EphraimEscobar

blueroms.ws does include box art and screenshots of the games they distribute in their torrents, which I can appreciate for the effort. However, focusing on information that cannot be replaced such as the hash or serial number may be wise in the long term, since screenshots and videos of those games can be found in other websites, I think including them in a torrent is rather wasteful, specially for NES games smaller than a screenshot (unless you make it pixel perfect).

Besides, that is what the Retreye BitTorrent Index is designed to do, show the basic information, magnet link and images, while the torrent takes care of the technical bits engraved in the media device like a stone tablet!

veilid

Interesting, it sounds like I2P. I will send them an email about it! :)

Thanks etherphon! I will take a look at that private tracker.

You are absolutely correct muusemuuse! but when someone downloads a game as a torrent, they should be able to play it without extracting it. This could save space and convert the players into archivists.

I appreciate the enthusiasm Lindene! In fact, someone in SimpleX suggested IPFS to me a few months back.

It sounds crazy good, there is a lot of good things to say about it, however, unless IPFS becomes mainstream as ThePirateBay made BitTorrent mainstream in the 2000s, there is a low chance a mass audience will adopt a tool that currently requires reading a long manual just to download a video game.

BitTorrent is not perfect, but the fact that a website uses the same file sharing protocol since 2004 says something.

IPFS is a total PITA. It’s not worth it.

We did...It's complicated!

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/ROM_%26_ISO_sites#BitTorrent

We have found the torrents from the Reddit user r/1G1R to be a great choice, but some of these collections use a file format that does not work on an emulator. For example, the "1G1R - Redump - Sony - PlayStation" torrent has ROM files stored in a .7z archive (does not work with DuckStation). That is Game Over for those that want to download, play and archive every game at the same time. :(

Yeah, we know that being "illegal" puts us in a bad light, perhaps we can embrace it. And apologies for the bad impression! This is the first time we want something as big as the lair, and we know that messing it up would ruin the movement. :)

We have to admit, a private torrent tracker would be more efficient to prevent leeching. And using a torrent client to download a 2MB ROM is extreme, so perhaps including a "playable" 1G1R version would help for those who want the whole collection and then load any of those ROMs in an emulator without extracting the file (e.g. .zip or .chd or .rvz or .wux), which would prevent having two copies of it, however, updating a 1G1R torrent is out of the question, that would just cause more problems.

By the way, you can join the signal group and discuss this further with us! You can send me a direct message as a request or find it in the "RetroTorrents" community page.

I really liked your elaboration on the consequences for hosting a torrent site. And forget about money, the only line of defense someone has on the internet is privacy.