ROM greediness
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When I got my first broad band (768 Kbps) I decided to download every MP3 I could get hold on, major regret when 95% of my 20 GB HDD had music I never listened to.
When I got upgraded to 10 Mbps I decided to download every DivX I could get hold on, major regret when 95% of my 1 TB HDD had movies I never watched.
When I got my first RPI I decided to download every ROM I could get hold on, major regret when 95% of my 32 GB SD-card had games I never played. And it took forever to scrape and scroll through game lists.
Nowadays, I have grown up, and I do only play the games I owned, and still owns. Roughly 20 per system, for 7 systems.
Isn't it funny how history repeats itself?
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I never cared for ROM hoarders. There is no way people are playing every one of those games.
The reason I love retropie is because I get to play the games I played as a kid. Occasionally I'll find a new one I want to try but I usually will watch a gameplay video on YouTube first before I get it. Granted I'm usually too busy coding or doing real life to be playing anything but when I do it's just the nostalgic stuff.
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@herb_fargus said in ROM greediness:
I never cared for ROM hoarders. There is no way people are playing every one of those games.
The reason I love retropie is because I get to play the games I played as a kid. Occasionally I'll find a new one I want to try but I usually will watch a gameplay video on YouTube first before I get it. Granted I'm usually too busy coding or doing real life to be playing anything but when I do it's just the nostalgic stuff.
@Arcuza From a fellow non-hoarder, how do you combat the necessity of the dreaded (by me at least) 'MAME RomSet'?
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I think I've basically said the same thing so many times, but I agree. I'll never knock someone for doing what they enjoy, but it does make me laugh when I see screen shots posted and the game list fills their page and it's only game's that are in the 'A' category. But thats fine.
I don't have the time to play every game ever released on every retro console-too busy at work, being a Dad, looking after the house etc. I have about about 30 games loaded, 4 or 5 of those are ones that my partner plays (never does, but I make sure her favourites are on there to keep the peace!). I've used Retropie to re-live my youth, and play a handful (literally 3 or 4) games that I couldn't afford when I was younger, and that have equally priced me out of the eBay market now. Some real gems that I can really get stuck into (Easter Hol's are coming up so a great time to get stuck into something 'new'), i think, are often over looked because there is so much else to choose from.
I am a bit of a sucker for music though, but I used to Dj so a vast quantity of my music collection is made up of stuff i used to use and that cost me a lot of money back in the day. Podcasts cater for a bulk of the stuff I like to listen to now, so although quite large and underplayed, my music collection is like my Retropie-it only contains the stuff I'm actually interested in-and thats the best way in my opinion.
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I like hoarding ROMs but I do it well! In the root folder are all the games I own - then I have a folder with every single game from a select systems romset. So whenever I hear a game talked about, or watch a video, or see it on a top XYZ list somewhere, I already have it loaded up on my Pi 3 and can try it out and see if I like it.
MAME is an entire different animal...WAY too many to ever go through. Those I limit to what I used to play at the arcades (and some other cool ones I've found over time). I split those up into different categories too since there's just so many.
Oh, plus I have like 16 TB of hard drives in my Mac Pro so I'm pretty set for storage space ;)
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i like having complete sets, mainly because as well as playing my favourites i also like to read old magazines and choose a few games i never had the chance to play as a kid, for instance i read Crash magazine no.2 last night and have 3 or 4 spectrum games i want to play later as a result - having full sets means i don't have to go looking for them now.
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i have about 350 for NES, 150 games per the other major (US) systems (atari, snes, gen) and about 20 to 60 per lesser known systems / handheld and arcade.
But my collection is extremely well catered, with custom edited artwork for every game and handmade gamelists for every system.
I like to try at least 3 games per week that i've never played. So having a moderate collection is kind of nice, but i keep it well under 1000 total across all systems.
I have no idea why people would want to have 65,000 GAMEZZZZZ.... there isnt enough time in a lifetime to play all those.
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There will always be completists who want every ROM, alt and hack. That's just the nature of people. I just think it is total overkill. No-one has the time to play all these games and managing and searching them must be a nightmare.Each to their own I suppose. I try to stick to a manageable number per system. Even on MAME I only have about 160 or so and I think that's too many.
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I started building my pi out with every possible game for every system that was well emulated. The roms were all so small, it was no problem putting 4,000 games on a 16GB card (with room to spare, mind you). I thought, "no matter what game I might hear about or be interested in playing, it will just be right there, ready to go at my fingertips.
But then, yeah, every other gamelist was over 600 titles long, and a pain to find anything worth playing. Then I had to question why I had every Madden when I only like '93 (answer: because they fit and why not?). And over time, just "because I could" no longer sounded like a good enough reason.
Now I have about 1,200 games (console and arcade roms) total. I have no more than 250 games from any one system, and most have 100 or less. The menus load fast, are easy to navigate, and are chock full of only quality playable games.
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@Arcuza said in ROM greediness:
When I got my first broad band (768 Kbps) I decided to download every MP3 I could get hold on, major regret when 95% of my 20 GB HDD had music I never listened to.
When I got upgraded to 10 Mbps I decided to download every DivX I could get hold on, major regret when 95% of my 1 TB HDD had movies I never watched.
When I got my first RPI I decided to download every ROM I could get hold on, major regret when 95% of my 32 GB SD-card had games I never played. And it took forever to scrape and scroll through game lists.
Nowadays, I have grown up, and I do only play the games I owned, and still owns. Roughly 20 per system, for 7 systems.
Isn't it funny how history repeats itself?
Glad to hear that I'm not the only one lol. Couple years ago I leeched an entire MP3 FTP of a friend of mine who ran a 0day warez box. The entire collection was like 2TB. It took me a while to get everything. The funny part is my DL speed was 600kb per seconds. One day when I was on my leeching mission, I was checking on how fast it was and the speed was 1.5mb per seconds. My ISP upgraded all the inet speeds for all their subs. Now my dl speed is 15mb per seconds the upload is only 1.5mb per sec. I needed all the music for my pirate station lol.
For MAME I have downloaded the entire romset as well as for the NES, SNES, GB, GBC, GBA and Genesis. To me it's not about having them but it's about finding good games, sometimes I will just start a random game and see how it is. Beside those romsets are not that big except for the MAME one. I have the USA N64 romset on my PC but I only have a few N64 games on the Pi. Same story for the PSX.
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Cheaper storage has a lot to answer for. It is truly amazing that 65,000 (or whatever) games can fit on something that's half the size of a postage stamp.
I'm in the process of tidying my games selection to the stuff I had as a kid (if I can remember) and the so-called "must haves" and classics for the main emulators, adding others as and when. I've built (almost finished) a bartop and it's just a pain for others having so many to scroll through (some are unsuitable and/or won't work anyway).
In reality I'm sure the non-hoarders on here will have them all stashed somewhere.
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I went through the emulators I'd like to use, and looked up a few "top games for console X" type articles that covered those systems. I combined that with my memory of what I used to play, and what I thought my kids might like, and got a pretty manageable set of ROMS from that (about 6GB I think, including some larger PSX games, otherwise it would be a whole lot smaller). Took some research and thought time, but it was worth it.
After learning and playing with various tweaks in my first install, I started over from scratch with the new v4.2 last night. Added a small list of tweaks from the tidy list I kept, then added my ROMS. Didn't take long at all.
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i'm actually just about to build a pi3 setup for my brother, who isn't so tech-savy or a huge gamer, so i think for him i might limit the roms to either games we had as children, so the 32gb card might be pretty empty. but i think there's something to be said for the 'personal touch' :)
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I downloaded every ps1 game rated 7/10 or better on IGN, now I am at 600+ games, so I guess I am a hoarder? Lol
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This time around I've needed to get whole MAME sets simply because the ROMS worked with a minimum of fuss. I've also collected complete sets for other consoles. My intention is to spend a few evenings working through the lists to see what I want to keep and what to put aside.
That said, I've a 128gb USB stick to play with...
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@dankcushions The personal touch is definitely a winner. I did the same for my brother for his birthday last year. I added 50 or so Spectrum games from childhood to a Pi Zero and bought the cheapest wireless keyboard i could find ( I am generous). He was pleased as punch.
He hadn't played any game for 30+ years....My sides were splitting after watching his (lack of) gaming skills.
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On my vids I'll show 1000s of games...mainly because that is what a lot of people want to see. On my personal PI....I HAD a bazillion games...eventually got tired of hunting down my favorites though and only have a handful now. Everything I have on the system I game on only takes up 20gb on a 32gb sd card. Wouldn't even be that big if it weren't for those big ole cd based systems.
I call the folks that have to have everything "completionists" They just want as complete a system as they can build. That said the advantage in at least poking around in all those games is you may find something you really like....that was unobtainable in the day, or today.Ideally I think I will load my home system up with everything I have (1.5 tb) for poking around and finding new stuff. Then finishing my gamegear project for a mobile solution...and only keeping my must haves on it.....could prolly even setup an rsync script to keep my save games/states the same between the home system and mobile system. Could make a little progress on final fantasy 7 on the bus ride home....and start right back to it on my tv after supper....if I ever stop writing scripts and getting involved in other projects that is ;-)
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In defence of "greediness", I don't have the 1000+ mame ROMS in my memory card since there are many revisions and some are just crap (still have some 300 though), but I do have (and think it's valid to) complete romsets of many home consoles. Several reasons:
-I like to discover "new" games by picking at random, specially when im too tired (or too drunk) to engane full on experiences on my PS4.
-When I read about a game, or someone mentions one I don't happen to know, I can just switch my Raspi on and check it out straight away. It's convenient.
-My fav/childhood games might not be my friend's, so bigger chances to make people excited about Retropie. Many don't even understand the concept of emulation and how it's possible to have so many games in a little box. It's just nice to have friends over and look at their faces when they're browsing through so many games. "Ah, you have that too!!!" If I'm not gonna play a ROM, someone eventually will.
-Many of these friends who are seeing it for the first time, obviously want one too. I tell them what they need to buy and clone my image for them. Done it 4 times already, don't need to bother loading more games.
-How can I know which games I like on systems I've never owned? For example, find the thick of what's on PC Engine to be fairly good, some actually great. In doubt, they're all there :)
-I also see my Retropie as a retogaming encyclopedia. It's just nice to browse through all games, learning about releases, years, box arts, etc. It's just useless, geeky knowledge made convenient.
-Finally, I have a 128GB card, but older systems take almost no space. In contrast, I only have the best PSX titles (it would be senseless to have everything for it given the size of the library and files themselves), and as for PSP, N64 and Dreamcast, the ones that work. -
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.
As for my own opinion, I look at my collection like an interactive museum. Being able to fully explore the birth and evolution of an entire creative medium in such a hands on way never gets old to me. Even playing an evolutionary dead end like the wholly unique NES pinball/role playing game, 'Pinball Quest', adds to the overall context of how all this insanity became a multi-billion dollar industry and I find that to be endlessly fascinating. Also, I like the funny noises.
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@mediamogul wonderfully put!
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