Edit: What a great thread. I love you Lemmy nerds!
I’ve been seeing these new devices coming out that come preloaded with something like 20,000 roms across every console released from the 70’s to the 2010’s, and I have to admit, I’m tempted.
I’m wondering if anyone out there has purchased one of these and what was your experience with it?
Often enough they are just poorly thrown together ROM collections. Often enough the worst ROM available is used. And they have numbers at the beginning of their names to sort them by whatever insane quality metric the company had, so good luck finding anything good.
I’d only buy one where you can supply your own ROMs. They are cheap enough these days.
No idea why Nintendo and Co let them do this. Sometimes they don’t contain games by the big companies. But most of the time they actually do.
The numbers are are probably scene numbers. Most of the ROMs floating around the internet come from various scene groups. Many older groups would number their ROM dumps (I assume in the order that they released them). Additionally, different groups often had different numbering systems. From what I understand it’s a practice that’s mostly fallen into disuse since it doesn’t really help.
This is good feedback. Thank you!