Nearcade vs ROMie

Nearcade is a free, open-source, self-hosted platform for playing local co-op games over the internet with friends. A host runs the game, while viewers join from a desktop or mobile web browser without installing a client. Streaming uses WebCodecs or WebRTC and peer-to-peer connections. Hosts can allow gamepad input, raw keyboard and mouse, or keyboard and mouse mapped to a virtual gamepad; mobile viewers get touch controls and a virtual joystick. Sessions can use private Cloudflare or Zrok tunnels, or appear in the public Nearcade Arcade lobby. Public Arcade sessions are limited to 80 minutes and require a verified tunneling provider. A host needs Node.js 18 or newer and Python 3. Linux also requires PipeWire and the uinput module, while Windows gamepad support requires ViGEmBus. Linux is listed as production-stable; Windows and macOS are experimental, and macOS lacks gamepad support. The project is published under GPL-3.0 and provides setup, usage, API, and VPS server documentation.

ROMie imports and organizes ROM collections, then copies them to handheld SD cards using the folder layout for a selected device profile. It can create tagged game playlists, normalize filenames into game titles and compare ROM MD5 hashes with the RetroAchievements database to show progress for verified games. Device profiles listed include OnionOS, Knulli, muOS, ROCKNIX and custom profiles. ZIP and 7z archives are accepted when each contains exactly one supported ROM file; they remain compressed in the library and are copied to the device that way. Supported systems include Nintendo, Sega, Atari, Neo Geo Pocket and MAME arcade systems. PlayStation is temporarily unsupported because of multi-disc game complexity. ROMie is free software under the MIT license, with no paid plans stated. Downloads are listed for macOS, Windows and Linux, including Linux x64 and ARM64 builds. The releases page lists v0.9.0-rc.2 as a prerelease.