Really Good ROM Sets: SNES (GoodSNES 2.04) h33t ericp torrent

The "Really Good" prefix, pretentious as it sounds, is part of the title
of these torrents for a reason. After some time hunting for ROMs on the
Internet, you realise that most downloads for ROM sets suffer from one or
more of the following problems:

• They are not really complete. Some are missing a few roms (in
  comparison to the databases from the Good* tools). Some are a mess of
  mixed ROMs, with files that are repeated, missing, unnecessary, etc.
• The filenames are wrong. Again, using the Good* databases as the
  standard, some romsets out there have files with names that are just
  completely wrong, and some are wrong in just a few files, in subtle
  ways. It's almost as if some people purposedly renamed the files
  incorrectly trying to fool others.
• They are not "download-friendly". I really don't understand why people
  create torrents for a single multi-megabyte RAR file, which is a
  collection of a bunch of files. You end up having to download the
  whole thing, even if you're only interested in a few files.

These torrents I'm creating are labeled "Really Good" because they have
none of the above problems. To be more specific:

• They are *really* complete. Not one ROM missing. And they have just
  the ROM files. No more, no less.
• The filenames are correct. For this torrent, GoodSNES v2.04 was used to
  verify/fix them.
• These torrents are meant to have inside a set of files, so people with
  modern clients can select which files to download/prioritise. ROMs are
  organised in groups, each one compressed to a 7z file. Each group
  represents a single game, with all its known variations. The way these
  files were chosen and built was according to the GoodMerge
  algorithm/databases (more info on this later).

I don't claim these "Really Good" sets are perfect. I just made them
because they fix the problems explained above, which seem like the most
important to me.

In particular, if you're not really interested in getting the complete
collection of ROMs, and only want to casually play a few games, you'd
probably be better off just searching for them individually on the
Internet. There are good sites for that if you look for them.

I have the following ROM sets, which I plan to release, in that order, as
time permits:

• Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) - GoodNES 3.14
• Game Boy/Game Boy Color (GBx) - GoodGBx 3.14
• Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) - GoodSNES 2.04
• Nintendo 64 (N64) - GoodN64 3.14

I also have most games for the Game Boy Advance, but I doubt I'll ever
release a Really Good romset for the GBA, since the GoodGBA database is
huge, and includes *a lot* of stuff that's not so interesting (public
domain stuff, videos).

Start by taking a look at http://www.allgoodthings.us/mambo/ . If you
can't make sense of that site, here's the gist of it: they are a set of
programs that include databases for ALL known ROMs for different systems.

They exist for different systems (not only Nintendo's), and the way they
work is very simple: You run the tool in the directory where you have your
ROMs, and it tells you, among other things, how many ROMs you have from
the database, how many ROMs you're missing, and if their names are
correct.

The tool used for this torrent was GoodSNES V2.04.

It's worth mentioning that the Good* tools are not the only ones that
exist for keeping track of ROM sets, but they are probably the most
popular, and their databases are very thorough, almost to the point of
obsession (the way any collector wants them). They have a few problems,
like for example the lack of frequent updates, or issues with the tracking
of game translations and the way they give credit to the people behind the
hacks, but all in all, the GoodTools are just great for what they were
made for.

See http://goodmerge.sourceforge.net/About.php .

Take note that the Really Good ROMSets were not made with the official
GoodMerge tool, but they were prepared using the same algorithms and the
same data files (XMDB). The reason for this is simple: the GoodMerge
program was made for Windows systems, and I don't have one on my computer,
so I took the source code for GoodMerge (it is open source software), and
based on it, wrote my own program to organise my ROM collection.

In any case, I assure you, my program uses the exact same algorithms, and
the exact same data files, so the 7z files should be the same as those
produced by the original software, as far as their contents goes. However,
they are probably different in one regard: I built all my 7z files with
the maximum compression level supported by p7zip (using the -mx=9 flag),
while GoodMerge tries to be clever about it and runs the p7zip program
with a bunch of arguments that I guess make the compression go faster, but
the end result is not very different.

See the GoodMerge website for the complete rationale behind the
organisation in 7z files.

However, you don't have to worry. If you want some help taking your
GoodMerge'd collections and turning them into files that your emulator can
use directly, search the web for a program called "UnGoodMerge". It is a
neat program that even filters your ROMs according to your tastes.

Take a look at Manifest-SNES.txt

You need an emulator. I suggest you search for emulators on the Internet,
and use the ones you like the most. But here are some suggestions:

For NES:

• FCEUX. http://fceux.com/web/htdocs/
• Mednafen. http://mednafen.sourceforge.net/

For GBx:

• Visual Boy Advance. http://vba.ngemu.com/
• VBA-M. http://vba-m.com/
• Mednafen. http://mednafen.sourceforge.net/

For SNES:

• ZSNES. http://www.zsnes.com/

For N64:

• mupen64plus (for Linux). http://code.google.com/p/mupen64plus/