4 ms·
I wish people would start with a "rom format" for windows games. There's so many old games and no standardized way to run them.
by spwa4 4mo ago
I wish people would start with a "rom format" for windows games. There's so many old games and no standardized way to run them.
- trollbridge 4mo agoScummVM has effectively done this.
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoYou mean ISOs? ;)
- draginol 4mo agoI think he means where the DOS/config is all set up too. Sort of like a really small VM.
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoIt was a joke, because ISO is a file copy of a CD-ROM disc. ;)
- lproven 4mo agoDOS mostly predates CD-ROM. The DOS heyday was the 1980s. No officially-released version of DOS contains generic CD-ROM drivers; the last few DOSes (MS-DOS 6.x, DR-DOS 6/7) contain the redirector (`MSCDEX.EXE` or equivalent) but not the device driver. From 1992, Windows 3.1 rapidly took over. The first mass-market CD-ROM drives were the mid-1990s, and ATAPI CDs that could attach to an EIDE interface only became common in the latter half of the 1990s, when Windows 95 was the default PC OS. Microsoft never shipped any version of Windows 3.x on CD; I used to have a Gateway 2000 WfWg3.11 CD in my travelling toolkit, just in case. Windows 95 originally shipped on 13 1.4MB floppies. https://archive.org/download/microsoft-windows-95_202404 https://archive.org/download/microsoft-windows-95_202404
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoThe original comment was regarding Windows not specifically DOS, someone else inferred DOS from the comment. On that note, FreeDOS does support CD-ROM.
- lproven 4mo agoI know. (I've reviewed it and am on its mailing lists; I've contributed a tiny handful of fixes to FreeGEM.) So does the Win98 emergency boot diskette. But both post-date Win95.
- MisterTea 4mo agoYou mean a packaged file that one simply runs? Isn't that the installer?
- nehal3m 4mo agoAn installer extracts and moves a bunch of files from a blob to the filesystem, writes registry values (on Windows anyway), sets environment variables, sets up services, permissions and a bunch of other things, does it not? A ROM is a binary blob that some executable accepts as input and interprets, the executable being the emulator, which simulates the target hardware well enough that the ROM's machine code runs as if it were on the original silicon.
- MisterTea 4mo agoI was being facetious captain obvious.
- sudobash1 4mo agoI don't think it is supported anywhere else currently, but Batocera has a simple wsquashfs format. It is basically the game compressed into a squahsfs. Then it can be managed as simply as other traditional ROMs: https://wiki.batocera.org/systems:windows#folder_compression https://wiki.batocera.org/systems:windows#folder_compression