Continuing the discussion from In the beginning… a filesystem:
I’m fusing my filesystem into place, and am wondering:
I can never get any automated library, such as the one in RetroArch, to identify my roms from names. I suppose I need to look it up per system.
~/games/roms/$SYSTEM is my normal standby, but I thought I might give Clover an account and share the roms system-wise. I wonder… /opt/roms/gamecube/skies-of-arcadia-legends.gcm?
Maybe /use/local/games/roms/$system/rom.file.
I decided I would probably serve my media directories over various protocols, so I chose /srv/roms as my directory. I just tested it by adding /srv/roms/gamecube/ to Dolphin and it works! That is very cool, because I can share it with Clover locally, and myself over NFS. 
I looked it up and the names lists for ROMs are derived from hashes (because release groups used to add stuff to the ROMs, there is a group called “No Intro” that compiles the lists, and everyone uses them).
So I name them whatever I want, their fine. 
Doesn’t really help your use case, but wanted to share my system.
I keep my roms folder separate from a more general games folder for syncthing purposes; as sometimes I like telling syncthing to synchronize my roms, but not everything in the games hiearchy. It lives in my home folder ~/Roms
Subfolders include:
gb
gba
gen
nds
nes
psp
psx
sav
snes
The ‘sav’ folder stores all of the rom save files. And all emulators are set to check there for save games by default. That way I get ‘cloud saves’ synchronized across multiple devices/emulators. Some of these systems have a “bios” folder inside with bioses as appropriate.
Very cool! If you and your partner shared a computer with seperate accounts, how would you adjust it?
OMFG, I’ve been drowning in directory specs lately, my brain auto-translated your words into $PATH/<package>/sav and $PATH/<package>/bios…
Because I’m definitely sharing with at least Clover, and we’ll definitely have multiple devices (at least a laptop each and one shared desktop), I’m thinking:
/srv/roms for NFS/Retroshare/FTP/whatevs~/.sync/roms/savs with syncthing, per userWhatcha think? Kinda cool, kinda unix-y, ne?
I tend to setup my own prefix in /usr/local for anything installed system-wide that isn’t handled by my package manager. 9 times out of ten since it’s applications im compiling myself and im using GNU Stow to manage them, it’s /usr/local/stow
SO… ultimately id pick /usr/local/stow/share/roms
Would have to rethink save games. As they would need to be synced seperately in the home folder, or have a new per person hiearchy in the roms folder. Luckily my man tends to mostly stick to original hardware when the mood strikes him, though that isnt TOO often.
Very cool, and very unixy. You using Retroshare? How do you like it, ive never used it but its often looked interesting.
Ah, that’ really interesting! I made the same call, but different value for ROMs: I see them as data files to load into the emulator. I go there when I compared /usr/local versus /opt, and realized a ROM on it’s own isn’t very useful.
The other things I’m sharing with @susan and Clover are photos and music (and maybe videos, but often it’s easier to just keep them on external drives for sneakernet-sharing). ROMs are games, but they don’t operate on themselves, so we need emulators and photo views and music players, the class of stuff that gets installed in /usr/local//opt/via package, in my thinking.
Fascinating stuff, way geeky. 