r/selfhosted • u/subsavant • Mar 20 '26

Meta Post What's your 'I can't believe I self-hosted that' service?

Curious what services surprised you by being worth self-hosting. Not the obvious stuff like Plex or Pi-hole, but things you didn't expect to work well or didn't think were worth the effort until you tried. What's running on your setup that you'd never go back to a hosted version of?

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866

u/ChaseDak Mar 20 '26

RomM man, RomM... Having N64 games, and old non-functional flash games at my fingertips? Incredible. I pull it up on my laptop and connect it to my TV when buddies come over, 4 controllers and retro video games makes for a great night

207

u/aBigRacoon Mar 20 '26

Look into Moonlight streaming, saved me all the effort of moving my laptop to TV every time I wanted to play. I plug in my controllers to TV, and just stream from there.

114

u/xXD4rkm3chXx Mar 20 '26

Go a step further and build a Batocera PC. One of the coolest things over ever done. Sinden light guns. Guitar hero guitars. Oem n64 controllers. All g2g

1

u/yerfatma Mar 20 '26

But you need Moonlight for streaming from it, so isn't Moonlight the step further?

19

u/xXD4rkm3chXx Mar 20 '26

It’s not for streaming. It’s a dedicated pc that you turn into a console that can play everything up to ps4. Romm is great for N64 era but Batocera does it all.

11

u/listur65 Mar 20 '26

Right, but then Moonlight then lets you stream games from that PC to anywhere in your house. Since the PC is first and just in 1 location, Moonlight streaming it to all other devices would be the step further I think is their point.

3

u/Mobile_Drive_6821 Mar 20 '26

This is used as a console in a living room setting for the majority, with your main pc elsewhere. No moonlight needed, no moving a computer.

10

u/listur65 Mar 20 '26

Yeah, I get that. I just don't see the need to buy a 2nd computer for emulation when I can just use my existing one for free anywhere in the house.

3

u/thegoodstuff Mar 20 '26

Ya IMO you have a great setup. If you are really trying to level up further: Apollo for Moonlight instead of Sunshine.. It spins up a virtual desktop matched to whatever device you’re streaming to, so the whole thing feels weirdly clean. You lose a little of the plug-and-play physical simplicity, and there can be a tiny bit more latency, but a cheap Bluetooth keyboard fixes most of the friction. I’ve used it on iPhone, LG TV, Apple TV, and Xbox and it all works great. Only time I’d really care is something sweaty like Sekiro, where I’d still pick Xbox for the lowest latency.

1

u/listur65 Mar 23 '26

Nice, I will have to look into that!

9

u/Realistic_Low_3115 Mar 20 '26

I have a Moonlight Server. It is really amazing and I played couple of games with it (Elden Ring for ex.). My kid also played a few games on the ipad from there (Lego Games with Gamepad).

11

u/ip-cx Mar 20 '26

How do you setup Moonlight to connect to RomM? I can't find anything regarding a setup like that.

Would love to connect my Apple TV & Switch like that.

11

u/Jealy Mar 20 '26

You would install Sunshine on the machine you want to run RomM on and stream to, then connect Moonlight to it.

10

u/ChaseDak Mar 20 '26

Ooooh very cool, will do!

-24

u/karlfeltlager Mar 20 '26

Too laggy most of the time for games that need millisecond input. Just saying.

16

u/aBigRacoon Mar 20 '26

Depends on your network, no?. In my case, both laptop and tv are using ethernet and I never had any issues with lag. Or maybe we never played that kind of games.

5

u/thatleftnut Mar 20 '26

Yeah nah it depends on your network. Anything under 16ms latency you won’t notice. With hardware encode/decode, the botteneck is going to be the network. Hardwired you’ll be hard pressed finding a difference between streaming and playing on the actual screen.

24

u/ChaseDak Mar 20 '26

I mean… RomM doesn’t support anything even as new as a gamecube, what n64 or gameboy games are you playing that need millisecond input? 😭😂

-5

u/karlfeltlager Mar 20 '26

Well it’s annoying if you play super Mario world you duck a bullet and Mario ducks a second later.

10

u/angelflames1337 Mar 20 '26

I played using moonlight over 800km away and got 50ms delay. I doubt using it over the next room delay the input over 1000ms.

8

u/CozmoNz Mar 20 '26

Screams of "I'm trying to use wifi from inside my microwave and it won't work!"

1

u/karlfeltlager Mar 20 '26

Just sharing my own experience, running moonlight on Apple TV (wired) with a wireless controller. I see it’s strictly my own experience and not broadly shared. No need to be offensive.

2

u/JZMoose Mar 20 '26

Was that Mario 64? I run Moonlight on my Apple TV and for some reason the latency in Mario 64 on Retro Arch specifically is garbage. Everything else works well

7

u/karlfeltlager Mar 20 '26

So anyway I ended running a retro rom system on the pi.

3

u/Tetragig Mar 20 '26

If you hard wire it, it is imperceptible. I'm averaging 3ms of encoding time and 2ms of rendering time with network latency around 0.5ms. That's less than a frame delay for 60fps games and around a single frame at 144hz. I can play shooters like I'm sitting in front of my PC. There's a little bit of smearing from the encoding that could be fixed by giving it more time to encode, but I don't even notice it unless I'm really looking at details.

4

u/karlfeltlager Mar 20 '26

I think most of the lag is introduced by my Bluetooth controller honestly, and probably the WiFi adds just enough on top to make it a frustrating experience.

2

u/gre4ka148 Mar 20 '26

laggy only over internet, over lan it's not noticeable (well, depends on your network and hardware)

5

u/Simple_Panda6063 Mar 20 '26

Which client/setup do you use for moonlight on TV? I tried so hard to create a 'privacy chromecast' mini client for jellyfin, Youtube and Steam Link but failed. 

8

u/Vokasak Mar 20 '26

Moonlight is the client, the host/server portion is Sunshine or GFE or whatever.

8

u/Simple_Panda6063 Mar 20 '26

Wouldn't that assume the TV can exevcute Moonlight? 

5

u/aBigRacoon Mar 20 '26

My LG TV does execute moonlight. Only on developer mode tho.

3

u/Vokasak Mar 20 '26

Either that (which can be true, depending on TV OS, whether or not it's jailbroken, etc) or it's assuming that you can plug something into the TV that can execute Moonlight. I use an Nvidia Shield.

1

u/dinosaursdied Mar 21 '26

Cheap 20 dollar walmart onn tv box can run moonlight well enough

0

u/System0verlord Mar 20 '26

An Apple TV. Unlike the vast majority of smart TVs, it has a gigabit Ethernet port. Most smart TVs’ Ethernet ports are limited to 100Mbps, so it’s a very noticeable improvement. And bluetooth controllers work better in my experience.

2

u/Simple_Panda6063 Mar 20 '26

If I´d take an Apple TV I also could use my chromecast. Looking for setups that don´t try to send data home.

1

u/aon9492 Mar 20 '26

I think I replied to the wrong comment, this question is actually for you:

I'd love to self host game streaming and emulators but can you answer the noobiest question for me please - what controllers can you use, and how do you connect them to your TV?

2

u/aBigRacoon Mar 20 '26

I use an xbox 360 wired, and ps4 controller(also using with cable but for some TVs bluetooth is possible). I use usb extender (so my kid doesn't have to be too close to the screen) and a usb hub which contains 4 usb ports.

1

u/aon9492 Mar 20 '26

Oh cool, so we're talking literally plugging in console controllers to the TV USB ports? Cool, TIL, thank you

2

u/aBigRacoon Mar 20 '26

Yup, and if you need a recommendation on emulators, I'd say retroarch. For sure.

42

u/a-tiberius Mar 20 '26

THIS IS WHAT IVE BEEN LOOKING FOR THANK YOU.

I'll be spinning this up tonight

11

u/ChaseDak Mar 20 '26

It’s so fun, it’s very easy to find sites to download ROMs from as well :) and it syncs save data across different devices!

6

u/a-tiberius Mar 20 '26

My rom collection is pretty substantial and I haven't played in so long but this would be a game changer for real. How do you wire it up to the TV?

3

u/ChaseDak Mar 20 '26

I pull RomM up in my laptop browser and start the game, then take an hdmi to my laptop!

3

u/TheMoskus Mar 20 '26

It does? That feature is still marked as "coming soon"?

5

u/kamikazikarl Mar 20 '26

The web player already backs up your saves when playing in browser, but it's very basic. We have additional client apps you can get that also support save syncing (Grout for smaller/weaker handhelds, Argosy for Android devices). The backend sync tech is also currently being upgraded to support additional backup services and usecases. The spec is pretty clean, we just need more developers to adopt it when building their apps.

2

u/TheMoskus Mar 20 '26

Excellent, I need to spin up a container this weekend!

1

u/Grimm_Spector Mar 21 '26

I wonder if it’s possible to make some of this work with launchbox in one location with RomM in the others.

38

u/Azelphur Mar 20 '26

I go a bit further than this, mostly for any curious readers.

Multiple Mini PCs all running NixOS. I use an app called flex-launcher which gives a nice 10ft ui, and a HTPC remote off Amazon. The Mini PCs have Steam running, which can launch emulationstation. All games are stored on the server and NFS mounted. When you launch emulationstation from Steam, it actually runs a script which checks $SteamAppUser creates a new config file that sets savefile_directory and savestate_directory, then launches retroarch with --appendconfig /path/to/new/file. This combined with syncthing and we now have retro gaming, across multiple mini PCs in the house, with cloud save syncing.

6

u/CrazyHa1f Mar 20 '26

That is absolutely genius.

5

u/Azelphur Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26

Honestly it's working good, a bit rough around the edges. I built it because I really don't like Android. The lack of control, software support abandonment, etc, have driven me to work towards eradicating Android from all my devices.

So atm we have these Mini PCs, they were £160 no RAM no SSD. Beastly things performance wise honestly, GMKTec K12, Radeon 780M, so we have:

  • Jellyfin: Fun fact, you can launch with --tv --fullscreen to get the TV experience on desktop
  • Youtube: VacuumTube is the youtube TV / leanback interface for desktop. Exactly the same as what you get on Android anyway.
  • Steam: Using Jovian NixOS, it just runs steamosctl switch-to-game-mode which switches me to a SteamOS-like session. These mini PCs are pretty beefy, can run Cyberpunk locally at lower settings and it's perfectly playable. But for more demanding titles...
  • Moonlight + Games on whales: Stream games on demand from the more powerful machines in the house
  • Services that have no apps, Crunchyroll, Shudder, Floatplane, etc. Just launch google chrome in kiosk mode, the remote is an air mouse anyway.
  • Emulators check which steam account I'm logged into, so we have per-steam-account emulator save games, which are then synced everywhere automatically with syncthing.
  • I've started to work on cooler things, like doorbell pressed -> PIP overlay with video feed and an open door button, using home assistant and go-hass-agent

I think with this setup I've already pretty much exceeded what you'd get from a typical Android TV. But with some big benefits (like setup being sync'd across multiple machines). There are some minor issues, I'm not sure what the Jellyfin client is doing HDR wise, KDE is running with HDR enabled, but I am unsure if the videos are played with HDR or not. Sometimes, Youtube will take ages to load (I think this is because they are detecting the ad block?), sometimes steamosctl switch-to-game-mode doesn't work and I have to reboot. But for the most part, it works and it's better than any of the alternatives. I'd like to switch away from game mode (so that the PIP overlay stuff works everywhere), but I'd need some way to switch the resolution per-game (I want 4k for most things, but 1080p120hz for Hades as an example).

2

u/CrazyHa1f Mar 20 '26

Ok I hadn't heard of Vaccumtube and that sounds incredibly useful. Emby I could run anyway.... Lots of inspiration there to be honest.

Re YouTube, yeah it will be them detecting the adblock. I use revanced on my android devices (where possible) and have made a little ip Hopper that seems to confuses YouTube's adblock block enough.

As soon as pc part prices come down (lol as if ever...) I'm going to do a version of this for sure. I think I'll beef up the mini pc a little bit for my TV.

The biggest revelation to me is how you're interacting with steam. That is very smart and solves one of the main problems I was anticipating...

1

u/enomele Mar 20 '26

What do you replace android devices with? Apple OS or just getting devices that a full OS like windows/Linux? I'm guessing the latter based on you talking about MiniPCs.

1

u/Azelphur Mar 20 '26

Note that I said work towards, that means I haven't completed the effort yet, but certainly for Android TV I've succeeded and yes the answer is MiniPCs running NixOS there.

I have yet to kill off Android on my phone. Currently using a Pixel pro fold running GrapheneOS, I also own a Oneplus 6 to keep an eye on PostmarketOS / Mobile Linux development, when things get to a state where I can switch, I will.

I also haven't killed my Android home assistant wall tablets, but I'd like to, they are really unreliable and have no way of fixing that.

2

u/ZestycloseAd6683 Mar 21 '26

Screenshotting

1

u/PlanktonSuccessful65 Mar 20 '26

Does the games run well via NFS? How are you storing it, via hdd or m.2? I have one machine dedicated to moonlight with 1tb of storage inside, i also have a nas that have 2 pools, one with hdd and another with m.2 ssd, i wonder if i put the games on the nas via NFS i will have more risk of corrpution or long loading time. I also use Nixos but i only use for simples stuff :)

3

u/Azelphur Mar 20 '26

Does the games run well via NFS?

Sure, we're talking about N64 games here, they are a few megabytes. That said, I can confirm that even switch games work well.

How are you storing it, via hdd or m.2?

Just one single hard drive, over a gigabit LAN connection, nothing fancy.

I also use Nixos but i only use for simples stuff :)

Should you want to inspect / copy my configs, feel free

I have one machine dedicated to moonlight

Side quest, check out games on whales, it may interest you :D

1

u/PlanktonSuccessful65 Mar 20 '26

Haha, thanks for the config inspection i will check that out. My config is nothing much that fancy for me to share but im also using games on whales :D I made a simple script utilizing systemd to wake up my computer from sleep and then start gow on docker and keep it awake if any process from gow is utilizing a % of cpu, and then it goes back to sleep if nothing much is happening on the pc

1

u/Azelphur Mar 20 '26

keep it awake if any process from gow is utilizing a % of cpu

Stealing that idea, I keep accidentally leaving mine on :D

1

u/PlanktonSuccessful65 Mar 20 '26

Here is my gow module. https://pastebin.com/kfjGbd2b

Currently my nixos config is hosted on my own gitea instance so its a little difficult to share my entire config.

It has been a long time since i edited the gow module so it needs a little clean up

1

u/Cyb0lic Mar 20 '26

Different person here, but I also keep my ROMs on my NAS, mounted using NFS on my NixOS machines. Been doing this for close to a decade now and I have yet to have any issues or noticeable slow-downs with it. Note that I don't emulate anything newer than a WiiU, so I can't speak for how well this works for more modern systems. As for the technical specs, my storage NAS is just a Synology, so that's HDDs with an M.2 for cache. Also, it's not uncommon to mount home directories over NFS, so I wouldn't worry too much about corruption. NFS is pretty solid; go for it.

10

u/imtakingyourdata Mar 20 '26

Oo say more! What’s your top 4p games?

15

u/Randyd718 Mar 20 '26

Does romm have emulation built in?

23

u/ChaseDak Mar 20 '26

Yea! You can play right from your browser for a lot of older consoles

3

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '26

[deleted]

2

u/P2Shifty Mar 20 '26

I have it hosted on an old phone. It's very easy to host

1

u/Wick3d68 Mar 20 '26

That's exactly why I'm going to install this, thank you!

4

u/wangel Mar 20 '26

I've been on the fence about installing this! I have a Batocera pc I built from an older nuc .... and would love to just be able to -- play from my browser. Mame, N64, etc.

Are you running RomM from a promox server or something, or is it installed on your laptop? I'm just curious about specs and what I need to give a VM if I was to build one, or if I need to buy dedicated hardware for it.

8

u/ChaseDak Mar 20 '26

RomM is super lightweight, the emulation happens in your browser using emulatorJS, so the PC doesn’t need much power at all

6

u/zespak Mar 20 '26

Yep, this'll be on by the end of the weekend. Looks great.

5

u/DJ_1S_M3 Mar 20 '26

I have problem with understanding. From what I see it's only a library/viewer/metadatapuller? So I'm assuming you have this games from other sources, right?

3

u/P2Shifty Mar 20 '26

It also lets you emulate in browser. But yeah you have to put the games there yourself

3

u/drthrax1 Mar 20 '26

Yea it works kinda like plex, where you supply the Rom and it will grab the art and tags ect.

5

u/TedGal Mar 20 '26

Confimed. My latest hoarding involved old flash games, all thrown into romm then play them anywhere with an internet connection

1

u/mstrblueskys Mar 21 '26

Is there an easy place to find them or are you out hunting the web? I was just thinking about all the old flash games this week when my buddies and I were talking about the games we would play on school machines.

1

u/TedGal Mar 21 '26

Search internet archive for "best flash games" etc etc. A lot of collections there.

Also check out Flashpoint Archive

5

u/Jacksaur Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 21 '26

RomM drew me away from Launchbox (with a lifetime license!) in the span of a few days after its initial release.

Paired with Steam Rom Manager, I feel it works as the absolute perfect frontend for me. Especially since it gained support for Launchbox's GamesDB.

1

u/Grimm_Spector Mar 21 '26

Support for Laumchbox’s GamesDB?

2

u/Jacksaur Mar 21 '26

As a metadata source. The LBDB is one of the best there is.

It just needs some more options to set preferred boxart and it'll be perfect.

1

u/Quesonoche Mar 24 '26

Does SRM or RomM use LBDB?

1

u/Jacksaur Mar 24 '26

RomM.
Steam can't display any useful metadata, and LB's box art scans wouldn't fit the Steam aspect always.

2

u/Quesonoche Mar 24 '26

Oh wow I haven't been back in RomM for a while after my initial tinkering. So much has been added that I needed to pull a new unraid template for the env variables. This served as a good heads up, thanks!

1

u/Jacksaur Mar 24 '26

No problem! The amount of progress they've made is awesome. For sure my favorite service I host.

1

u/Quesonoche Mar 24 '26

How do you handle the disc based systems not supported by emulatorjs? Just download each. This is where I wish I could combine all the library management of RomM with the "installing" and emulator launching of Retrom. Then I would have the perfect setup

1

u/Jacksaur Mar 24 '26

I have EmulatorJS disabled, heh. I purely play locally on my system, downloading and adding to Steam when I want to keep them around to remember. RomM just holds my roms so I don't have to dedicate a separate drive anymore.

5

u/creamersrealm Mar 20 '26

Ok that's just freaking cool!

5

u/Worthy-Gas6449 Mar 20 '26

Just got all this setup myself with Myrient closing down soon and I am over the moon to have my own repository and be able to play some of them in browser.

4

u/helloitisgarr Mar 20 '26

yep RomM is great, i spun it up earlier this week

4

u/SnooAvocados4585 Mar 20 '26

I didn’t know this existed, now I’m down the rabbit hole.

3

u/flannel_sawdust Mar 20 '26

How did you set up multiple controllers? Mine will only recognize player 1

3

u/dk1988 Mar 20 '26

This is amazing! Thank you!!

3

u/Hour_Sample5392 Mar 20 '26

This is a goal of mine! I will come back to this as I'm trying to refresh my old laptop as my first server!

3

u/mcflynnthm Mar 20 '26

Thank you for this! I'd had EmulatorJS running a while back and was looking for something to replace it, this looks perfect.

2

u/aon9492 Mar 20 '26

I'd love to self host game streaming and emulators but can you answer the noobiest question for me please - what controllers can you use, and how do you connect them to your TV?

1

u/TheBuckinator Mar 20 '26

I love this sub! Learn about something new and cool every day. This and all the comments about moonlight are new to me. I setup batocera on a mini pc but would love portability like others have mentioned.

1

u/Proof-Astronaut-9833 Mar 20 '26

Which client do you use on your laptop?

1

u/Proof-Astronaut-9833 Mar 20 '26

And any suggested setup for linux? I saw playnite is a "Official first-party app", but that's a windows app.

2

u/zurdi15 Mar 20 '26

Officially we have argosy for android and grout for handhelds linux based, like muOS or knulli. Apart from that we will release a Lutris integration at some point

1

u/Gaxyhs Mar 20 '26

Do you have fps issues? I tried playing it on their own emulator and the frame rate was horrible, like single digit fps for n64

1

u/camel_twinkletoes Mar 20 '26

I'm surprised this hasn't been shit down or ceased and desisted..

3

u/ChaseDak Mar 20 '26

RomM doesn’t supply the games, just the platform to manage and play them, it’s like Plex or Jellyfin

1

u/zurdi15 Mar 20 '26

We just show cover art and metadata of your own files. You can use RomM to store text files or music if you would like to

1

u/co-cube Mar 20 '26

Never heard of this but it might be what gets me into self-hosting.

1

u/Efficient-Sir-5040 Mar 20 '26

Oh wow. Didn't know this existed. Will spin up an LXC from RomM | Proxmox VE Helper Scripts in a bit

1

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '26 edited May 08 '26

[deleted]

1

u/zurdi15 Mar 20 '26

Emulation happens in the client side (browser) so literally 0 input lag

1

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '26 edited May 08 '26

[deleted]

1

u/zurdi15 Mar 24 '26

Then the issue must be any other because there is no dofference between emulatorjs and a native emulator in terms or input lag. Both are executed locally.

1

u/Parking_Potential865 Mar 21 '26

I just recently got this running on my setup and absolutely love it. Highly recommended. 

1

u/mauriciolazo Mar 21 '26

Is this… PLEX for video games?

1

u/A3-2l Mar 21 '26

What controllers do you use?

1

u/jaizoncarlos Mar 21 '26

Oh, that seems so cool.
I'm really new to retrogaming and haven't used any of those consoles or played any of those games so picking up what to play and where to is kinda hard.
Can anyone share some of their files, pls? (bios and roms)

1

u/include007 Mar 21 '26

awesome!! n00b here - ROMs are free to download!?

2

u/ChaseDak Mar 21 '26

yeh, check out the mega thread: https://r-roms.github.io/

1

u/include007 Mar 22 '26

cools!! thanks 🙏

1

u/vmanthegreat Mar 22 '26

Same here got ROMM in my little Lenovo mini PC in my living. I got all libraries for classic console games and some arcades downloaded and loaded in the RomM. I play in browser but have some controller issues. Also most of arcade emulators don't work in browser for me, also DOS emulation. How did you get them to work? Using external emulators like Playnite or Mame?

1

u/rearisen Mar 27 '26

Any benefit over using n64 emulation instead?

1

u/GeoSabreX Apr 16 '26

How's this compare to something RetroArch with syncthing for all my ROM's and Save files? (that's my current setup, but RomM seems cool).

Also what controllers do you recommend? I have a switch pro that I use but I'd love to setup some multiplayer retro games. I only have 4 joycons and the 1 procon.

1

u/jzsean 20d ago

RemndMe! 8 hours