What are ROMs & ISO’s? by RomsBB
in Entertainment / Video Games (submitted 2011-02-24)
What are ROMs & ISO’s? First off you need to know what an emulator is. An emulator is a program that usually “emulates” console such as PS2 or Wii and play the PlayStation 2 or Wii games. There is virtually an emulator for every game console to be released in the past twenty years.
Okay, so now what are ROMs?
A ROM is a copy of the chip found in game cartridges and made into a file that can be read on a computer, think of it as a computer based copy of a game. ROMs exist for nearly every game that has come out for the popular consoles, like the Atari, Nintendo, and now even the Nintendo DS. As you may have noticed the consoles that I have mentioned are all cartridge based. Right, so what are ISO’s? ISO are archives. The most common type of archive files people run into are .RAR files, but there are other formats, including tar.gz, hqx, and 7z. Most archived files compress the information they contain and make it easier to store and transfer over a network. ISO files are disk images, in most cases CD or DVD, which contain an uncompressed image that you can burn with a burning program, such a Nero Burning Rom.
So now that you know what a ROM & ISO’s are, how do you know if its legal or not?
Well it’s simple really, if you own a game, and actual retail version of the game, then it is perfectly legal to own a ROM of that game. Some people abuse them and download ROMs of games that they do not own thus giving the emulation community a bad reputation and is often referred to as people who steal games. While this is the case sometimes not every person who uses emulators or ROMs are thiefs and most, like myself, allow the idea of trying it out before purchasing the real thing.
Where can I get ROMs?
There are literally tons of sites online that offer ROMs but most of them are filled with spam and spyware. To add to the frustration of try to find ROMs some sites actually require you to vote for sites to gain access to their large base of ROMs but they give you a endless supply of pop-ups and ads thus making it frustrating. . Also some sites may require you to have a membership fee or may actually charge you to buy the ROMs, this is 100% illegal.
There are however sites and blogs out there are hosting a lot of ISO’s and ROMS for free and these links are generally flowing all over the internet.
Okay, so are there any decent sites? A great site that I have found which you can google is called: Roms-bb
This site features no spam, fees, or even those stupid voting things. The site features ROMs and even ISOs for most game that cover just about every console. I would also like to add that the owner of this site also does not condone the illegal use of ROMs, so please don’t abuse this great privilege. If you decide to download it please do it for testing purposes and remove & buy it to support the owners/distributors.
About the Author
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