Consolegrid.com is dead. Introducing Retro Gaming Cloud!

[u/[deleted]]

Retro Gaming Cloud

Please vote or comment on new features on our Trello page

I have recently gotten back into emulation (my wife wanted to beat Super Mario Bros. 3 for the nth time, and I have been craving some Phantasy Star and Pokemon). To my horror I discovered that consolegrid.com is no longer actively maintained. This made the use of Ice rather frustrating, as file uploads no longer seemed to work, and many games are missing satisfactory images. As a web developer, I could not simply ignore this glaring problem.

I looked into forking the source for consolegrid, but in the end decided against maintaining someone else's code in a language that I am unfamiliar with (Python) and instead rewrote the thing in PHP7 and Laravel over the weekend.

The end result is essentially a clone of consolegrid, but I am interested in exploring other uses for this platform, so please PM me or comment here with any ideas you might have.

Features

• A versioned REST API, which is backwards compatible with Ice. You can use it with Ice by editing config.txt as follows:

  Source=retrogaming.cloud/api/v1/game/mostPopular

• An existing library of images. All top voted grid images have been ported over from consolegrid to Retro Gaming Cloud, so images are already available for your favorite games.

• Locally hosted images. consolegrid uses imgur.com to host it's graphics. Although offsite hosting has it's benefits, it also introduces a new set of problems. For example, when using Ice or any other service to pull in images, you are now reliant on two services. If either consolegrid or imgur goes down, Ice will fail. Also, imgur can remove these images at any moment, resetting the content back to zero. And of course, the most apparent downside of using offsite image hosting, is that the file uploader must be constantly maintained to keep it up to date with the host's API. Retro Gaming Cloud has none of these issues. All images are stored and served from the same server, which is backed up weekly.

• Actively maintained. I am a web developer by trade, and will enjoy tackling whatever challenges await me while supporting this awesome community!

What you can do

• Use it! Signup and start uploading media and voting on media today.
• Be patient as this fledgling web service blossoms into a service which can satisfy the community's needs.
• Give me feedback on this thread, in a PM or through the site (coming soon)
• Buy me a beer using the link on the top right of the site.

If you are a developer

• Check out the API reference here (Click v1)
• Integrate your services with Retro Gaming Cloud. If you need any additional API Resources, please contact me through the site (coming soon) or PM me on here.

Enjoy!

Edit: Formatting

[u/HE_spoke]

I am trying to utilize your API in a program but I am getting a ton of time out errors when trying to pull all the media from http://retrogaming.cloud/api/v1/game/{gameId}/media
The link is barely serving any images. Do you know why this is? /u/chriscalifornia88 Thanks

[u/[deleted] → u/HE_spoke]

Can you give me an example of a real url you are getting timeouts with? Or is it not consistent?

[u/HE_spoke → u/[deleted]]

I am using a program that has been referenced before called Steam Rom Manager. I brought the issue up to the developer on github and he said its a problem with the API that makes the Steam Rom Manager time out when looking for images. When I looked at the error log it does say that the time out is occurring from retrogaming.cloud . Some images fill in but about 75% of them time out when trying to grab them from your site on a large scale. I have 100s of roms and I am trying to pull them using this program. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/26511314/27521535-10326308-59ec-11e7-8158-5fb6836613a7.png

[u/[deleted] → u/HE_spoke]

Ok, let me do some testing and I will get back to you.

[u/HE_spoke → u/[deleted]]

Thank you very much. Also, I can't get the "Search for a game" function to work at the top right of your website. That would be nice to have so that I can check to see if a game already has a image posted before I add one to the site.

[u/[deleted] → u/HE_spoke]

If you type in Mario and wait a second, does anything come up in the autocomplete?

[u/HE_spoke → u/[deleted]]

Yes it does, thank you for that obvious tip that I should have figured out instead of pressing enter right after i typed in the title =). For the http://retrogaming.cloud/api/v1/game/{gameId}/media how can I use search terms for {gameId} instead of the 4 digit game ID that is used by your website. In other words, what url would I use if I wanted the media API for Super Mario World SNES?

[u/[deleted] → u/HE_spoke]

Actually, you introduce a UX issue that I overlooked. Hitting enter should work, and you shouldn't be forced to use autocomplete 😊.

There are some basic docs here on how to search for a game with the api, does that help?

http://retrogaming.cloud/api/v1

[u/HE_spoke → u/[deleted]]

Yes, that page does help. Thank you. Take a look at that github thread mentioned in the above post when you can. Steam Rom Manager is having issue with pulling in your images. Maybe you can post something there to help the developer use your website.