DRM-Free Games on Steam - Add Category for Games With ROMs

[acanuck 0]

Over the past few years I've been trying as much as possible to get away from buying games through DRM restricted sources, mainly buying from GoG.com and Itch.io when available, and pages like The big list of DRM-free games on Steam has been INVALUABLE for identifying games on Steam that can be downloaded and backed up. One thing I've been looking into is games that contain ROMs that can be played in emulators. Things like the SEGA Classics Collection just have the raw ROMs in the folder, but some other games they're embedded in the game data. I've found a few bits of custom python scripts here and there for extracting them, but it's been difficult tracking some of them down. For example, I found scripts to extract ROMs from Mega Man Legacy Collection and Mega Man X Legacy Collection but not Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 and Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2.

If there was a dedicated section on The big list of DRM-free games on Steam page specifically for ROMs that can be found in purchased games it'd make it easier to centralize all known ways to get the ROMs out. Maybe actually pointing to software for extracting the ROMs is against site terms, I'm not sure, but at the very least a list of games known to contain raw ROMs, or maybe even ROMs that can be easily extracted with an archive manager, would be a helpful resource.

[Dandelion Sprout 12]

There was https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_officially_distributed_with_emulators_to_run_them for a short while in September-October. But not only was it unable to include such games as SEGA Classics Collection due to it having a non-emulated main menu, the list was also completely forgot about when the admin team changed list queries from Semantic to Cargo earlier this autumn.

[Aemony 124]

Seems the list couldn't be moved over to Cargo because the relevant Cargo table required a full recreation because the current table didn't have the necessary Wrapper columns, and I assume Garrett didn't start the recreation due to waiting for the main data to finish being populated at first.

I've started the recreation and once it's finished (it has ~46k rows) we'll be able to switch out the current table which will fix the list.

[Aemony 124]

This is taking ages.... 😐 I'll ping our sysadmin on Discord regarding possibility of speeding up the process.

[Aemony 124]

On 11/28/2021 at 6:54 AM, Dandelion Sprout said:

There was https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_officially_distributed_with_emulators_to_run_them for a short while in September-October. But not only was it unable to include such games as SEGA Classics Collection due to it having a non-emulated main menu, the list was also completely forgot about when the admin team changed list queries from Semantic to Cargo earlier this autumn.

This page has now been fixed, though it only includes 10 games in total.