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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

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!)

so often have I downloaded "ISOs" (from Highly Legitimate Sources (says the retrogaming researcher/hacker)) and instead of an ISO file I have one of the 800 different disc image format that aren't actually ISOs

some consoles even have their own disc image formats!
Ever look into Wii games? It's madness over there.

There's a whole special toolset for converting between ISOs, WDF, WIA, CISO, GCZ, and WBFS.

anyway this has been annoying me for so long that 8 years ago I ported a version of Tetris to run off a ROM chip on an ISA card. Therefore I had a "ROM" of a PC game. I played it in an old 286 board with no drives attached, floppy, optical, or hard!

Mind you, the emulator I'm using right now (BizHawk) doesn't help matters. It has a File->Open ROM menu item that'll open everything from an NES game to a PS1 disc image to an Apple II floppy disk image.

@Canageek nothing comes on CDs anymore?

@MenhirMike Sure. It'd be more work but it's doable.

@martin_piper the PC BIOS has long had support for something called "Option ROMs".

Basically after it finishes POST but before it tries to boot, it checks for any cards with ROM at specific addresses, and if it finds some, it executes them.

it's used to do things like initialize SCSI cards or network cards, in case you need to boot off one of them.

Instead of booting anything, my option ROM just played Tetris.

@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

@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

@kastor whoops. that was a typo. I meant CD-Audio.

But yeah, it's red-book audio vs ISO-9660 files.

@NULLderef oh that was a typo, whoops. fixed