sedand / retrobot

Retrobot

Retrobot is a Discord bot that allows you to play NES/SNES/GB/GBA games with your friends over chat! Think "TwitchPlaysPokemon", but with GIFs. It accepts button presses, emulates the result, and encodes a GIF to view.

Input Assist

Retrobot simplifies control by auto-forwarding through idle parts of games, such as conversations or battle animations.

Additionally, numbered buttons are added to automatically repeat button presses. This is useful for walking in a specific direction for a long period.

How to Use

Create a bot in the Discord Developer Portal, and obtain a token for your bot. Also, ensure "Message Content Intent" is enabled for your bot.

Create a file name exactly .env in your clone of this repository with the following contents:

DISCORD_TOKEN=YOUR DISCORD TOKEN HERE

Run these commands:

yarn install
yarn start

Then invite the bot to a server with the following URL. Be sure to update the OAuth Client ID.

https://discord.com/api/oauth2/authorize?client_id=YOUR_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID_HERE&permissions=68608&scope=bot

Once the bot has joined your Discord server, drop an uncompressed ROM file into a channel. The bot will automatically find the ROM file, and begin emulation. Note: only server "administrators" can start new games.

Running as a Daemon

If you'd like a simple way to run the bot as a background service, there's a helper yarn script. It will fire up the bot as a background service, and record logs to ./forever/retrobot.log

yarn service:start

And to stop:

yarn service:stop

Running via Docker Compose

Requires Docker and Docker Compose is installed on the machine.

• Rename docker-compose.yml.example to docker-compose.yml
• Edit docker-compose.yml and your Discord bot token.
• Run docker-compose build
• Run docker-compose up -d

Technical Notes

Retrobot is built on libretro, the code that powers RetroArch. Several libretro cores have been cross-compiled to WASM to be used in Node.js. Since WASM modules have independent memory spaces, it means several cores of the same type can be instanced. This allows parallelism.

License

The bot source code here is licensed as MIT. The libretro core each have their own licenses.

• mGBA - https://github.com/libretro/mgba/blob/master/LICENSE
• QuickNES - https://github.com/libretro/QuickNES_Core/blob/master/LICENSE
• snes9x2010 - https://github.com/libretro/snes9x2010/blob/master/LICENSE.txt