The idea of simply mounting a filesystem and selecting from a list of titles which roms to download and add to your local games, unloading them and transparently re-downloading when you need to free up space, all without relying on a centralized host even for the file index, is pretty appealing. You can do similar things with torrents but it's not quite as "natural".
Most of the emulator frontends I've seen are pretty against integrating this kind of ease-of-piracy stuff, though, accepting recognizing and filling in metadata for well-known roms, but not making it easy to integrate with remote libraries of roms... except tools that run on "hacked" consoles, which seem to love just giving you a list of games with a "tap A/X to pirate" UI.
You can use fuse-btfs [0] for mounting torrents as filesystems! Last I checked it was a fairly mature piece of software so hopefully it doesn’t feel unnatural.
It's because that crosses the line of plausibly legal. In theory you could use an emulator with only titles you copied from your own physical copies which is legal. But if they implement a download mechanism it's clearly illegal.
At any rate you can replicate the same thing by just hosting the ROMs on your own cloud storage and using something like macos virtual files which will do this transprent download/delete to manage storage.
IPFS (at least initially) was designed to be a BitTorrent replacement, a new version of it, which you can use not only with a special software, but also via HTTP and also directly inside the browser.
It basically works as BitTorrent, but also provides HTTP access to the files.
In fact, many pirate websites use IPFS in one way or another (either directly, by serving the downloads over one of the public gateway, or indirectly, for internal needs).
Couldn't you also just build a bittorrent client that hosts a local webserver to provide http access? I could never get what IPFS actually did that bittorrent didn't.
And why would you do that? As opposed to, say, distributing via BitTorrent or serving them using a good-old HTTP server?
edit: Not opposed to the idea, just curious what makes you pick IPFS over the existing alternatives.
The idea of simply mounting a filesystem and selecting from a list of titles which roms to download and add to your local games, unloading them and transparently re-downloading when you need to free up space, all without relying on a centralized host even for the file index, is pretty appealing. You can do similar things with torrents but it's not quite as "natural".
Most of the emulator frontends I've seen are pretty against integrating this kind of ease-of-piracy stuff, though, accepting recognizing and filling in metadata for well-known roms, but not making it easy to integrate with remote libraries of roms... except tools that run on "hacked" consoles, which seem to love just giving you a list of games with a "tap A/X to pirate" UI.
> The idea of simply mounting a filesystem
You can use fuse-btfs [0] for mounting torrents as filesystems! Last I checked it was a fairly mature piece of software so hopefully it doesn’t feel unnatural.
[0] https://github.com/johang/btfs
It's because that crosses the line of plausibly legal. In theory you could use an emulator with only titles you copied from your own physical copies which is legal. But if they implement a download mechanism it's clearly illegal.
At any rate you can replicate the same thing by just hosting the ROMs on your own cloud storage and using something like macos virtual files which will do this transprent download/delete to manage storage.
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IPFS (at least initially) was designed to be a BitTorrent replacement, a new version of it, which you can use not only with a special software, but also via HTTP and also directly inside the browser.
It basically works as BitTorrent, but also provides HTTP access to the files.
In fact, many pirate websites use IPFS in one way or another (either directly, by serving the downloads over one of the public gateway, or indirectly, for internal needs).
Couldn't you also just build a bittorrent client that hosts a local webserver to provide http access? I could never get what IPFS actually did that bittorrent didn't.
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Maybe fear of Nintendo coming to bite you?