What is a Complete ROM set?

NB: This is a quick note “note-to-self” style post to explain my thinking around complete ROM sets, in particular for the SNES. Perhaps it will be useful to others. I may post a longer how-to article later, as the process of acquiring, organizing, and validating a set of ROM files against archival databases is not well-documented.

There are almost always several versions of any given video game. In the pre-cloud era, versioning required changes to the production process and was limited to regional releases, serious bug fixes, and special editions of games. Collectors, archivists, and preservation groups such as No-Intro discover, acquire, and document these cartridges, then dump the raw binary data to a ROM file that you can use with an emulator or, in my case, copy back onto a flash cart to play on the console.

So, by that logic, the SNES has about 4,000 unique ROMs attested. The most common version differences are language/region, but there are also a lot of historically interesting oddities. For instance, “ActRaiser (USA) (Arcade).zip” is the version of ActRaiser contestants played on the show Nick Arcade. It omits the citybuilding elements and includes only the platforming stages (ActRaiser is a great early example of a successful unconventional genre combo, with a Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack that set a high bar for the then-new SNES).

Anyway… I now know for certain that I have the ROM files for all but 85 SNES cartridges known to exist. The ones thatt are missing are e.g. hardware testing tools, obscure unlicensed games, versions that are known to exist but for which no ROM file exists yet.

So, the next step is to create a one game, one ROM (1G1R) set for actually playing. I want to keep all those interesting variants, and also keep Japanese copies of games.