly proud of.

It's taken me about a year to get Hasheous to where it is today. By far the biggest issue is that of data integrity. Hasheous relies on DAT providers (such as TOSEC and NoIntro) who all name games slightly differently. The same is also true of the metadata providers. Examples include that a DAT might name a game with a dash, which the metadata provider might use a colon. Individually these are reasonably easy to match, but at scale it gets a lot harder. So building out a community contribution method (to fix bad matches) that is abuse resistant was also a challenge.

---

---

With MattSays - community member and developer responsible for the Android app:

Yeah sure! You may want to know why I decided to make this app. I recently got into retrogaming handhelds and in particular Android retro handhelds, and I also discovered the existence of RomM. However, to my surprise there wasn't an app that could easily handle all of my rom collection without having to go to my browser and manually do all the steps required to just play my desired games. So I developed a client that could improve the usability of RomM on Android without too much hassle and shared all of this with the charming community that instantly tested it and gave me precious feedback.

---

And that's that!

Well, like I said, perhaps a little rougher than my regular efforts at these, but the contents in the answers really did deserve to be read through, but anyone interested. I love how passionate about gaming, self-hosting and emulation the team (and contributors) are in RomM. It makes me smile to see!

You can find more on The RomM Project with these links:

• Their official website
• Their GitHub
• Their Discord

And don't forget, if you like this kind of gaming nonsense I share, you can find me on Mastodon, where I tend to post every day:

I saw that no one had shared Junk Store's newly released version '2.0' announcement, so I figured I'd format it for Lemmy and post it here.

Is anyone picking it up? Or trying it out?

Anyway, everything below here is their words that I'm pasting in:

---

The wait is over! Junk Store 2.0 is now live, and we’re excited for you to try it! You’ve heard the fuss, now you can judge it for yourself. If it’s not for you, no hard feelings; all we ask is that you make up your own mind.

Check it out in action here

Get it here

What is Junk Store 2.0?

Junk Store 2.0 is a fully extensible game launcher designed to help you easily install and manage games from platforms like Epic, GOG, Amazon, and more — all without the hassle of complex workarounds. It’s faster, more stable, and includes a ton of new features to enhance your experience on the Steam Deck.

Try Junk Store 2.0 Now!

We know you’ve been waiting for a faster, more stable, and expanded experience, and Junk Store 2.0 delivers just that. While we continue to scale up some of our supporting systems, we’re offering a 25% discount on your first year if you sign up before the end of the month. Use the code EarlyBird at checkout to take advantage of the savings Learn more here

What Users Are Saying

• “Junk Store 2.0 gives me access to dozens of games I already own on platforms I rarely use — without all the convoluted workarounds.” — Anonymous

• “JS allows me the freedom to choose stores with better deals, DRM-free options, or freebies — without sacrificing the joy and simplicity of the Steam Deck.” — BadServo

• “This is f*ing great and well worth the sub. It’s leagues better than before and blows the Decky Loader version out of the water.” — Zer04evr

• “It's the perfect Swiss Army knife for my Deck!” — Tiny Tech

How to Try It?

• 7-day Free Trial – Try before you buy! If you cancel within the first 7 days, you won’t be charged.

• 25% off your first year – Discount available until the end of the month.

Why Upgrade?

You’ll still have access to the old version of Junk Store, but we truly believe the new version offers too many improvements to ignore. Whether it's the download queue, the new extension generation tools, or the ability to view up to 1,000 games, this is the future of Junk Store. Check out "What’s New" here

Hear from the Developer:

• Hear from the developer himself in this interview with Gardiner Bryant: Watch here

• Listen to Gardiner Bryant: Watch it here

We’re Here to Help

Junk Store is a living project. We’re constantly working on improvements, and we need your feedback to make it even better. If you run into any issues, let us know — we’re a small team, but we strive for fast resolutions.

Thank you for your support — Game on!

I saw that no one had shared Junk Store's newly released version '2.0' announcement, so I figured I'd format it for Lemmy and post it here.

Is anyone picking it up? Or trying it out?

Anyway, everything below here is their words that I'm pasting in:

---

The wait is over! Junk Store 2.0 is now live, and we’re excited for you to try it! You’ve heard the fuss, now you can judge it for yourself. If it’s not for you, no hard feelings; all we ask is that you make up your own mind.

Check it out in action here

Get it here

What is Junk Store 2.0?

Junk Store 2.0 is a fully extensible game launcher designed to help you easily install and manage games from platforms like Epic, GOG, Amazon, and more — all without the hassle of complex workarounds. It’s faster, more stable, and includes a ton of new features to enhance your experience on the Steam Deck.

Try Junk Store 2.0 Now!

We know you’ve been waiting for a faster, more stable, and expanded experience, and Junk Store 2.0 delivers just that. While we continue to scale up some of our supporting systems, we’re offering a 25% discount on your first year if you sign up before the end of the month. Use the code EarlyBird at checkout to take advantage of the savings Learn more here

What Users Are Saying

• “Junk Store 2.0 gives me access to dozens of games I already own on platforms I rarely use — without all the convoluted workarounds.” — Anonymous

• “JS allows me the freedom to choose stores with better deals, DRM-free options, or freebies — without sacrificing the joy and simplicity of the Steam Deck.” — BadServo

• “This is f*ing great and well worth the sub. It’s leagues better than before and blows the Decky Loader version out of the water.” — Zer04evr

• “It's the perfect Swiss Army knife for my Deck!” — Tiny Tech

How to Try It?

• 7-day Free Trial – Try before you buy! If you cancel within the first 7 days, you won’t be charged.

• 25% off your first year – Discount available until the end of the month.

Why Upgrade?

You’ll still have access to the old version of Junk Store, but we truly believe the new version offers too many improvements to ignore. Whether it's the download queue, the new extension generation tools, or the ability to view up to 1,000 games, this is the future of Junk Store. Check out "What’s New" here

Hear from the Developer:

• Hear from the developer himself in this interview with Gardiner Bryant: Watch here

• Listen to Gardiner Bryant: Watch it here

We’re Here to Help

Junk Store is a living project. We’re constantly working on improvements, and we need your feedback to make it even better. If you run into any issues, let us know — we’re a small team, but we strive for fast resolutions.

Thank you for your support — Game on!

Hello, everyone!

I was lucky enough to get in touch with Wouter, the solo developer behind the Linux game launcher Minigalaxy. He was generous with his time and happy to answer a bunch of random questions I sent his way over the course of a few days. What started as a quick chat turned into this fun little Q&A.

A few hours ago, I posted an article here on Lemmy that used some of his replies as the backbone for a short piece about Minigalaxy. But the more I looked over his answers, the more I felt they deserved to be shared on their own, unedited and in full. So here they are...straight from the source.

I like to do these little Q&A's, interviews and pieces on these projects and programs, because it's a fun chance to get to see what's behind the curtain - hear from the devs which you rarely get to.

Minigalaxy itself is a lightweight, open-source game launcher for Linux, designed specifically for running GOG games with ease. It keeps things simple and streamlined: no bloat, just the basics like installing, updating, and launching your games.

I hope you might enjoy these, it was a fun time, and Minigalaxy itself is a great little Linux program :)

All questions by me, and all answers are by wouter!

---

Minigalaxy:

---

Q. I'd like to start with what inspired you to create Minigalaxy? Was it the 'typical' reason? - I know that everyone (do you know Lignuin from Heroic? I'd say you do, he and I both think that GOG's own Galaxy 2.0 is essentially abandoned now) is dissatisfied with the software GOG themselves present.

A. So I wrote Minigalaxy at at time where Lutris was the only other option, but it wasn't as easy to use as I'd like. I also wanted to do a project using python, since that language was still quite new to me. So I decided to write my own client. The idea was to have my own easy to use GOG specific launcher. The initial version was a bit rough and still saw some crashes, but it got better over time. In the beginning I was only planning to make it able to install Linux games, but then it ended up taking off and people started contributing. A contributor who's account name on GitHub is Kzimir wrote the initial wine support.

Q. Minigalaxy seems to be known for its minimalism. Was that a deliberate design choice from the start? I'm a big fan of that, by the way!

A. It was deliberate, I wanted a good overview of the GOG games I can play and an easy way to install them 😄

Q. Why focus solely on GOG support, instead of building a more universal launcher?

A. In the last 6 years I've contributed to a lot of open source projects, but the only launchers I've been using have been Steam and Minigalaxy, so I've not really ran into an opportunity to contribute to other launchers. Besides Minigalaxy I spend a lot of time contributing to PSPDEV, which is a homebrew SDK for the Playstation Portable, and to open source games and game preservation projects.

I think other launchers do a great job integrating multiple platforms. I really like that Minigalaxy is so focused specifically on GOG. I think that gives it its own niche and allows us to offer a level of uniformity while still providing a lot of specific info from GOG. For example filtering on genre would be hard if you're dealing with multiple platforms

Wouter's unprompted statement:

I do have to say that I was not expecting as much community engagement as there has been when I originally started. It was initially just something I wanted to have, but also made available to others. Then when I implemented translation support the contributions really started rolling in and even some programmers joined and added features I wouldn't have thought about. Lately GB609 on Github came in an he fixed most of the outstanding bugs. It has been really cool to work with the over 50 contributors over the years

I recently made translation easier by adding support for Weblate and we now have a 100% complete Ukrainian translation which we didn't have before. It's things like that which just blow me away

To give another example, being able to ship a full Taiwanese Mandarin translation with the third release I did was unexpected, but insanely cool

Q. How has the Linux/GOG gaming community responded to Minigalaxy?

A. The community has been really nice 😄They've really helped to keep me going. Minigalaxy has had so many contributions from the community. Translation, small fixes on the website and even new features and bug fixes

Q. What keeps you motivated to maintain the project?

A. I think that has been my main drive. Minigalaxy has had the features I want from it for a while now, but the community keeps bringing in new ideas and even implementing them

Q. Is there any way people can support you — contributing code, donations, spreading the word?

A. I don't want donations, but contributions are always welcome. It is now super easy to contributed translations, I think it would be really nice if some more people could help out with that 😄

---

And that's that!

It was short, but their time is valuable, and this was more a chat than a full-blown interview. I am very glad wouter agreed to chat at all: projects like Minigalaxy, which are done free for the community who love gaming are amazing, and I think he deserved a little time to share his views!

• If you're more interested in Minigalaxy, you can find the GitHub page here!

• And of course, the Discord server link is here too, if you want to join in on the chats!

---

I do hope you'll forgive me posting the entirety in full here, so soon after my other link. And I hope you enjoyed this little post also!

Hello, everyone!

I was lucky enough to get in touch with Wouter, the solo developer behind the Linux game launcher Minigalaxy. He was generous with his time and happy to answer a bunch of random questions I sent his way over the course of a few days. What started as a quick chat turned into this fun little Q&A.

A few hours ago, I posted an article here on Lemmy that used some of his replies as the backbone for a short piece about Minigalaxy. But the more I looked over his answers, the more I felt they deserved to be shared on their own, unedited and in full. So here they are...straight from the source.

I like to do these little Q&A's, interviews and pieces on these projects and programs, because it's a fun chance to get to see what's behind the curtain - hear from the devs which you rarely get to.

Minigalaxy itself is a lightweight, open-source game launcher for Linux, designed specifically for running GOG games with ease. It keeps things simple and streamlined: no bloat, just the basics like installing, updating, and launching your games.

It works on the Steam Deck (and I wonder how many here might have actually tried it?)

I hope you might enjoy these, it was a fun time, and Minigalaxy itself is a great little Linux program :)

All questions by me, and all answers are by wouter!

---

Minigalaxy:

---

Q. I'd like to start with what inspired you to create Minigalaxy? Was it the 'typical' reason? - I know that everyone (do you know Lignuin from Heroic? I'd say you do, he and I both think that GOG's own Galaxy 2.0 is essentially abandoned now) is dissatisfied with the software GOG themselves present.

A. So I wrote Minigalaxy at at time where Lutris was the only other option, but it wasn't as easy to use as I'd like. I also wanted to do a project using python, since that language was still quite new to me. So I decided to write my own client. The idea was to have my own easy to use GOG specific launcher. The initial version was a bit rough and still saw some crashes, but it got better over time. In the beginning I was only planning to make it able to install Linux games, but then it ended up taking off and people started contributing. A contributor who's account name on GitHub is Kzimir wrote the initial wine support.

Q. Minigalaxy seems to be known for its minimalism. Was that a deliberate design choice from the start? I'm a big fan of that, by the way!

A. It was deliberate, I wanted a good overview of the GOG games I can play and an easy way to install them 😄

Q. Why focus solely on GOG support, instead of building a more universal launcher?

A. In the last 6 years I've contributed to a lot of open source projects, but the only launchers I've been using have been Steam and Minigalaxy, so I've not really ran into an opportunity to contribute to other launchers. Besides Minigalaxy I spend a lot of time contributing to PSPDEV, which is a homebrew SDK for the Playstation Portable, and to open source games and game preservation projects.

I think other launchers do a great job integrating multiple platforms. I really like that Minigalaxy is so focused specifically on GOG. I think that gives it its own niche and allows us to offer a level of uniformity while still providing a lot of specific info from GOG. For example filtering on genre would be hard if you're dealing with multiple platforms

Wouter's unprompted statement:

I do have to say that I was not expecting as much community engagement as there has been when I originally started. It was initially just something I wanted to have, but also made available to others. Then when I implemented translation support the contributions really started rolling in and even some programmers joined and added features I wouldn't have thought about. Lately GB609 on Github came in an he fixed most of the outstanding bugs. It has been really cool to work with the over 50 contributors over the years

I recently made translation easier by adding support for Weblate and we now have a 100% complete Ukrainian translation which we didn't have before. It's things like that which just blow me away

To give another example, being able to ship a full Taiwanese Mandarin translation with the third release I did was unexpected, but insanely cool

Q. How has the Linux/GOG gaming community responded to Minigalaxy?

A. The community has been really nice 😄They've really helped to keep me going. Minigalaxy has had so many contributions from the community. Translation, small fixes on the website and even new features and bug fixes

Q. What keeps you motivated to maintain the project?

A. I think that has been my main drive. Minigalaxy has had the features I want from it for a while now, but the community keeps bringing in new ideas and even implementing them

Q. Is there any way people can support you — contributing code, donations, spreading the word?

A. I don't want donations, but contributions are always welcome. It is now super easy to contributed translations, I think it would be really nice if some more people could help out with that 😄

---

And that's that!

It was short, but their time is valuable, and this was more a chat than a full-blown interview. I am very glad wouter agreed to chat at all: projects like Minigalaxy, which are done free for the community who love gaming are amazing, and I think he deserved a little time to share his views!

• If you're more interested in Minigalaxy, you can find the GitHub page here!

• And of course, the Discord server link is here too, if you want to join in on the chats!

---

I do hope you'll forgive me posting the entirety in full here, so soon after my other link. And I hope you enjoyed this little post also!

Hello everybody!!!

Sorry it’s been so long since my last updates here on Lemmy. I do know its been too long between my Steam Deck / Gaming News posts (and I pinkie-swear that will change sometime soon!), but at least I have some things to share here which I hope you’ll find interesting.

I’ve been lucky in that a friend on Mastodon has asked me to help contribute to his weekly gaming ‘magazine’ - a site he’s launched a week or so ago with the idea of being:

...a site where we can write about games, technology, and nerdy culture in a relaxed, informal fashion. Where we can celebrate creators, game developers and anyone else who makes a positive contribution to the gaming community on the fediverse.

So, this time, I’ve written some things for this site as a contributor, and I’d love to get your thoughts on what I’ve written.

---

An article:

First is an article on RomM's new release version 0 4.0.0 (along with its Android app release!), which is a little different to how I’ve typically written and shared on Lemmy before. You might remember that I’ve interviewed the team behind RomM before, and shared it here on Lemmy. They’re all lovely people!

For this I wrote more of an 'article' - but also was in touch with all the devs responsible for the changes in this release, so you'll find them sprinkled throughout!

The link to my RomM article is here!

---

Minigalaxy:

The developer behind the Linux GOG launcher for games, Minigalaxy was kind enough to chat to me over a few days so I could hear more about the work and what brought the launcher into being.

I'm super grateful that they wanted to chat, and Minigalaxy is such a fun program, if you haven't already then you should check it out!

[The direct link to that article I wrote is here]

---

An interview:

Lastly was to be an interview with the developer behind Falkor, an independent game launcher built almost entirely by one develop. Designed to be personal, customisable, and community-driven, Falkor was built to stay in line with the dev's plan: a 'user-first alternative to the other launchers available'.

In our conversation, he shared his journey as a dev, insights on the plugin architecture, thoughts on legal boundaries, and future plans for Falkor, including Proton support and deeper community involvement.

Sadly, a few hours before posting, he actually ceased work on Falkor with an announcement in his Discord, and has stepped back from it. So that one is no longer being posted!

---

What's Next:

But I have also got plenty more in the works to share. I’ve been in touch with:

• PortMaster (though this one might be taking a little longer than I first anticipated)

• The person behind the emulation compatibility report site called EmuReady

• The dev team who have made Ocean Keeper: Dome Survival on Steam - they've been super kind and are arranging the dev team to answer my questions, and provide me with promo material to use

• And another handful of teams and devs – projects and independent games, which I suppose I’ll share when the time is right!

What I'd love most from all of you here is to hear what you think. These posts have entirely been for all of you on Lemmy in the past. But sharing these on this site does mean RSS will be easier for you (for those who ask how to RSS my posts).

Would you like me to share my articles and interviews here in Lemmy as they were, or through this fediverse-centric site instead? Or both?

Please share what you think. My style writing these, the format, the fact they’re on a site, just give me your thoughts.

If you’d just like a link to the site itself, its here:

https://magazine.fediverse.games/

One other thing, if you'd like to contribute to that site, then Mr Dendry stated:

...if you have a product or project you'd like to be featured on this site please reach out! Additionally, if you're a writer and you want to contribute, please let me know as it would be great to have a few people writing here aside from me.

Hope you’re all well, and enjoying gaming lately. Again, all apologies for my absence from Lemmy lately :)

Hello everybody!!!

Sorry it’s been so long since my last updates here on Lemmy. I do know its been too long between my Steam Deck / Gaming News posts (and I pinkie-swear that will change sometime soon!), but at least I have some things to share here which I hope you’ll find interesting.

I’ve been lucky in that a friend on Mastodon has asked me to help contribute to his weekly gaming ‘magazine’ - a site he’s launched a week or so ago with the idea of being:

...a site where we can write about games, technology, and nerdy culture in a relaxed, informal fashion. Where we can celebrate creators, game developers and anyone else who makes a positive contribution to the gaming community on the fediverse.

So, this time, I’ve written some things for this site as a contributor, and I’d love to get your thoughts on what I’ve written.

---

An article:

First is an article on RomM's new release version 0 4.0.0 (along with its Android app release!), which is a little different to how I’ve typically written and shared on Lemmy before. You might remember that I’ve interviewed the team behind RomM before, and shared it here on Lemmy. They’re all lovely people!

For this I wrote more of an 'article' - but also was in touch with all the devs responsible for the changes in this release, so you'll find them sprinkled throughout!

The link to my RomM article is here!

---

Minigalaxy:

The developer behind the Linux GOG launcher for games, Minigalaxy was kind enough to chat to me over a few days so I could hear more about the work and what brought the launcher into being.

I'm super grateful that they wanted to chat, and Minigalaxy is such a fun program, if you haven't already then you should check it out!

The direct link to that article I wrote is here

---

An interview:

Lastly was to be an interview with the developer behind Falkor, an independent game launcher built almost entirely by one develop. Designed to be personal, customisable, and community-driven, Falkor was built to stay in line with the dev's plan: a 'user-first alternative to the other launchers available'.

In our conversation, he shared his journey as a dev, insights on the plugin architecture, thoughts on legal boundaries, and future plans for Falkor, including Proton support and deeper community involvement.

Sadly, a few hours before posting, he actually ceased work on Falkor with an announcement in his Discord, and has stepped back from it. So that one is no longer being posted!

---

What's Next:

But I have also got plenty more in the works to share. I’ve been in touch with:

• PortMaster (though this one might be taking a little longer than I first anticipated)

• The person behind the emulation compatibility report site called EmuReady

• The dev team who have made Ocean Keeper: Dome Survival on Steam - they've been super kind and are arranging the dev team to answer my questions, and provide me with promo material to use

• And another handful of teams and devs – projects and independent games, which I suppose I’ll share when the time is right!

What I'd love most from all of you here is to hear what you think. These posts have entirely been for all of you on Lemmy in the past. But sharing these on this site does mean RSS will be easier for you (for those who ask how to RSS my posts).

Would you like me to share my articles and interviews here in Lemmy as they were, or through this fediverse-centric site instead? Or both?

Please share what you think. My style writing these, the format, the fact they’re on a site, just give me your thoughts.

If you’d just like a link to the site itself, its here:

https://magazine.fediverse.games/

One other thing, if you'd like to contribute to that site, then Mr Dendry stated:

...if you have a product or project you'd like to be featured on this site please reach out! Additionally, if you're a writer and you want to contribute, please let me know as it would be great to have a few people writing here aside from me.

Hope you’re all well, and enjoying gaming lately. Again, all apologies for my absence from Lemmy lately :)

This is probably going to seem wildly low-effort compared to my usual posts here, but I've found a bit of a treasure trove of print media gaming ads from magazines and sites. And they're amazing. I found it so fun to see what companies used to do to promote their games.

Things have clearly changed a lot over time, some of them are insensitive or even outright sexist, but if you just look at it through a lens of being a time capsule, it's fun.

This one's going to be very image-heavy. If you're using Boost on iOS then you might struggle to scroll through this (or maybe not? It's happened with all my other posts though, so you've been warned), if that happens just visit using your browser :)

---

Game Boy Advance/SP:

---

The 'feet' collection were from an ad company in Stockholm, in 2005. I think it is to mean you're using hands to play the GBA, and only have feet left to use for real life:

---

PS2:

---

---

Nintendo Game Cube:

---

---

And that's that! Just interesting to see a time when gaming was a little more experimental and edgy.

In case you missed it, recent reports suggest that Microsoft/Xbox has likely cancelled future Forza Motorsport titles (effectively ending the series), following massive layoffs that affected around half of Turn 10’s staff.

Its not a series I played, like most I think I opted for the Horizon series, but its still more sad news in a line of layoffs recently.

So, I decided I might just make a tiny list of a few games which haven't sold massive amounts, aren't AAA, and have few reviews.

Fair warning though, as ever I love to include a ton of pictures and GIFs in my posts. This one is no exception. One issue is if you're using the Boost for Lemmy app. My posts tend to slow scrolling to a glitchy mess, so if you're interested enough...maybe opt for your browser to read through instead? Or another app, I guess.

I know it's not what I typically post here, but...it's an easy write up...even if its a niche problem (finding car games to play!). If you know of any, or have enjoyed some and want to recommend, please comment them!

Anyway, let's start with the first one:

---

Art of Rally:

---

To start with I’ll have to mention Art of Rally. I’ve ranted about this for so long now, you’ll no doubt have already read through me trying to convince you to play. But, let’s do it all over again. It’s so good.

Set in the ‘golden era’ of racing: from the 60’s to the 80’s in a kind of alternate universe – if the infamous and incredibly dangerous ‘Group B’ never ceased.

Group B itself was a class in the World Rally Championship (WRC) that existed from 1982 to 1986, and was infamous for being both the most spectacular and the most dangerous era in rally history. They’d find literal fingers, hair, blood splatters in their vent grates and stuck in their cars when the races were finished...because no rules were in place for the spectators. None.

Group B allowed the car manufacturers to use just stupid barely tested technology and push performance limits with minimal regulation. The cars just had the most lightweight materials, turbochargers, superchargers, and four-wheel drive, producing up to 600 horsepower (more than many modern supercars). Their own rules required only 200 road-going models, making it easy for manufacturers to develop near-prototype race cars.

In the end they were extremely fast, but safety measures couldn't keep up. Tracks were narrow and lined with crowds of unprotected spectators, and co-drivers had to rely on pace notes at breakneck speeds. Crashes were frequent and often fatal.

This YouTube video is amazing and really should be watched, just so you get a snapshot of how dangerous and unsupervised this all was.

Anyway, that’s the history behind the setting. Now to the game.

Race in the golden era of rally. Drive iconic cars from the 60s to Group B on challenging stages through stylized environments inspired by real worldwide locations. Will you master the art of rally?

It’s a minimalist game. Super stylized environments and landscapes, the art design is bright simple and colorful, with over fifty ‘iconic’ rally cars (their own takes on them though, not at all licensed), rally driving tricks (Scandinavian flick, counter steering, left foot braking, handbrake turns) and maps like Germany, Japan, Norway, Australia, Indonesia (some are DLC).

I love how its open for simple beginners all the way up to incredibly detailed technical expert racing. I love how has a top-down perspective, not the typical racing style.

The music is beautiful, and its such a complete independent game. If you regularly claim the Epic Games free PC games each week then you’ll have the base game in your library already. But it is on regular sales too, with -40% off on Steam currently!.

It’s a game that very much reacts to your touch and movement. Much like a real rally car, you’re going to be feeling that sensation of needing to react quickly, or trying your best to wrestle that steering to either direction, or quickly having to tap the break. And that handbrake is where you’ll be dialing in those hairpins and perfecting that Scandinavian ‘flick’.

To me its the atmosphere. The setting, the colors, the foliage and hills, sky and how cheerful it all is makes this game such a beautiful one. I’ve played so much of it, and if you’re looking for a racing/rally/automotive game you might have missed alongside the typical AAA offerings, then choose this one!

• The ProtonDB page for Art of Rally – where you can check Linux/Steam Deck performance ratings from community members

• Their website

• The link to the game on GOG

The developers also have another automotive-based game coming:

Explore the world in the golden age of offroading. Drive iconic vehicles from the 60s to 80s by yourself or with friends through challenging trails and beautiful scenery.

Here’s the link to that one, called ‘Over The Hill’

---

Drive Rally:

---

Drive Rally released their 1.0 after being in Early Access not so long ago. This was one of those games you’d be forgiven for actually buying in E.A. though, since it was so damned complete (much like Hades 2, or Selaco feel for example).

One Caveat, there’s a hashtag before ‘Drive’ in the game’s title...but that is used for formatting on Lemmy so I’m just leaving it off for this little one.

DRIVE Rally is an arcade-inspired rally-driving experience set in the golden racing era of the ‘90s. Grab your co-driver and burn some rubber on iconic race-winning cars across a variety of terrains in some of the most iconic rallying locations in the world!

Far less sim, or precision-based, and far more forgiving, this one’s just fun - and feels the most ‘arcadey’ of the ones I’ll cover here. It’s more of a retro-inspired look to it, kinda reminding you of the PS1/PS2 days but without that heavy pixel-ish look to everything.

You can dial down the ‘wackiness’ on the voices of your co-driver/navigator (I recommend you do this), if you’d prefer it to be a little more serious. By default they have a humor to them, and a distinct voice style. Or you can keep it all the way up, totally up to you!

I like how this game makes me feel like I’m not fighting my car, that I am in control and it’s not punishing me for mistakes. Some people don’t like this, but I just like to think of it as a fun arcade racer – keep my serious racers for other times.

The usual suspects are here: car customization, fun locales which have their own unique feeling, there’s a heap of fun easter eggs from the genre and the history of racing games.

There’s constant updates, and you can see the devs care about keeping their game feeling fresh. I do know from an early point they really did listen to the community in Early Access, and changed the game according to some issues raised. So that’s always nice to see.

It’s on sale as a part of both the GOG and Steam Summer Sales right now, too, with -30% off right now:

• Link to the GOG store page here

• Link to the Steam store page here

• Their official website for the game

• Trailer for the 1.0 release from 2 months back on YouTube

If you just want a fun, arcade rally game that rewards you for races (unlockables), and doesn't make you stress on every turn and decision, this one is a perfect buy. I really recommend it!

---

Old School Rally & Rush Rally 3:

---

Both of these games are very similar, if not in the gameplay, in execution. They’re attempting to take you back to the PS1/arcade game era of rally racers, but with modern controls (and sensibilities, too). One is extra-heavily pixelated to make you think of the Colin McRae series of games.

---

Old School Rally:

“Carefully crafted retro style visuals, reminiscent of the late '90s rally games full of nostalgia and charm”

“With a variety of rally tracks from around the globe, race across different surfaces such as dirt, tarmac and snow and challenge your driving skills.”

“Choose from a diverse lineup of rally cars inspired by the legends of the past, each with unique characteristics and features.”

“Challenge other drivers from around the world and climb to the top of the leaderboards. Ready for more? Try to get all the achievements over the course of the game.”

To me this one’s a great Steam Deck game. There’s a fun balance between pure arcade gameplay, but with more to it if you want to invest your time in it. I’ve noticed the reviews tend to mention the excellent music...and they're very right on that one.

If you've nostalgia for the PS1 era racing games, obviously the McRae series, then this is a must have for you.

• Old School Rally official website

• Official trailer on YouTube

• Platinum Rating on ProtonDB with one review stating: “90 FPS, 7.5-8 W TDP with 7+ hours of gameplay easily with a full charge.”

• Steam Listing here with a ‘Very Positive’ rating from 1,186 reviews.

---

Rush Rally 3:

Less pixelated and intentionally PS1-ish than Old School Rally is, this one still is in the same vein. Created by a single dev, it’s amazing how deep the game feels. To me the ‘rougher’ areas, are the tracks and lanscapes, but the vehicles seem to be far more polished for the player – even giving you a pretty comprehensive set of options to customize the cars to your liking:

There are online features (leaderboads and multiplayer), unique weekly live events, a dev who cares deeply about suggestions and is constantly making adjustments and changes to how things run and look based off player feedback. I love how dedicated the dev seems to this game, you can tell they love racing and rally.

“60 FPS racing (120+fps on supported devices) at night or day in the rain or snow! Over 100 new and unique stages each with different surface types including snow, gravel, tarmac and dirt! Race with one of the best car dynamics models to date, including real time vehicle deformation and damage, built from over 15 years of experience.”

“Race with your favourite controller, all fully configurable including full force feedback wheel support!”

• Again, platinum rating on ProtonDB, though this time there’s only one review left for it

• The dev mentioned on Steam that they’re done extensive Steam Deck testing to make sure it runs as well as can possibly be expected

• The Steam page for the game, with a -70% off price currently

• No official trailer is on YouTube, but a ton of great review videos are there, with everyone stunned by how great the game is

---

Japanese Drift Master (JDM):

You might have seen this one, while it’s still kinda under the radar compared to most games (with only 2,457 total reviews on Steam), it turned some heads before release because of the setting and presentation.

Drifting in Japan. Story told through the pages of manga. Clearly very inspired by recognizable, real life locations. Licensed cars. Euro-beat. DRM-free?

It ticked so many boxes that racing fans have, but the main one is being set in Japan. Horizon fans have been clamoring for the game to be set in that country for many iterations now, so this kinda felt like...the next best thing?

JDM: Japanese Drift Master combines realistic, carefully-tuned physics in a simcade experience that’s as smooth on a controller as it is with sim racing hardware. Tackle hundreds of kilometers of open-world roads and uncover story-driven events and quests along the way. Hone your drifting skills, perfect grip races, take on challenges, and feel the thrill of authentic Japanese street racing.

This game is far more…‘sim’ than the others I’ve covered so far. While of course it’s still accessible to those who don’t want to take it super duper seriously, you can see this one’s aimed more at those who want to play the game as a drifting simulator.

Experience the automotive culture of Japan and discover the roads where drifting was born.

It’s very, very pretty. The detail in the environments and the cars is really impressive. The music is incredibly moreish and I did keep going back to this game. What gives me pause in the end is that I don’t feel much like their market. I’m less into sim-racing and more into fun arcade racing. Performance is not the best, more suited to higher end systems (which is why I played on desktop, rather than any of my handhelds, though it did perform and look nice on my Legion Go), with the usual Unreal Engine 5 hiccups.

The devs keep updating the game regularly, the map/roads are amazing, really I’d put it up there with any Gran Turismo title.

If you’ve any interest in a serious racer, with a less-serious story, beautiful locations and want to try something a little different, then this game is an easy recommendation.

• Here is the launch trailer, which is on YouTube

• Their official website, which has a lot of nice info on the game

• On sale on Steam right now, this is the link to the page. -25% off, but it does end soon!

• Also on sale on GOG, with the same -25% discount, but this sale will probably end by the time you read this, idk. This is the link to the GOG page!

---

Emulation:

---

Of course, if you just emulate, then you’re going to get the best of the best from every preceding era to play through.

• The old Colin McRae games (if you use something like DuckStation then you can even upscale to a crazy degree, add shaders and then use RetroAchievements to make it feel amazingly modern!)

• Gran Turismo games

• In particular you can add the Gran Turismo Spec II mod to GT4 and have a massively upgraded experience, [this YouTube video will explain what it is and what it does (sounds, tracks, cars, camera views, menus, UI, it’s massive)

• All the WipEout titles, including WipEout HD/Fury for PS3 (works beautifully on the Steam Deck!)

...the list is obviously so extensive, over so many consoles and systems that I won’t go into super detailed details. I will say however, that I use my friends’ creation: RetroDECK to play them on my Steam Deck, and it works beautifully for this. The YouTube channel, Retro Game Corps covers RetroDECK in-depth, showing what it can do, the features and step-by-step how to install and configure it. The link to that particular video on YouTube is here if you want to check it out.

---

This post is just a small one, and a bit of fun. I love racing games, and maybe you'll find something interesting in here if you do also!

And again, if you've got suggestions for similar games, please leave them below!

In case you missed it, recent reports suggest that Microsoft/Xbox has likely cancelled future Forza Motorsport titles (effectively ending the series), following massive layoffs that affected around half of Turn 10’s staff.

Its not a series I played, like most I think I opted for the Horizon series, but its still more sad news in a line of layoffs recently.

So, I decided I might just make a tiny list of a few games which haven't sold massive amounts, aren't AAA, and have few reviews.

Fair warning though, as ever I love to include a ton of pictures and GIFs in my posts. This one is no exception. One issue is if you're using the Boost for Lemmy app. My posts tend to slow scrolling to a glitchy mess, so if you're interested enough...maybe opt for your browser to read through instead? Or another app, I guess.

I know it's not what I typically post here, but...it's an easy write up...even if its a niche problem (finding car games to play!). If you know of any, or have enjoyed some and want to recommend, please comment them!

Anyway, let's start with the first one:

---

Art of Rally:

---

To start with I’ll have to mention Art of Rally. I’ve ranted about this for so long now, you’ll no doubt have already read through me trying to convince you to play. But, let’s do it all over again. It’s so good.

Set in the ‘golden era’ of racing: from the 60’s to the 80’s in a kind of alternate universe – if the infamous and incredibly dangerous ‘Group B’ never ceased.

Group B itself was a class in the World Rally Championship (WRC) that existed from 1982 to 1986, and was infamous for being both the most spectacular and the most dangerous era in rally history. They’d find literal fingers, hair, blood splatters in their vent grates and stuck in their cars when the races were finished...because no rules were in place for the spectators. None.

Group B allowed the car manufacturers to use just stupid barely tested technology and push performance limits with minimal regulation. The cars just had the most lightweight materials, turbochargers, superchargers, and four-wheel drive, producing up to 600 horsepower (more than many modern supercars). Their own rules required only 200 road-going models, making it easy for manufacturers to develop near-prototype race cars.

In the end they were extremely fast, but safety measures couldn't keep up. Tracks were narrow and lined with crowds of unprotected spectators, and co-drivers had to rely on pace notes at breakneck speeds. Crashes were frequent and often fatal.

This YouTube video is amazing and really should be watched, just so you get a snapshot of how dangerous and unsupervised this all was.

Anyway, that’s the history behind the setting. Now to the game.

Race in the golden era of rally. Drive iconic cars from the 60s to Group B on challenging stages through stylized environments inspired by real worldwide locations. Will you master the art of rally?

It’s a minimalist game. Super stylized environments and landscapes, the art design is bright simple and colorful, with over fifty ‘iconic’ rally cars (their own takes on them though, not at all licensed), rally driving tricks (Scandinavian flick, counter steering, left foot braking, handbrake turns) and maps like Germany, Japan, Norway, Australia, Indonesia (some are DLC).

I love how its open for simple beginners all the way up to incredibly detailed technical expert racing. I love how has a top-down perspective, not the typical racing style.

The music is beautiful, and its such a complete independent game. If you regularly claim the Epic Games free PC games each week then you’ll have the base game in your library already. But it is on regular sales too, with -40% off on Steam currently!.

It’s a game that very much reacts to your touch and movement. Much like a real rally car, you’re going to be feeling that sensation of needing to react quickly, or trying your best to wrestle that steering to either direction, or quickly having to tap the break. And that handbrake is where you’ll be dialing in those hairpins and perfecting that Scandinavian ‘flick’.

To me its the atmosphere. The setting, the colors, the foliage and hills, sky and how cheerful it all is makes this game such a beautiful one. I’ve played so much of it, and if you’re looking for a racing/rally/automotive game you might have missed alongside the typical AAA offerings, then choose this one!

• The ProtonDB page for Art of Rally – where you can check Linux/Steam Deck performance ratings from community members

• Their website

• The link to the game on GOG

The developers also have another automotive-based game coming:

Explore the world in the golden age of offroading. Drive iconic vehicles from the 60s to 80s by yourself or with friends through challenging trails and beautiful scenery.

Here’s the link to that one, called ‘Over The Hill’

---

Drive Rally:

---

Drive Rally released their 1.0 after being in Early Access not so long ago. This was one of those games you’d be forgiven for actually buying in E.A. though, since it was so damned complete (much like Hades 2, or Selaco feel for example).

One Caveat, there’s a hashtag before ‘Drive’ in the game’s title...but that is used for formatting on Lemmy so I’m just leaving it off for this little one.

DRIVE Rally is an arcade-inspired rally-driving experience set in the golden racing era of the ‘90s. Grab your co-driver and burn some rubber on iconic race-winning cars across a variety of terrains in some of the most iconic rallying locations in the world!

Far less sim, or precision-based, and far more forgiving, this one’s just fun - and feels the most ‘arcadey’ of the ones I’ll cover here. It’s more of a retro-inspired look to it, kinda reminding you of the PS1/PS2 days but without that heavy pixel-ish look to everything.

You can dial down the ‘wackiness’ on the voices of your co-driver/navigator (I recommend you do this), if you’d prefer it to be a little more serious. By default they have a humor to them, and a distinct voice style. Or you can keep it all the way up, totally up to you!

I like how this game makes me feel like I’m not fighting my car, that I am in control and it’s not punishing me for mistakes. Some people don’t like this, but I just like to think of it as a fun arcade racer – keep my serious racers for other times.

The usual suspects are here: car customization, fun locales which have their own unique feeling, there’s a heap of fun easter eggs from the genre and the history of racing games.

There’s constant updates, and you can see the devs care about keeping their game feeling fresh. I do know from an early point they really did listen to the community in Early Access, and changed the game according to some issues raised. So that’s always nice to see.

It’s on sale as a part of both the GOG and Steam Summer Sales right now, too, with -30% off right now:

• Link to the GOG store page here

• Link to the Steam store page here

• Their official website for the game

• Trailer for the 1.0 release from 2 months back on YouTube

If you just want a fun, arcade rally game that rewards you for races (unlockables), and doesn't make you stress on every turn and decision, this one is a perfect buy. I really recommend it!

---

Old School Rally & Rush Rally 3:

---

Both of these games are very similar, if not in the gameplay, in execution. They’re attempting to take you back to the PS1/arcade game era of rally racers, but with modern controls (and sensibilities, too). One is extra-heavily pixelated to make you think of the Colin McRae series of games.

---

Old School Rally:

“Carefully crafted retro style visuals, reminiscent of the late '90s rally games full of nostalgia and charm”

“With a variety of rally tracks from around the globe, race across different surfaces such as dirt, tarmac and snow and challenge your driving skills.”

“Choose from a diverse lineup of rally cars inspired by the legends of the past, each with unique characteristics and features.”

“Challenge other drivers from around the world and climb to the top of the leaderboards. Ready for more? Try to get all the achievements over the course of the game.”

To me this one’s a great Steam Deck game. There’s a fun balance between pure arcade gameplay, but with more to it if you want to invest your time in it. I’ve noticed the reviews tend to mention the excellent music...and they're very right on that one.

If you've nostalgia for the PS1 era racing games, obviously the McRae series, then this is a must have for you.

• Old School Rally official website

• Official trailer on YouTube

• Platinum Rating on ProtonDB with one review stating: “90 FPS, 7.5-8 W TDP with 7+ hours of gameplay easily with a full charge.”

• Steam Listing here with a ‘Very Positive’ rating from 1,186 reviews.

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Rush Rally 3:

Less pixelated and intentionally PS1-ish than Old School Rally is, this one still is in the same vein. Created by a single dev, it’s amazing how deep the game feels. To me the ‘rougher’ areas, are the tracks and lanscapes, but the vehicles seem to be far more polished for the player – even giving you a pretty comprehensive set of options to customize the cars to your liking:

There are online features (leaderboads and multiplayer), unique weekly live events, a dev who cares deeply about suggestions and is constantly making adjustments and changes to how things run and look based off player feedback. I love how dedicated the dev seems to this game, you can tell they love racing and rally.

“60 FPS racing (120+fps on supported devices) at night or day in the rain or snow! Over 100 new and unique stages each with different surface types including snow, gravel, tarmac and dirt! Race with one of the best car dynamics models to date, including real time vehicle deformation and damage, built from over 15 years of experience.”

“Race with your favourite controller, all fully configurable including full force feedback wheel support!”

• Again, platinum rating on ProtonDB, though this time there’s only one review left for it

• The dev mentioned on Steam that they’re done extensive Steam Deck testing to make sure it runs as well as can possibly be expected

• The Steam page for the game, with a -70% off price currently

• No official trailer is on YouTube, but a ton of great review videos are there, with everyone stunned by how great the game is

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Japanese Drift Master (JDM):

You might have seen this one, while it’s still kinda under the radar compared to most games (with only 2,457 total reviews on Steam), it turned some heads before release because of the setting and presentation.

Drifting in Japan. Story told through the pages of manga. Clearly very inspired by recognizable, real life locations. Licensed cars. Euro-beat. DRM-free?

It ticked so many boxes that racing fans have, but the main one is being set in Japan. Horizon fans have been clamoring for the game to be set in that country for many iterations now, so this kinda felt like...the next best thing?

JDM: Japanese Drift Master combines realistic, carefully-tuned physics in a simcade experience that’s as smooth on a controller as it is with sim racing hardware. Tackle hundreds of kilometers of open-world roads and uncover story-driven events and quests along the way. Hone your drifting skills, perfect grip races, take on challenges, and feel the thrill of authentic Japanese street racing.

This game is far more…‘sim’ than the others I’ve covered so far. While of course it’s still accessible to those who don’t want to take it super duper seriously, you can see this one’s aimed more at those who want to play the game as a drifting simulator.

Experience the automotive culture of Japan and discover the roads where drifting was born.

It’s very, very pretty. The detail in the environments and the cars is really impressive. The music is incredibly moreish and I did keep going back to this game. What gives me pause in the end is that I don’t feel much like their market. I’m less into sim-racing and more into fun arcade racing. Performance is not the best, more suited to higher end systems (which is why I played on desktop, rather than any of my handhelds, though it did perform and look nice on my Legion Go), with the usual Unreal Engine 5 hiccups.

The devs keep updating the game regularly, the map/roads are amazing, really I’d put it up there with any Gran Turismo title.

If you’ve any interest in a serious racer, with a less-serious story, beautiful locations and want to try something a little different, then this game is an easy recommendation.

• Here is the launch trailer, which is on YouTube

• Their official website, which has a lot of nice info on the game

• On sale on Steam right now, this is the link to the page. -25% off, but it does end soon!

• Also on sale on GOG, with the same -25% discount, but this sale will probably end by the time you read this, idk. This is the link to the GOG page!

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Emulation:

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Of course, if you just emulate, then you’re going to get the best of the best from every preceding era to play through.

• The old Colin McRae games (if you use something like DuckStation then you can even upscale to a crazy degree, add shaders and then use RetroAchievements to make it feel amazingly modern!)

• Gran Turismo games

• In particular you can add the Gran Turismo Spec II mod to GT4 and have a massively upgraded experience, [this YouTube video will explain what it is and what it does (sounds, tracks, cars, camera views, menus, UI, it’s massive)

• All the WipEout titles, including WipEout HD/Fury for PS3 (works beautifully on the Steam Deck!)

...the list is obviously so extensive, over so many consoles and systems that I won’t go into super detailed details. I will say however, that I use my friends’ creation: RetroDECK to play them on my Steam Deck, and it works beautifully for this. The YouTube channel, Retro Game Corps covers RetroDECK in-depth, showing what it can do, the features and step-by-step how to install and configure it. The link to that particular video on YouTube is here if you want to check it out.

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This post is just a small one, and a bit of fun. I love racing games, and maybe you'll find something interesting in here if you do also!

And again, if you've got suggestions for similar games, please leave them below!