December has been a crazy month for me as I painstakingly undertook probably the most ambitious project for TopRoms yet. I know you’ve been secretly dying to see this addition to your beloved collection and I’d like to announce this massive edition of TopRoms. A set of games from a generation that brought forward some of the most definite classics in gaming history. An era that put four gaming titans in an arena for the fight of taking over your living rooms and no matter what team you chose, you had hardware with a lineup of absolutely excellent software.
Enough beating around the bush, take a deep breath!
Introducing the sixth generation of consoles! A carefully curated set of must-haves for Sega Dreamcast, Sony PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube and Microsoft Xbox are now part of the collection bringing these unforgettable titles on the screens of your choosing. All of the files have been converted to formats not only with reduced space usage but also compatible with emulators out of the box. This has come, of course, with quite the size penalty, expanding TopRoms by about 1.2 TB.
If you can’t contain your excitement, the torrent is ready to go right here. As usual, use your torrent client to select what consoles you’d like to download. In some clients, you will be able to see the size of each of the sets. This time, the files are being hosted on a dedicated seedbox rather than my home server meaning much improved download speeds and reliability.
TopRoms – 2025 Edition – Torrent Download (1.57 TB)
While you wait for this extremely lengthy download to finish, you can find out about the changes and additions to TopRoms.
Sixth-Generation Consoles
The Dreamcast was technically a commercial failure after customers lost trust in Sega due to their disastrous launch of the Saturn and the embarrassing attempt to put the Genesis on life support with the 32X. However, retrospectively, the console did have a sizeable amount of unforgettable and innovative classics and now it’s considered Sega’s final swansong before exiting the hardware business in 2001. The platform was home to many definitive arcade ports, unique exclusives and was the birthplace of timepieces that would have sequels on other systems. Games are provided in CHD format which is compatible with the excellent Flycast emulator that is also available as a RetroArch core.
Nintendo didn’t disappoint with their GameCube bringing excellent first-party games to your living room in addition to many great third-party contributions. Many of the entrants have been considered the best of all time and are enjoyed still thoroughly today with many of them still played as part of esports and charity competitions. All games have been compressed with the RVZ format, which is native to Dolphin, an emulator that was impressive even in its infancy.
Of course, the sixth generation could not be forgotten without the extremely popular PlayStation 2, which ended in a solid lead in terms of hardware sales making it the best selling of all time at 160 million units. As a tradition of Sony, there is a swath of exclusive titles that only found a future on their subsequent consoles. Due to the very long life of the system, almost 5000 games were released, so narrowing them down was quite difficult. As a result, the PlayStation 2 is quite massive at more than 300 games and 650 GB of space. The images are in CHD format compatible with the PCSX2 emulator which provided mind-boggling compatibility, excellent performance and enhancement features like higher resolution and wide-screen hacks. A separate folder is included for sport games.
Last but not least, Microsoft’s entrant to the console world started with the Xbox, which took some time to become a hit. Being the most powerful of the four, it did bring graphics to the next generation though many of them didn’t take full advantage of the hardware because they were ports from other consoles or PC. Nonetheless, there were still quite a few titles only released for the system. In the end, the Xbox was more well known for being an excellent modding platform for turning it into a media centre and emulation machine. After 20 years, there was great progress in the emulation scene, but performance and compatibility still remain to be desired. All the games have been converted to XISO format for compatibility with the xemu emulator with a separate folder for sport games. Xbox Live made online gaming and DLC mainstream in the console world and I’ve included disc images to install them. You can also find the appropriate BIOS files in the “BIOS - Standalone” folder.
Arcade Systems
I made an embarrassing mistake in the 2023 edition of TopRoms. I wanted to ensure that all games would run and in order to do that, they would need dependencies to work. I mistakenly used the 'merged' collection which intuitively would be the right set but it is actually the 'non-merged' version. The archives have been migrated to 'non-merged' and should solve issues with games not starting. Now compatible with MAME 0.272.
Also, the set relied on some games that were disc-based and I didn't include the appropriate CHD files which are now there in a separate folder.
New Additions
Just like with the Super Famicom addition last year, a set of fan-translated Japanese RPGs have been integrated into the collection. Many of them are unknown to the Western world though I bet many of them are fondly remembered in the East. They are in a separate folder for convenience.
There was a collection of games that were released in the early life of the Nintendo Famicom only in Japan. While not very ambitious, they were highly memorable and quite fun. Some might not want to include them so they are collected in a separate folder. Ironically, these were made famous in the West in pirate multi-carts and terrible clone consoles sold at some malls.
A well-remembered micro-computer in Europe, the ZX Spectrum, was strangely omitted during my compilation of TopRoms. Some of those unforgettable classics have been included now. The images have been stored in TZX format for compatibility with the FUSE emulator which comes as a libretro core in RetroArch.
The Philips CD-I is now part of TopRoms as well. This is a controversial inclusion as some of the Nintendo franchises have been massacred into awful cartoon animations. However, some of these games are actually acceptable once you put the Nintendo IP aside and skip the cutscenes. When using the SAME CD-I emulator, you will see a blank cyan screen at first. It isn't broken, you must wait about a minute for the CD-I inferface to show up and then you can select Play to run the game. You can speed this up by using the fast-forward feature in RetroArch.
Fixes
Jaguar CD games can be hard to run especially in the normally used ISO or CHD formats. The well-developed BigPEmu emulator has its own format for disc-based games. These images have been converted to the BigPImg format which works perfectly with that emulator.
Commodore Amiga games were included in the incorrect format for compatibility with emulators. They have been converted into the LHA format. The emulator PUAE which is available in RetroArch works perfectly with them.
I neglected to test Commodore 64 games in the previous release extensively. Tape images are now in the TAP format which is compatible with the VICE emulator available as a RetroArch core.
So that’s it for TopRoms. Please email me at toproms@cdahmedeh.net if you have any questions or issues with the download. I’ll continue working to improve and polish TopRoms this year and release incremental updates. Late holiday greetings for all!