Tillbaka

I'm going to pretend that's what all the searchers were looking for, and they weren't just calling the pirated file for a CD-based game "a ROM"

foone: I hate linguistic prescriptivism. Language changes, grandpa, get used to it!

google: hey some kids think the word "rom" means all pirated games, not just ones from ROM-based systems like the Atari 2600 through N64

foone: my eyes are bleeding but I guess that's alright

google: want some MS-DOS ROMS?

foone: THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS MS-DOS ROMS!

except for the games available for the PCjr on cartridge, and arguably the firmwares of many 90s palmtops contained a version of DOS that fit into ROM... so those firmwares are "DOS ROMs"

BUT THERE DEFINITELY WASN'T A "DOOM ROM" UNLESS YOU MEAN A VERSION FOR THE GBA OR SUPER NINTENDO

wait, Atari Jaguar! It had Doom as well. I always think of it as a CD-ROM system (it came out in 1993, it should have been one) because it did later get a CD add-on, but I don't believe Jaguar-Doom used the CD add-on, I think it was a cart

the official Doom wiki suggests that I forgot:
* Sega 32X
* N64

and I think that's it for commercial ports. There's certainly fan-ports lots of other consoles, many of which use ROMs

For reference since I didn't actually explain and clearly not everyone knows this:

"ROMs" are named like that because they're ROM dumps. Early pre-CD consoles used Read Only Memory chips to store the games, so to pirate the game you took that chip and dumped it, giving you a ROM Dump file. Stick that file onto an ((E)E)PROM or into an emulator, and you can play it without buying it. "ROM dumps" quickly got shortened to just "ROMs"

PC games never (again, other than the weird PCjr) used ROM chips for games, they used floppy disks, type-in BASIC, or cassette tapes. None of those have "ROM dumps" as there's no ROM to dump, thus no "ROMs"

later we got CDs (and DVDs, technically) for PC games, but those don't have "ROM dumps", they have "disc images" or "ISOs".

and then eventually games went fully downloadable, so neither ROMs nor ISOs make sense: They're just sparkling warez

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.

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

THIS DOESN'T MEAN I HAVE TO LIKE IT

@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?

@Canageek nothing comes on CDs anymore?

@foone I mean, nothing comes on ROM chips either! I mean, why did ROM piracy terms win when ISO piracy terms were more popular when I was an undergrad, as I recall.