What are y’all using for your offline game libraries? I ended up getting Resident Evil on GoG and started thinking about how I can host these on a NAS. Maybe something Dockerized?
Jellyfin for music and video
Immich for images
Audiobookshelf for Audiobooks
??? for Gaming?
Not sure if that’s your image, but I see Rocket from the Crypt and scream Dracula scream!
I just download the offline installers from GOG and keep those on my NAS organized into folders per game until I want to install them. Not fancy, but it works fine for me.
Same, but i’d still love for a way to nicely download these games across my network. Like, I have the folders in my NAS with the setup files, I just need an interface that will install them like a regular installer would.
I’m keeping an eye on gamevault as well, but wanted to include to Retro gaming. I also like a web interface which gamevault is not currently planning on having. Right now I am experimenting with Romm. I can create a category for gog games and download each game as a zip archive. Not fully what I want but it works. I love that for a lot of emulators you can play roms directly in the browser.
I also saw mention of gaseous games and Gameyfin but haven’t looked at them to closely yet.
I just store all my game files on my NAS and have a set of bash scripts to generate installers for lutris, so if anyone in my family wants to play something I’ve brought they just run the script, select the game and it does everything for them. Got over 200 games and it works almost flawlessly.
You mind sharing? :) sounds interesting :)
Sure!
I have all the original, un-edited game files stored on my NAS; such as gog setup files, Steam files or just ROMs. Then with each game I store anything else needed to get it to run, such as custom patches, cracks if necessary, mods etc.
I have another folder full of tools, such as Steam Redistributables (DirectX, VCRedist, DotNet etc), any emulators that aren’t part of lutris’s runners and things like Goldbergs emu. And another folder with the bash scripts for each game.
So my family or anyone visiting can go to the website I run on our local network and download a bash script. This script just checks if they can see the NAS and the game folders, if not, it automatically mounts the directories and logs in for them. Then it reads all the game folders and lets you search for the game you want to install. When you select the game you want it loads their specific script which writes a .yml file to your home directory which lutris can then read; depending on the type of game depends on how elaborate it needs to be.
The script ends by launching lutris and pointing it directly to the .yml file which starts the installation; I’ve made mine all automatic so no one has to press anything once they select where to install and lutris starts, everything will install itself. Helps keep things simple and reduces errors.
There’s a little more detail to each bit, such as using autohotkey to automate installers that don’t have silent options, or ISO installs with CD Keys etc but that’s the rough gist of my current setup, took a while to get all my games working buy now they are done it’s easy for everyone!
Happy to explain or help if anyone has any further questions!
You can put a separate Wine prefix for each game on your NAS and use a launcher like Lutris to run the games. You can share the Wine prefix between multiple computers. Newer games that require a SSD probably won’t work well over the network though.
I’m waiting for Playnite to have support for linux and then I’ll link it to a Games on Whales VM on Proxmox
Mainly I’ll use heroic launcher for PC fames or retro arch for playing emulators locally, but the examples you list are both web based front ends, in which case I setup emujs to share with friends.
- Navidrome is still a little bit ahead of jellyfin for music
Eh, Jellyfin is just a storage. I mostly use it to link up to Symphonium.
NFS
Need For Speed isn’t on GoG yet.
I’ve been keeping an eye on GameVault as it does exactly what I want from a server perspective. I’m just waiting for a Linux native client or integration the HeroicLauncher or Lutris. The devs are pretty active in this community too!
Looks cool, to bad it’s not open source
Here’s the link to their GitHub
Like they say in their FAQ it’s source available but not open source
No, GameVault is source-available, meaning the code is open for you to explore and modify for personal use. However, you may not use it for commercial purposes.
They also have a paid premium version which is required to use third-party clients, so there will be no heroic integration unless you pay
