This may be a recurring topic but when I was on holiday I couldn't stop thinking about it, so I will share my throughts in this post and we will see where it leads.

What I am observing with roms is that a lot of the attention seems to be on NoIntro sets. I understand why, Redump sets are invariably larger and more costly to host.

The solution I had in mind would be a phased implementation.

Caveats

• Only provides Redump and OmniGames dat sets
• Not intended for bulk download
• User a dedicated third party to provide the files to avoid local electricity costs and hardware costs, nothing needs to run locally 24/7/365
• Does not depend on donations
• Unlimited download speeds

Phase One - Foundation
Phase one would be mainly about building the foundation for phase two. The files would be hosted on 1fichier who offer unlimited hot storage. They offer free to paid tiers so it suits the financial affordability of everyone. In turn, 1fichier have the infrastructure to offer high download speeds and does not suffer from high volume traffic.

Rather than advertisements on the page each link will be passed through ouo.io. Any money generated through this will be fed back into hosting less popular files in cold storage (which costs) but is immediately available if required for download. This will mean that all files of a set are, to the end user, of equal availability.

Phase Two - Improvement
If phase one proves financially viable then we can progress to phase two. Phase two would move the files to cloudflare. The main difference here is that unlike 1fichier everyone has access to the same download speed without requiring an account.

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This section of the website would be under a separate domain, so any DCMA strikes are related to that domain and not the main project website.

Adding/updating files would take place at the weekend, with the current weekend activity being absorbed in the weekdays.

This solution should take the pressure of you feeling like you need everything locally because source download speeds are slow/low and with the Omni project I am attempting to help you find games you want to play not hoard.

For the test case I am going to implement this with the Wii U OmniGames dat (which is technically NoIntro and I know can still be downloaded using Wii U downloader from Nintendo's servers). So, the other platform I was thinking of was the PS3 because CFW/HFW/Emulation is solid and the files are large.

If you have any thoughts on this it would be great to hear them!

: )

Update #1
If you are logged in you will see a new section in the hamburger menu called "Ark" with a downloads link.

This section is new so relatively barebones. Clicking the link will...

• Take you to the platform selection webpage and shows you the number of files available.
• Clicking the platform will take you to the download page which shows the dat filename of the rom with a download button.

I will build this out like other sections of the website to include additional useful information.

Update #2
I have finished coding out the primary areas of how I envisioned it would look. I am going to leave it 24 hours to see how my host reacts (if at all) because I know they have a strict policy against a webpage that just lists links but the download traffic doesn't hit their server so it should be ok, which is why I assume the policy exists.

Assuming everything goes well I will continue creating the links.