[Idea of implementation]Dropbox sync

General Development
#1

Hello guys,

First of all I’m loving this project. I’m making some custom overlays gamepads, so I can play better on my iPhone, and will share with the forum soon, but my objetive here is another.

I ever loved playing emulators, SNES and GBA are my favorites, but losting the save… oh man, it’s very frustating.

I loved the fact that I can play the same save in my Mac that I saved on my iPhone. Currectly I’m syncing them using the icloud, but wanted to use DropBox, unfortunately there’s no way for iPhone… (I can do with icloud because there’s a folder in iphone (/var/mobile/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs to be more especific) that allow me to save and auto sync with icloud) . I wanted to use Dropbox so I can play in every device my saves! I mean, I can simply play on the bus, using iPhone or 3DS, get home and continue playing on my… humm… ps3, or even my wii u! I wanted them synchronyzed! More of it, I have the safety that I will not lost my saves, that for me, is a lot important. Well, maybe retroarch could have an automatic backup of saves too, but this is another idea.

There’s any plan to make this happen on retroarch?? I could contribute with this, but I am very ‘beggining’ with programmation and I am afraid I can’t do it… (maybe with help I can colaborate…) So, this is my idea.

I hope someone that is hard contributing to the app read this.

Thanks! Denis.

#2

RetroArch usually leans on not implementing systems that likely should be part of other applications, or part of the OS. This includes mounting drives, or re-implementing proprietary systems.

If there’s no way to get DropBox working on your iPhone, maybe you should consider a phone that does work with it? Dropbox for Android seems to work well.

I’ve been using a network Samba drive on my NAS. Can mount it across:

  • Lakka/LibreELEC media centre
  • My desktop (Ubuntu)
  • My phone (Google Pixel on Android)

On the road, I usually just copy it over, but I have used SyncThing for it before.

#3

Hello RobLoach,

Thanks for the clarification, but any chance of creating a dedicated server for users to provide this service?

I mean, users can choose to pay a determined amount (according to how much disk space user want) to have a service which uploads save/configuration data to the server and provide an automatically sync. The save state usually doesn’t uses a large amount of space (except N64 ones… these are monsters and idk why), so I think this is a viable option. User doens’t need to pay a large amount too… What’s 50GB nowadays? One dollar?

I know this is a project free of charges, but charging is needed as owning a server brings cost to developers.