ROMsets
This is a catalog of all "ROMsets" on Archive. That means:
- Sets of ROM images for game consoles
- Sets of floppy images for computer games
- BIOSes and related files for these purposes
This list does not explicitly include application software. Some of the ROMsets for computers include applications / utilities incidentally, but these should be catalogued on their own dedicated pages e.g. Windows 3.x Applications. The reasoning is that "complete sets" of games are frequently desired, but a "complete set" of application software is less practical and less desired.
ROMset Basics[edit]
ROMsets are made by indexing teams such as TOSEC and No-Intro. These groups do not provide the ROMs themselves; rather, they provide hashes and metadata used to uniquely identify ROMs, and other people assemble the sets and upload them.
ROMsets come in varying degrees of completeness and have different standards for how files are sorted, named and stored.
A set of NES ROMs might simply be a single ZIP containing one .NES file for each game; another set might have categories like "Games", "Applications", etc. with ZIPs containing ROMs, manuals, cover images. Some sets are strictly intended for archival and contain every known version of a game, some have selected the "best" version and do not include the others.
There are different "releases" of ROMsets. The 2016 No-Intro release for instance may be lacking titles, or have inferior images compared to later releases. IA does not necessarily have the newest version of each set, and finding the latest version can be a challenge. If there's a link to the indexing team's website, check there to see what the latest version is, and then search on IA for that release.
TOSEC[edit]
The Old School Emulation Center basically aims to catalog everything, everywhere, as long as it isn't for modern PCs. Put simply, a TOSEC ROMset is probably very close to the best, most consistent collection of archived software available for any given platform.
TOSEC doesn't pick a "best" version of anything, but instead catalogues absolutely every single version ever found, so these sets often have many "redundant" images.
IA has a TOSEC Collection which includes many TOSEC releases.
NoIntro[edit]
No-Intro is more opinionated than TOSEC - their mission is to only provide the "best" version of each ROM.
IA has a No-Intro tag which is messier than the TOSEC collection and less likely to get you the latest release.
Total DOS Collection[edit]
TDC attempts to catalogue DOS games in the TOSEC style. All games are presented as ZIPs containing all the files you need to run them, not disk images (like the few PC games in the TOSEC collection).
Total DOS Collection Release 14 is the latest release on IA. There is a newer version (15) not yet on Archive.
