Just yesterday, I’m not sure why, I started messing around with ROMs. For those of you who don’t know what a ROM image is, or simply ROM, it’s a computer file which contains a copy of the data from a read-only memory chip which are often from video game cartridges, computer firmware, or from an arcade game’s main board.

The term is frequently used in the context of emulation, whereby older games or computer firmware are copied to ROM files on modern computers and can, using a piece of software known as an emulator, be run on the newer computer.

ROM images are also used when developing for embedded computers. Software which is being developed for embedded computers is often written to ROM files for testing on a standard computer before it is written to a ROM chip for use in the embedded system. At present, this Wikipedia deals mainly with the use of ROM in relation to emulation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROM_image

Now that we’ve got the basics down,on with my story, I had said that I started messing around with ROMs. In previous encounters, I did not have an easy time with ROMs. They usually never worked. Now that I am wiser in the way of computers, I am able to learn from my mistakes. I started my search by getting basic emulators that would run on my Toshiba e310 running Windows Mobile 2002. I currently have PicoDrive, PocketGBA, VBAdvenceCE, PocketGenesis, PocketSNES, PocketAdvance, and Pocket Nester. I then had the tedious task of searching for the the proper ROMs for each of those apps (I only looked for my favorite games.) I’ll be the first one to tell you that searching for ROMs isn’t the easiest thing to do (Yes they are.) Some websites will give you the runaround and others aren’t able to give ROMs out do to copyright agreements. But of course there are those sites that manage to get ROMs out into the hands of the public.

After two days,I was able to find some of my favorite games such as MegaMan Battle Network,Sonic The Hedgehog,and Super Mario Bros. While I got most of the ROMs to work,I’m still struggling with the others.Aside from this I got Mario Kart 64 to work with an emulator on my laptop.W00T! While I’m refraining from posting any download links or giving ROM site URLs out,I will say this.If you want to play your favorite games without having to use the old game systems or port the ROMs yourself,be smart and go ROM hunting on the internet.It’ll be worth your time in the end.