My retro gaming hardware collection has grown recently. The Analogue Pocket introduced me into a gaming platform possible of playing decades of games across dozens of consoles, handhelds, and arcade boards. Recently, I got a Mister which expanded this reach even further.
Last year, I made a page that catalogued all of the notable games I had on my Analogue Pocket. And now I've revamped that curated list into an overall Digital Retro Game Library. This lists all the notable games I have available on both the Pocket and the Mister. More platforms may be added in the future, like PS2 and Gamecube.
Originally, these games were being collected to build Genre lists of games using the now-canceled Playlist feature for the Analogue Pocket. The idea was that I could scroll through a Genre of games and choose one to play without having to pay attention to the hardware platform it was designed for. I was collecting all this information using Pocket Utils, a collection of Java programs that I wrote to manage games and stuff on my Pocket.
Later, after the Playlist feature was buried and gone, I decided to put all of this information into a webpage so I could at least see everything visually. This was the Pocket Curated Games page, the first iteration of this project.
Later again and recently, I got a Mister. The Mister is the premiere FPGA gaming platform, and the Analogue Pocket is a handheld FPGA device. FPGA cores are written for specific hardware, so there are advantages to both platforms, although the Mister can generally handle more complicated systems and it's open source. Because of this, people have built several features and accessories on top of the platform. One thing implemented a couple years ago was Shortcuts. Rather than turning on a core and choosing a game, you could choose a game directly from the main menu. This is exactly like how I wanted Playlists to work on the Analogue Pocket.
So, by updating the programs in Pocket Utils to look for Mister games, I could add all that information in the database. And writing a new program, I could automatically make shortcuts to all the games I have managed in my database, essentially creating all the Playlists I wanted from the beginning.
The Pocket Curated Page being revamped into the Digital Retro Game Library now shows all those games, too.
There's another really nice feature available on the Mister called TapTo. TapTo is a service that runs in the background on Mister and accepts game executing commands. The main idea for this feature was to bring back physicality to the Mister, which is a sole digital platform. Using a physical NFC reader you can "tap" a physical NFC card (or anything with an NFC signal) and it will automatically launch the game associated with it.
I'm not interested in having a huge collection of cards for individual games. But, I was very interested in TapTo's feature of launching RANDOM games. By sorting all of my shortcuts to games in Genre folders, I could launch a random Shooter or random Fighter.
Earlier this year, the TapTo service was upgraded to accept network requests. Any device connected to the same Wifi network could send a command to TapTo and it'll execute it. They launched a phone app that took advantage of this, but the request service is wide open. Anything can send commands.
So, combining yet another project with this, I added functionality in my chat bot, Schlock Bot, to accept requests to launch random games from my Genres. With Pocket Utils updated to manage my Mister games, Schlock Bot can read this information too, and launch individual games.
!game Shooter
!game Panzer Dragoon (Saturn)
These commands can be typed in my Discord and read by Schlock Bot.
One annoying thing about typing in games to launch in Discord is that you have to type them correctly. Dr. Mario has a period in it, so if you type Dr Mario, it won't find the game. Also, I have a Gameboy Color version of Dr. Mario, too, so which one do you want? You need to be annoyingly specific.
So, using the Digital Game Library, you can click on a game, it'll write that execution command in Discord, Schlock Bot will read the command (if it's running), and then launch the game on Mister (if that's running too).
As such, the Digital Retro Game Library not only shows all my available games, but it's also a method of selecting games to play on the Mister.
There's a lot of moving parts in between clicking a game and it launching on the Mister. It would be a lot better if the webpage sent the request to Schlock Bot directly. But, this janky thing works for the time being. :)
Getting back to the Library, prior to getting a Mister, I set up a Playstation 2 with a game server to play all of those classic games. I made an inventory page that shows all of those games, but I'm thinking about adding them in this library, too. Also, I may mod a gamecube in the future to play a library of those games. I will want to have a library of those games listed somewhere, so adding them here or on the PS2 inventory page makes sense.
In addition to more games, I was thinking of putting download links to my save files for each game, too. I'm already doing this on the PS2 Game Inventory page with memory cards.
We'll see. :)