Atari 2600 / 5200 / 7800 / Lynx / Jaguar + Coleco ColecoVision + Mattel Intellivision Romsets v1.0 (1170 Games) (No Duplicates) (No Hacked ROMS) (Extras)

Hello everyone! I always am looking for romsets that are meant to have only a single rom for each game, rather than a lot of different versions of it, but never am able to find them. I finally finished this one, after a handful of headaches and medicine for the headache.

Because I just wrote too much, I will be skipping some not so important things here in the description, because they go over the Kickass limit for descriptions. I will be writing it all in the Comments section.

One important thing to keep in mind. I have NOT tested many of these games and the tests I did, were just to see if these games can play in emulators. It would be pointless to share them if people can't find ways to play them after all.

There are quite a handful of things I want to say about these Romsets, so if you care about details, read on. If you do not read, please do not complain about me having duplicate romsets or the same rompacks two times with the same roms. If you want to skip unnecessary details, scroll down to the info about the main Rompack and after. Make sure to read the Extra section though, since I will point out the most things there.

I have tried my best to not have duplicate games, but even so, there might be a couple left that I did not detect. If you find any duplicate game, please do report it in comments.

Always though first test the game to see if it is a duplicate, rather than just considering it a duplicate because of the name! There are quite a few roms that have the same exact name, but they are different games! Always test them first!

Main ROMSets
Unlike other Romsets I shared, these consoles do not really have English or Japan roms. I mean, would you care what region is Ms. Pac-Man when you play it? Definitely not!

With that said, now let's talk about the games. Atari 2600 has 554 games, Atari 5200 has 99, Atari 7800 has 65, Atari Jaguar has 56, Atari Lynx has 83, Coleco ColecoVision has 155 and finally Mattel Intellivision has 158 wonderful nostalgic games.

Even if all roms are meant to be clean working roms, there are some games marked with Proto, which are meant to be what you would call Alpha release. These Prototype roms are usually marked.

Every Romset has the normal one and a Mame-Edition as a named it! The Mame-Edition romsets have usually less games than the normal ones, but as their variation impies, they are made to be compatible with MAME. I am sure MAME users know it by now, but for people that do not, MAME is really picky with the roms it uses. If the roms do not have specific naming, MAME will just ignore the file, as if it is not there. For the reason I made an extra pack for every console, that includes roms in a form that MAME would recognize them. If you are not going to use MAME, then you do not need the Mame-Edition Romsets.

Most Romsets have a MAME BIOS folder inside the Extra folder. Read bellow on the Emulator section for more.

The Mame-Edition Romsets like I mentioned, have less roms than the normal Romsets. That is because the tool I used to rename them, so they will be accepted by mame, just did not like some games. Atari 2600 has 536 games, Atari 5200 has 98, Atari 7800 has 65, Atari Jaguar has 52, Atari Lynx has 83 and Mattel Intellivision has 109. Sadly though Coleco ColecoVision has just 13 roms and from these only 3 are from the main romset. I have not checked what the other 10 were, but I am guessing some might be duplicates. I left these in, just in case someone would want to include a couple of ColecoVision in their MAME. If anyone knows how to fix that, please do comment or message me please.

Extra
The Most important think to point out here, is that you might NEED THE BIOS FILES! A lot of emulators seem to require the user to put in the emulator folder the BIOS file, or else it does not work. Read more about BIOS on the Emulators section.

For Atari 2600 I moved all the Multi-Game roms inside the extra folder, since these include games that can be found in the main Romset, so I decided that they do not need to be in the main romset.

One thing to note, is that the Mame-Edition of the main 2600 pack, contains roms separated in two folders. One is for normal cartridges and and the other is for casettes. Like I said, MAME can be picky, so you might as well know which is for what.

For Atari 5200 I used a No-Intro pack and merely removed 3 duplicate roms. I scanned through the folder and separated non games, putting them on the extra folder.

For Atari 7800 I removed about half the roms from the no-intro pack, but that is because half of them were European duplicate roms, so I left just the USA ones.

For Atari Jaguar I removed only a couple roms from the no-intro pack. I was thinking to add Jaguar CD games, or more like the ones that are exclusive to Jaguar and you can't experience them on other consoles. Sadly Project Tempest (emulator) can play only some of them and it's really buggy. Last update from that emulator is from 2004, so I do not expect much. Virtual Jaguar (which I use) seems to plan to eventually support that, but even if it not over a decade old, the last update was on 2014. This is why I decided to not add any Jaguar CD images.

For Atari Lynx I just removed a single rom from the No-Intro pack. Not much more to say here

For Coleco ColecoVision I just removed 14 duplicated from the No-Intro pack. Again not much to say here either. Oh wait! I do! Ahem. In the main romset I have left 3 unlicensed games; Ms. Space Fury, Super DK! and Super DK! junior. I just thought it was ok for them to remain in the main romset. If you do not want them, you can remove them, as they are marked with Unl.

For Mattel Intellivision I used a merged pack from Emuparadise, since the is no No-Intro pack. I tried to make sure there are not duplicates left, but keep in mind that I go through the files manually. I also left in the rompack 3 games that were made by Joseph Zbiciak, and were made from 1999-2001, which is 20 years after the console was first released. Again, I felt it was ok to leave them inside the main romset. Again, if you do not want them, they are marked. Search for Joseph Zbiciak and remove them.

Unknown games on these Romsets, are just games I could not verify or check for integrity. As always, I added them for whoever wants to go through them and keep or delete any.

If you wonder what are the Public Domain roms, you can look it up in wikipedia, since you will understand it much better, than me trying to explain.

Games List
I have compiled a list of the Main Romset games in different formats, from normal text, to rtf and two different type of excel formats. The txt and rtf obviously can be read by the default Windows document readers, Notepad and Wordpad. The txt is simple where the rtf looks like a nice list in boxes, looking like an excel.

The Excel ones, ods and xml, are for either OpenOffice or Microsoft Office and they have filters to filter out versions and regions. If you download more than one of my romsets, you can always combine the Excel pages, by copying them all in a single Excel file. Just suggesting that for people that do not want to have a lot of different excel files.

Sadly it was really tiresome for me to make a detailed excel for Atari 2600, so I just listed the games. If anything, all these romsets either have small lists or just do not have many details. Either way, created them for whoever wants them.

I am only suggesting the Emulators and Frontend. I do not include them in the pack!

Emulators
First, to get it out of the way, MAME seems to be capable of playing all these consoles. I have NOT yet tried MAME to see if and how it works, but I doubt MAME would include them in it's lists without having any compatibility.

Sadly I can't help anyone with how to use MAME, since I have not used it yet and I can't make even a simple guide. But either way I did rename the roms so people that know how MAME works, will be able to add them. On most Extra folder I also included the console's BIOS file for MAME! MAME seems to have integrated some BIOS from some consoles, but for others it does not.

The MAME BIOS folder contains BIOS files I found that might be needed by MAME, but there seem to be some variations at times. From reading some guides I under that MAME looks for a zip file with the name of the console it needs to emulate, if it needs it's BIOS. The zip file must be named according to how MAME sees the console and to fine what name is for each console, you go in the Hash folder found in MAME. Lastly about the MAME BIOS files, I want to point out that the intv.zip for Intellivision, does not contain ecs.bin and ivoice.bin. I know that ECS games need the ecs.bin and IntelliVoice needs ivoice.bin. This is why I made an alternative intv.zip, and placed it in a separate folder. I will leave it up to you to test it out.

With the MAME out of the way, I want to point out now which Emulators I used to play the games, and whatever I can point out about them. I also will put links to the emulator sites.

For Atari 2600 I used z26. There was not really something special I had to do to make it work.

For Atari 5200 I used kat5200. I downloaded the zip version, not the installer one. This one needs for you to point out where is it's BIOS file (which is included in the Extra folder), or else it will not work.

For Atari 7800 I used ProSystem. Again like z26 it does not need something especial to work, but it's page is dead, so I got it from Zophar.

For Atari Jaguar I used Virtual Jaguar. For me the folders were set wrong in the settings. Make sure to check that eeproms folder is "./eeproms/" and Software folder is "./software/"!!! That will make the emulator use whatever folders are inside the same directory the exe file is. Keep in mind that roms go in the software folder. There is also another working emulator called Project Tempest. It is really old, but seems to have partial support for Jaguar CD (if you can call that support). I did not use it unlike Virtual Jaguar, so I can't really recommend it.

For Atari Lynx I used Handy. It seems to work "ok", but there is one thing to point out. The lynxboot.img that it comes with is FAKE, which means you need to replace the lynxboot.img that is found inside Handy's folder with a real lynxboot.img. I have included it in the Extra folder. Just to make clear that I am not accusing the emulator for being problematic. The creator used a fake file, because that is the BIOS of Lynx and I am guessing he did not want to use the official one for legal reasons.

For Coleco ColecoVision I used ColEm. Another easy to use emulator, that just needs you to choose the rom you want to play and you are ready to go.

Mattel Intellivision I used Bliss. Bliss requires exec.bin and grom.bin to be placed in it't folder (or the roms folder not sure) to work properly. If you want to use IntelliVoice and play ECS games, you need to also add IVoice.bin and ECS.bin. All 4 files are included in the Extra folder. Just to point out, there is a better looking and working emulator for this console. Namely, Nostalgia, which after some tests is much better than bliss. The main reason I liked it more, is because the interface looks like MAME, where you get a list of games you want to choose. Heck, you can even get pictures to add to it for the games it has. The reason I did not really use it, is because there is no portable version, meaning it needs an installation. Afar from that though, it seems like a much better emulator.

As you can see above, every system needs it's own emulator and some emulators are a bit hard to get used to or can give headaches. This is the main reason I decided to create additional MAME version packs, because even for myself, I feel I will try to get them work on MAME, rather than have a separate emulator for every console. But for now I will stick to these emulators.

Frontend
Finally I want to suggest LaunchBox.

Thank God LaunchBox works with all these emulators, so I can at least have it's nice interface. After they are set up, they will run then games through LaunchBox. The screenshot is of my running an Atari 5200 game through LaunchBox, using Kat5200.

Launchbox is a frontend for multiple emulators and if anything it is the best I have found out there. It is easy to import games in it's interface, it suggests the best emulator to get when for each console, when you try to add an emulator and it has the best interface I have found.

You can follow this tutorial, which will help you combine the ultimate emulator, with the ultimate frontend :D This Video might be for RetroArch, but it has a quick tutorial about Launchbox in it too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oeozvnb_-eI



PHEW!.
That was a lot of cleaning, packaging and writing info. If you find any problems please do leave a message or a comment, since I am guessing that within all these, I might have messed up something. When I will find a way to use MAME (especially through RetroArch), I might write here or guide and maybe release a new pack, hopefully with the ColecoVision romset for MAME.

Until then, enjoy the games, the nostalgia and that an awesome day!