Hello all! I have never selfhosted before, but I have a pretty extensive digital library of videogames (ROMs from a couple dozen retro systems among other executables) that my friends have expressed interested in having access. What’s the ideal software for giving them access to the library hosted on my drives? I’m picturing something like a selfhosted Steam where they see all of the games and can search via retro system, game tags, by name, etc. and each of could keep track of separate user accounts by playtime, favorites, recently played, etc. I use RetroArch and a few standalone emulators myself connected to RetroAchievements, so I figured they would need to download any emulators on their ends and then just pick and play the games as they see fit without having to have their own copies of the games.
what you’re looking for is a multi-tenant game server. only two ways to get that, virtualization or containerization.
you’ll need a really really beefy server for it either way if you want more than 2 people playing simultaneously.
since steam works on Linux you might have some luck with steamos on docker.
you can run multiple instances people connect to and stream all from the same “library”. this means you could technically be able to have halo running across two instances from the same executables. though YMMV since steam may be signing those exes per account.
alternative is to use something like unraid which has recipes for this exact problem. they use a combination of virtual boxes that use GPU passthrus. probably a larger overhead since it’s a full windows VM running, but you can run pretty much everything on steam in it.