I searched "snatcher sega cd" and google suggested "snatcher sega cd rom"

[foone@digipres.club]

but for a lot of people the word "ROMs" has always meant "pirated games" so they expanded it to all pirated games. You've got PS2 ROMs, you've got ROMs of steam games released this week, you've got ROMs of games that came on barcodes, which are many things but NOT ROMS.

[foone@digipres.club]

so it's technically incorrect but not linguistically incorrect. The word's general use has widened from the technical meaning.

[foone@digipres.club]

THIS DOESN'T MEAN I HAVE TO LIKE IT

[canageek@wandering.shop]

@foone I remember when in the mid-2000s if you wanted pirated things you searched Name ISO, I wonder why that fell out of style?

[foone@digipres.club]

I forgot to explain: The CD-ROM one is also weird.
They're called ISOs because the CD-ROM filesystem standard is ISO 9660, and that's ISO as in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO*).

In a different world the file extension/file type would have been dot iso9660 and we'd... probably still be calling them ISOs, honestly, but DOS/Windows only supporting 3-character extensions at the time didn't help.

* blame the French. UTC stands for "Coordinated Universal Time", you know?"

[foone@digipres.club]

@Canageek nothing comes on CDs anymore?

[foone@digipres.club]

but yeah. over in the PC space, this stuff was always just warez. as in "softwares", but with a Z, so it's Kool.

[foone@digipres.club]

with multiple words for different specific types of pirated media (warez/isos/images/roms) it's no surprise the larger community settled on just one name.

[foone@digipres.club]

but since it's technically incorrect it does make my bloodpressure go up a little everytime I see it used wrong.

[foone@digipres.club]

although to be honest, ISO was misused a lot too.
an "ISO" is technically a specific type of dump of a CD-ROM, it's the dumped ISO-9660 filesystem into a linear file.

But that filesystem doesn't contain any CD audio, those are separate. So more likely you'll see a bin/cue pair with some audio tracks, if the game uses CD-audio (and many did!)

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@foone what do you mean, roms are what you get when you image a floppy with the tab open

[foone@digipres.club]

so often have I downloaded "ISOs" (from Highly Legitimate Sources (says the retrogaming researcher/hacker)) and instead of an ISO file I have one of the 800 different disc image format that aren't actually ISOs

[mareepy@glaceon.social]

@foone a streamer I like pronounces Warez like Juarez and it fucks me up every time he does it. I feel like he does it on purpose.

[foone@digipres.club]

some consoles even have their own disc image formats!
Ever look into Wii games? It's madness over there.

[foone@digipres.club]

There's a whole special toolset for converting between ISOs, WDF, WIA, CISO, GCZ, and WBFS.

[foone@digipres.club]

@Mareepy I'm sure he does. I've definitely done that more than once

[midnitelibrary@glammr.us]

@foone Wait, I thought they were named after the spaceknight. /s

[curtmack@floss.social]

@foone Huh. All this time I had assumed it was "International Standards Organization."

[mhoye@mastodon.social]

@foone hold on, does that mean that if I took an “iso” with dd if=device of=file.iso that I can salvage the CD audio out of file.iso?

[foone@digipres.club]

anyway this has been annoying me for so long that 8 years ago I ported a version of Tetris to run off a ROM chip on an ISA card. Therefore I had a "ROM" of a PC game. I played it in an old 286 board with no drives attached, floppy, optical, or hard!