Where to (legally) acquire content to play on RetroPie

Auster

@themazingness Thanks for reminding me.

GOG page, NES and Genesis versions available since its release:
https://www.gog.com/game/jim_power_the_lost_dimension

Steam page, NES and Genesis versions available after today's update:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/370270/Jim_Power_The_Lost_Dimension/

Auster

Looks like Tanglewood for the Mega Drive/Genesis went F2P on Itchio:
https://bigevilcorporation.itch.io/tanglewood

Clyde

@auster said in Where to (legally) acquire content to play on RetroPie:

Looks like Tanglewood for the Mega Drive/Genesis went F2P on Itchio:
https://bigevilcorporation.itch.io/tanglewood

Thanks, I already bought it for my Evercade, but its nice to have an official free ROM for my emulator machines. :)

Auster

About Tanglewood, if someone likes the game, he/she should still drop a few bucks for it. I played it from beginning to end, and I thoroughly recommend the game.

On Itchio, it's set as "pay what you want", meaning the game accepts any payment values starting at its base price, or in cases it's below 1 USD/Euro/etc., it starts at 1 USD/Euro/etc. due to processing fees.

And it's still paid on GOG and Steam.

Clyde

@auster Absolutely, although I myself see my "debt" already paid via the Evercade cartridge. 😇

themazingness

This is a fun, short NES game that just released: https://pb-games.itch.io/biocats

Auster

Friendly reminder that multiple games from this list are on sale now:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/rom_based_gog_games_compatible_with_third_party_emulators_thread/post1

Auster

A few days ago, Gwen Gourevich, one of the devs at the team 2.21 (yes, that's the name of the dev team), released a devlog about their plans regarding the Little Big Adventure franchise (not to be confused with Sony's franchise of Sackboy).

The devlog:
https://twinsenslittlebigadventure.com/new-beginnings/

In it, they talk about upgrades to the game.
I'm not entirely sure if I'm misinterpreting something, but it sounds like there's a chance the current MS-DOS version gets replaced with a version ported to newer systems.
If they do, I suggest getting the games and backing them up before they release said upgrades.
Worth noting you get a discount on both games in the GOG version when you place both in your cart. And Steam has a bundle with the two already.
I also asked about this situation in the devs' official Discord group, just in case, and now I'm waiting for a reply.

GOG version:
https://www.gog.com/game/little_big_adventure
https://www.gog.com/en/game/little_big_adventure_2

Steam version:
https://store.steampowered.com/sub/80342/

And slightly off-topic, but the DOS version of the games had their engines made open source some time ago:
https://github.com/2point21/lba1-classic
https://github.com/2point21/lba2-classic

themazingness

https://itch.io/b/1316/bundle-for-ukraine

Itch.io's bundle for Ukraine has several roms in it. Nebs 'n Debs, Batlizard Bonanza, and Leggite Lutre Livre are NES games. There is Hunter's Moon for Commodore 64 and Vampire Night Shift for Gameboy.

If anybody is aware of others in the collection I'd like to know. There are hundreds of games in it and it was a lot of work to sift these out.

The collection also has several Pico-8 games which may be of interest to some here, but I didn't keep track of them.

Teh_Lurv

For people who live in the USA, computer store chain Microcenter sells a pre-built Retropie SD card with 100+ Atari games included. I believe it's the same collection of games as the Atari Vault, except (unlike the vault) the arcade games are stored in zip format.

https://www.microcenter.com/product/627545/atari-32gb-micro-sd

themazingness

@Teh_Lurv Nice! Looks like it's on Amazon too. It's not as cheap as the Micro Center sale but when it isn't on sale Amazon is cheaper. Amazon is cheaper even during the sale if you are getting it shipped and have their free shipping through Prime.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08T83828X/?coliid=IGVQJ4Y4VJAWI&colid=97XRANJH2ULA&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

Auster

Piko Interactive released a few emulated games through GOG yesterday:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/check_out_the_new_batch_of_classics_from_piko_interactive_980c3/page1

What they released, from what I was able to gather:
Shadow Madness - PS1 version according to an user in the GOG forum
Iron Commando - Probably SNES version based in the information I got from the Steam release
Legend - Probably SNES version based in the information I got from the Steam release
Nightshade - Probably NES version based in the information I got from the Steam release
Zero Tolerance - Probably Genesis/Mega Drive version based in the information I got from the Steam release
Water Margin - Genesis/Mega Drive version according to an user in the GOG forum

Folly

In the first post contains a broken link :
http://www.colecovision.ca/roms_homebrew_0-9.php
It's visible with wayback machine :
http://web.archive.org/web/20200130163128/http://www.colecovision.ca/roms_homebrew_0-9.php

Getting individual roms works ;-)
Though , getting the whole pack doesn't work anymore.

The files can also be found here :
https://github.com/retrobrews/colecovision-games

HipsterElephant

So for the five people here that remember Homestar Runner, the sites creators made a little game for the GameBoy celebrating the 19th Anniversary of Trogdor.

Here's the link.

Interestingly this is like the fourth Homestar Runner related game I found that was Homebrew, although its the first made by the creators themselves (the others being Population: Tire for Nintendo DS, Secret Collect also for Nintendo DS and Awexome Cross '98 for Game Boy Advance)

Edit: they did another game, Marzipan's Beef Reverser

Auster

Looks like we can still get ROMs out of the Capcom Arcade Stadium games, but a few extra steps have been added since the game got updated.

You need to open the Steam in console mode (not "gaming console", but "command console") and run a command to download a previous update of each DLC you want. Worth noting that you CAN'T do this process if you don't have the games in your account.

To open the Steam console, at least on Linux, you need to run this command from the terminal:

steam steam://nav/console

Not entirely sure on Windows, but I imagine the command is the same.

Then run a command to download specific updates, and whose syntax is as follows:

download_depot [app ID] [depot of the DLC you want] [DLC's manifest]

The app ID is 1515950.

The depots can be found here: https://steamdb.info/app/1515950/depots/

To get the correct manifest, click in the ID of depot you want in the link above, go to the manifests tab in the new page and look for the oldest entry in the list. What you want is the code at the right column.

So for example, the command for Ghosts 'n Goblins would be:

download_depot 1515950 1556690 5034024650887104340

Paste/Type the command in the console screen of the launcher and press enter. After it finishes downloading, it'll tell you where it downloaded, and you can go there do the original process you'd to to the collection's pak files.

One last thing:
Some romsets have their files merged, so they need to be split into files emulators can read, then put back together as .zip files.
And according to an user in the libretro group:

https://github.com/finalburnneo/FBNeo/blob/master/src/burn/burn.cpp#L879 => this is the function you'd need to reverse-engine to remove the sound data byteswapping
and this is the part where we handle interleaving for gfx data : https://github.com/finalburnneo/FBNeo/blob/master/src/burn/drv/capcom/cps.cpp#L1892

Sadly I don't know how to work with this, so I can't help much more.

themazingness

@Auster Awesome info!

I'm not able to actually look at the files (not at a pc), but for checking the files that should be in a MAME romset I always have used http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/. They don't have any you can download. It's just a database that tells you all the information about them like the typical file name, romset files in the .zip file and what they are, and other useful things. It's a great resource for projects like this (I needed it for working on the roms in Taito Legends 1 and 2 as well).