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I searched "snatcher sega cd" and google suggested "snatcher sega cd rom"

why yes, google, it was on CD-ROM!

I'm going to pretend that's what all the searchers were looking for, and they weren't just calling the pirated file for a CD-based game "a ROM"

foone: I hate linguistic prescriptivism. Language changes, grandpa, get used to it!

google: hey some kids think the word "rom" means all pirated games, not just ones from ROM-based systems like the Atari 2600 through N64

foone: my eyes are bleeding but I guess that's alright

google: want some MS-DOS ROMS?

foone: THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS MS-DOS ROMS!

except for the games available for the PCjr on cartridge, and arguably the firmwares of many 90s palmtops contained a version of DOS that fit into ROM... so those firmwares are "DOS ROMs"

BUT THERE DEFINITELY WASN'T A "DOOM ROM" UNLESS YOU MEAN A VERSION FOR THE GBA OR SUPER NINTENDO

wait, Atari Jaguar! It had Doom as well. I always think of it as a CD-ROM system (it came out in 1993, it should have been one) because it did later get a CD add-on, but I don't believe Jaguar-Doom used the CD add-on, I think it was a cart

the official Doom wiki suggests that I forgot:
* Sega 32X
* N64

and I think that's it for commercial ports. There's certainly fan-ports lots of other consoles, many of which use ROMs

For reference since I didn't actually explain and clearly not everyone knows this:

"ROMs" are named like that because they're ROM dumps. Early pre-CD consoles used Read Only Memory chips to store the games, so to pirate the game you took that chip and dumped it, giving you a ROM Dump file. Stick that file onto an ((E)E)PROM or into an emulator, and you can play it without buying it. "ROM dumps" quickly got shortened to just "ROMs"

PC games never (again, other than the weird PCjr) used ROM chips for games, they used floppy disks, type-in BASIC, or cassette tapes. None of those have "ROM dumps" as there's no ROM to dump, thus no "ROMs"

later we got CDs (and DVDs, technically) for PC games, but those don't have "ROM dumps", they have "disc images" or "ISOs".

and then eventually games went fully downloadable, so neither ROMs nor ISOs make sense: They're just sparkling warez

but for a lot of people the word "ROMs" has always meant "pirated games" so they expanded it to all pirated games. You've got PS2 ROMs, you've got ROMs of steam games released this week, you've got ROMs of games that came on barcodes, which are many things but NOT ROMS.

so it's technically incorrect but not linguistically incorrect. The word's general use has widened from the technical meaning.

THIS DOESN'T MEAN I HAVE TO LIKE IT

I forgot to explain: The CD-ROM one is also weird.
They're called ISOs because the CD-ROM filesystem standard is ISO 9660, and that's ISO as in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO*).

In a different world the file extension/file type would have been dot iso9660 and we'd... probably still be calling them ISOs, honestly, but DOS/Windows only supporting 3-character extensions at the time didn't help.

* blame the French. UTC stands for "Coordinated Universal Time", you know?"

but yeah. over in the PC space, this stuff was always just warez. as in "softwares", but with a Z, so it's Kool.

with multiple words for different specific types of pirated media (warez/isos/images/roms) it's no surprise the larger community settled on just one name.

but since it's technically incorrect it does make my bloodpressure go up a little everytime I see it used wrong.

although to be honest, ISO was misused a lot too.
an "ISO" is technically a specific type of dump of a CD-ROM, it's the dumped ISO-9660 filesystem into a linear file.

But that filesystem doesn't contain any CD audio, those are separate. So more likely you'll see a bin/cue pair with some audio tracks, if the game uses CD-audio (and many did!)

@foone hold on, does that mean that if I took an “iso” with dd if=device of=file.iso that I can salvage the CD audio out of file.iso?

Foone🏳️‍⚧️

@mhoye no, because that's making an ISO9660 dump, that's literally what an ISO file is, it contains no CD-ROM audio. That's in separate non-ISO9660 tracks

@foone but isn’t “dd if=device” making a bit wise copy of all the data on that device? I mean, I didn’t think dd knows what an iso is…

@mhoye Nope. The audio tracks aren't exposed through that interface.
That interface is intended for access to the filesystem.

This makes sense for Historical Reasons, where PCs would access the filesystem data, but the audio data just got played, and the CPU wasn't involved: The drive itself is playing the audio, and it's just being routed to the speakers (through cables, not software).

To pull the audio data off a disc, you need cdparanoia or EAC or something similar

@foone @mhoye Seeing this sort of discourse is what I love about Mastodon. Thank you for this informative thread.

@mhoye @foone Turns out CD Audio data doesn't show up in the block layer at all. It takes special ioctls to read. (It's also stored at a lower layer, with less error correction)

@aredridel @mhoye @foone on FreeBSD at least it works but you need to specify the correct block size of 2352 vs 2k for data

@aredridel @foone huh, this has been fascinating. Thank you both.