How are roms actually made??

Genesis

After reading throught all you're threads i just came to wondering how roms from different consoles were actually made?? does anyone know if so please tell:)

DiscoStu

some very technically savvy people build a bit of hardware to connect a snes cart, gameboy cart, arcade rom board or whatever it may be to a pc or whatever system they may be working on. they then write software to control this interface and read the information out of the aformentioned media then save it to their computer and then finally upload it to the net so us leeches can then leech away. thus concludes my idiots guide to rom dumping.

Genesis

god that al0t of work for one rom.do they have to make the hardware themselves???

bugs

Cartridge based games are generally pretty simple to rip. Considering that you can buy readers from companies that manufacture them in hong kong. They've all been around for ages.
Arcade boards are the real difficult jobs with there being so many different board types and variations of each.

DiscoStu

but back in "the day" when the commercial readers were not available those folks had to do it themselves.

bugs

Most of the rom dumps predate emulation of the systems. I remember being at a dodgy auction where they were selling a thing that allowed snes games to be dumped to floppy disk and then using the same ripper played back using the disk.
This was before i know of any snes emulator and it was maybe 8 years ago or more.

Arcade games similarily were dumped to raw data so they could be either re-upped to blank chips to be sold as hacked boards or edited and re-upped. It was fairly big business round about the CPS-1 time when arcade boards cost a small fortune and everyone wanted to play street fighter clones and hacks.