Posted By
Bacon
on 2004-11-29
08:08:28
|  Re: Treasure Island
Since I'm in a educational mood today, I'd like to to teach some terminology 
The Treasure Island file you downloaded is not a ROM. In the context of emulators, a ROM is a binary image of the contents of a ROM chip. Most games for the C16 and Plus/4 came on tape; a few came on disk. In a format usable in emulators, they are either tape images (.tap), disk images (.d64), or simply the plain program itself as it would be saved on a disk or a tape (it then usually has the extension .prg).
Many people wrongly call all games used in emulators "ROMs", probably because the first emulators emulated arcade machines and consoles, where the games indeed are stored on ROM chips. The binary files with the games were therefore called "ROM images", which got shorted to ROMs. When emulators of computers were developed, people who didn't know what a ROM chip is probably assumed that any game suited for an emulator was called a ROM.
To someone like me, who learned back in the 80s what a ROM chip is, it was very confusing when I started using emulators to see people refer to disk-based games for Commodore computers being reffered to as ROMs.
So:
- A program on cartridge or built into a chip in a machine: ROM (BASIC, the KERNAL and the 3+1 software in a Plus/4 are all ROMs)
- A tape that's been transferred to a format that can be used in an emulator: Tape image
- A disk that's been transferred to a format that can be used in an emulator: Disk image
Class dismissed.
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