A lot of initiatives dedicated to the cataloging and preservation of software, firmware and other resources exist. In this section we present the main projects with this aim. Beside these initiatives, we also put a few vintage collections (most of them was illegal at the time!).
The Old School Emulation Center (TOSEC) is a retrocomputing initiative dedicated to the cataloging and preservation of software, firmware and resources for arcade machines, microcomputers, minicomputers and video game consoles. The main goal of the project is to catalog and audit various kinds of software and firmware images for these systems. As of release 2014-10-31, TOSEC catalogs over 280 unique computing platforms and continues to grow. As of this time the project had identified and cataloged 781,347 different software images/sets, consisting of over 4.97TB of software, firmware and resources.
Cowering's GoodTools is a suite of 35 ROM auditing applications for Windows (The ROMS can be used on all platforms) that contain a database listing known software for various video game consoles and home computers. These tools, released as freeware, have established themselves as an important reference for ROM collectors, especially for older systems that don't have similarly authoritative sources and that have a perfect or almost perfect coverage in GoodTools. The popularity of GoodTools originated the practice of distributing, instead of single or arbitrarily collected ROMs, the so-called "goodsets", packaged archives of every ROM for a particular platform that GoodTools recognizes [from Wikipedia]. Other utilities depend on GoodTools. GoodGUI is a graphical front-end to GoodTools. GoodMerge is a tool that organizes and optimizes the compression of ROM collections by placing all versions of a particular game into one archive, reducing the number of files and significantly increasing compression. UnGoodMerge is a program to extract ROM images from archives (such as those created by GoodMerge, hence the name) according to rules, such as only one variant of a game and no bad dumps, in order to leave behind redundant ROMs.
Rather than a collection or catalogue, Hyperspin is a graphical launcher designed for arcade cabinets using various emulators (primarily MAME currently). Its main feature is that it boasts a highly customizable interface, to give users an arcade feel when navigating menus.
MAME (originally an acronym of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a free and open-source emulator designed to recreate the hardware of arcade game systems in software on modern personal computers and other platforms. The intention is to preserve gaming history by preventing vintage games from being lost or forgotten.
When the project No-Intro was born, its goal was to remove the intros that some pirate groups added to the Game Boy Advance ROMS. This is why it's called "No-Intro". In later years, it covered more and more systems and opened more fronts of preservation. "No-Intro" provides some .dat files, to be used with ROM-Managers, with information about the known ROMS released. Often there are more versions of the same ROM dump, but most of them are garbage, some examples may include: bad dumps, hacks, fakes, overdumps, underdumps, and so on. "No-Intro" lists only the best available ROM; it must be a full dump with no faults and no changes to the file, basically just the ROMS that are the closest as possible to the original licensed cartridges.
