RomM 4.5 Lands - Adding Netplay, Rich Text Notes

Self-hosted ROM management platform RomM has made leaps and bounds in 2025, and its last feature update for the year really raises the stakes.

The RomM project team have released version 4.5.0, adding even more features to the project that seems to continue to outdo itself.

Along with the two major changes below, this release also allows admins to set the order of preference for acquiring game metadata from their configured metadata providers.

Netplay - Play With Your Friends on Your RomM Instance!

When the EmulatorJS project released a complete rewrite of their netplay project back in March 2025, I wondered how long it would be until we saw those features land in RomM.

EmulatorJS' netplay is pretty simple and easy to get setup in RomM, with some caveats. To switch it on, admins simply need to update their config file to enable the functionality and configure the STUN/TURN servers and credentials.

However, early user feedback seems to point toward self-hosted STUN/TURN servers as being necessary to fully use the functionality to its potential, with public free services leading to significant throttling and latency for users.

Rich Text Notes

Also in the major changes for the release, players are able to add multiple notes to each title, with rich-text support via markdown.

Public and private notes are supported, allowing players to store their own notes about their personal playthroughs, while making other notes available for all users of their instance - like walkthroughs, reviews and the like.

Assorted Bug Fixes and Optimisations

Alongside the major new features, 4.5.0 brings with it a few under-the-hood improvements to make admins' lives a little bit easier.

Session data is now stored via Redis/Valkey rather than cookies, giving admins greater control over the sessions and the ability to invalidate them for things like password changes. Further caching should speed up scan processes and system performance.

The release also includes a number of bug fixes, including handling a breaking change in the How Long To Beat API which breaks functionality under the existing implementation.

Are you running or using a RomM instance? What do you think of the new changes in 4.5.0? Join the conversation and let us know over on Mastodon!