Rom Center Markdown Edition 2023

About Locked Internet Archive Items

Internet Archive restricts items that generate a high amount of traffic from being able to be downloaded without an account to prevent abuse. This is shown with a lock icon beside the file name in the item's file listing.

IALOCK

When accessing the file directly, the following error is shown instead.

IALOCKFILE

To download locked items, register an archive.org account.

Additional Information

About "No-Intro" and "Redump"

No-Intro and Redump are groups that catalog hashes of dumped games for different systems. If a link has "No-Intro" or "Redump" in the name, it is a collection of the currently best-available ROMs for the system. These should be your go-to links if what you are looking for is not in the Popular Games page.

About Internet Archive Items

Internet Archive items will have metadata files that end in extensions such as .xml and .sqlite. These files are not important to download but are meant for the website to know what files to display and the reviews of the item.

IAMETA

About Internet Archive Torrents

Some Internet Archive items will contain torrent files to provide another download method. However, the torrent's files listing is usually incomplete compared to what is listed on the website. For this reason, it is recommended to use direct downloads with a download manager instead of torrents.

About Archive Files (ZIP, 7z, RAR):

These files are not ROMs themselves; to use them, you must extract them. 7-Zip is recommended for extracting these files. Download and install it here and run it. Then, open the archive file in 7-Zip or right click on it and go to 7-Zip -> Extract Files.

About uBlock Origin

While not required anymore due to megaup links being removed, uBlock Origin is recommended when accessing certain links on this megathread and the Internet in general. It blocks ads, trackers,and much more.

Below are links to download and install it for popular web browsers.

Store Name Links
Chrome Web Store Link
Firefox Add-ons Link
Opera Add-ons Link

For Android: Download Firefox from the Play Store, locate the Addons menu and select uBlock Origin. Add it to Firefox and remember to only use Firefox to download ROMs.

How to Bypass Download Limits

Google Drive

From time to time when trying to download a file, you may see an error message saying “Download quota exceeded, so you can’t download this file at this time”. Here are steps to bypass the download quota limit:

  1. Log into your Google account, if you haven’t already.
  2. Open Google Drive and go to “My Drive” in the sidebar.
  3. Make a new folder in your drive. It doesn’t matter what you name it.
  4. Go to the quota'd folder, right click on whatever you want to download, and click “Add Shortcut to Drive”.
  5. Navigate to “My Drive” and then to the folder you made, and click “Add Shortcut”.
  6. Go to “My Drive” on the sidebar. Right-click the folder you made and click “Download”.
  7. A .zip file with the file(s) you selected will start downloading.

MEGA and 1Fichier

MEGA and 1Fichier have pretty serious data caps and unlike Google Drive, there is no easy way to get around them. To bypass the MEGA and 1Fichier download limits, you will need either a VPN or a list of proxies. For the VPN, connect to it and you are good to go. For a list of proxies, you will have to use some 3rd party tool like JDownloader2 and give it the list of proxies. Do note that this process is fairly advanced. After that, you can start downloading by feeding JDownloader2 links to the files you would like to download.