I searched "snatcher sega cd" and google suggested "snatcher sega cd rom"
why yes, google, it was on CD-ROM!
I searched "snatcher sega cd" and google suggested "snatcher sega cd rom"
why yes, google, it was on CD-ROM!
@foone And Android ROMs. 🤪
but for a lot of people the word "ROMs" has always meant "pirated games" so they expanded it to all pirated games. You've got PS2 ROMs, you've got ROMs of steam games released this week, you've got ROMs of games that came on barcodes, which are many things but NOT ROMS.
and then eventually games went fully downloadable, so neither ROMs nor ISOs make sense: They're just sparkling warez
later we got CDs (and DVDs, technically) for PC games, but those don't have "ROM dumps", they have "disc images" or "ISOs".
For reference since I didn't actually explain and clearly not everyone knows this:
"ROMs" are named like that because they're ROM dumps. Early pre-CD consoles used Read Only Memory chips to store the games, so to pirate the game you took that chip and dumped it, giving you a ROM Dump file. Stick that file onto an ((E)E)PROM or into an emulator, and you can play it without buying it. "ROM dumps" quickly got shortened to just "ROMs"
PC games never (again, other than the weird PCjr) used ROM chips for games, they used floppy disks, type-in BASIC, or cassette tapes. None of those have "ROM dumps" as there's no ROM to dump, thus no "ROMs"
and I think that's it for commercial ports. There's certainly fan-ports lots of other consoles, many of which use ROMs
wait, Atari Jaguar! It had Doom as well. I always think of it as a CD-ROM system (it came out in 1993, it should have been one) because it did later get a CD add-on, but I don't believe Jaguar-Doom used the CD add-on, I think it was a cart
the official Doom wiki suggests that I forgot:
* Sega 32X
* N64
BUT THERE DEFINITELY WASN'T A "DOOM ROM" UNLESS YOU MEAN A VERSION FOR THE GBA OR SUPER NINTENDO
foone: I hate linguistic prescriptivism. Language changes, grandpa, get used to it!
google: hey some kids think the word "rom" means all pirated games, not just ones from ROM-based systems like the Atari 2600 through N64
foone: my eyes are bleeding but I guess that's alright
google: want some MS-DOS ROMS?
foone: THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS MS-DOS ROMS!
except for the games available for the PCjr on cartridge, and arguably the firmwares of many 90s palmtops contained a version of DOS that fit into ROM... so those firmwares are "DOS ROMs"
I'm going to pretend that's what all the searchers were looking for, and they weren't just calling the pirated file for a CD-based game "a ROM"
@Red_Shirt_no2 @pendell @foone @suetanvil That's not an actual write protect switch. It's a flag the host computer can read that says "please don't write to me", but the host is free to ignore it. It's not wired up to the controller in the sd card to block write commands.
@pendell @foone @suetanvil
Rarely if ever on USB flash drives; but common on SD “flash drives”:
@suetanvil @foone I've never seen a flash drive with a write protect switch?
If you run a game off a flash drive with a physical write-protect switch that has been glued into the read-only position, you would still be running it off of a ROM.
anyway this has been annoying me for so long that 8 years ago I ported a version of Tetris to run off a ROM chip on an ISA card. Therefore I had a "ROM" of a PC game. I played it in an old 286 board with no drives attached, floppy, optical, or hard!
Mind you, the emulator I'm using right now (BizHawk) doesn't help matters. It has a File->Open ROM menu item that'll open everything from an NES game to a PS1 disc image to an Apple II floppy disk image.
There's a whole special toolset for converting between ISOs, WDF, WIA, CISO, GCZ, and WBFS.
so often have I downloaded "ISOs" (from Highly Legitimate Sources (says the retrogaming researcher/hacker)) and instead of an ISO file I have one of the 800 different disc image format that aren't actually ISOs
some consoles even have their own disc image formats!
Ever look into Wii games? It's madness over there.
although to be honest, ISO was misused a lot too.
an "ISO" is technically a specific type of dump of a CD-ROM, it's the dumped ISO-9660 filesystem into a linear file.
But that filesystem doesn't contain any CD audio, those are separate. So more likely you'll see a bin/cue pair with some analog tracks, if the game uses CD-audio (and many did!)
with multiple words for different specific types of pirated media (warez/isos/images/roms) it's no surprise the larger community settled on just one name.
but since it's technically incorrect it does make my bloodpressure go up a little everytime I see it used wrong.
but yeah. over in the PC space, this stuff was always just warez. as in "softwares", but with a Z, so it's Kool.
THIS DOESN'T MEAN I HAVE TO LIKE IT
I forgot to explain: The CD-ROM one is also weird.
They're called ISOs because the CD-ROM filesystem standard is ISO 9660, and that's ISO as in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO*).
In a different world the file extension/file type would have been dot iso9660 and we'd... probably still be calling them ISOs, honestly, but DOS/Windows only supporting 3-character extensions at the time didn't help.
* blame the French. UTC stands for "Coordinated Universal Time", you know?"
so it's technically incorrect but not linguistically incorrect. The word's general use has widened from the technical meaning.
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