Opened: May 21, 1997
Opened: May 21, 1997
Welcome to the Nintendo 8-Bit ROM Archive. I'm Jeremy Dorn the proprietor of this fine establishment. I was recently introduced to the world of computer based emulators by my friend Ahrik. I feel that these emulators have given new life to one of my favorite childhood pastimes, the Nintendo. When I was starting out I had a hard time finding ROMS to go with my emulator so I set up this site to help all of the other people out there who are scouring the internet for ROMS.
What is a ROM? Now I know most of the people who hunt down this site will already know what a ROM is but bear with me while I explain it to everyone else. A ROM is basically the Read Only Memory image of an original Nintendo game which has been dumped into a computer file using a home-made interface. The schematics for this device may be downloaded from this site here . Now these ROM images come in two different formats, the split-cartridge format and the single-cartridge format. These different formats limit what emulators will be able to run these cartridges. Most systems use the single cartridge (*.nes) format, but the split-cartridge format is used by the popular Pasfomi NES emulator. NOTE: All of the ROMS posted at this site are in the single cartridge format (*.nes) for the iNES and Nesticle emulators.
What is an emulator, you ask? An emulator is a computer program which has been written in some computer language (Assembly Code, Visual C++ 4, etc) that emulates the main processing chip of the orginal Nintendo 8-Bit system. While these emulators aren't entirely perfect most of them do run around 80% - 90% of the ROM images that are available on the internet. The reason that some cartridges don't run completely are is that some of the original NES cartridges had special chips on them that performed special functions while the game was running and the emulators don't support these chips yet (mostly because the ways these chips work is a mystery to many of the emulator programmers out there), but with each new version of iNES or Nesticle more and more cartridges are being supported.
What does this site provide? This site offers downloads of many different NES ROMS and emulators with which to run them. The only thing that I ask for from you is that you DO NOT LINK TO MY ROMS. If you are going to set up your own ROM archive, please don't link to mine, just download the ROMS and upload them to your server, I know all the other ROM pages out there agree with me when I say that we are all a lot happier if you don't copy our content.
I would love to hear all your comments about this page and about the updates that will be coming on a
regular basis. Please feel free to e-mail me about anything but try to use the wanted page for your ROM requests instead of e-mailing all
of them to me. I would like to take this opportunity to ask you people out there to PLEASE donate some
server space to me so this archive can continue to grow. I am currently limited to about 6 megabytes of server space and that prevents
me from uploading all of the ROMS that I currently have available. So until such a time that I come by more space I will be posting only
the most well known and popular ROM cartridges.
I would also like to take a que from the best NES ROM site on the internet, THE DUMP and open up a logo and button contest for my site. I created my current logo as a way to quickly get something up there so please send me all of your suggestions, logos, and buttons to jdorn@oocities.com All of the logos and buttons that I receive will be posted on my Contest page.
