1G1R

ROMSearch operates on a “one game, one ROM” (1G1R) philosophy. This means that for each game, it will find the ROM file that it believes to be the best. The approach ROMSearch takes depends mostly on regions, languages, versioning, and optional name priority, with regions being the ultimate discriminator.

Languages

Many ROMs are tagged with languages (En, Es, etc), that will be parsed out during the run. If a ROM does not contain the language the user has specified (most likely En), then this will be removed from the choice.

A lot of ROMs do not have any language tags (particularly US ones). For these, we currently do not cut them out, but this may change in the future to associate a region with an implicit language.

Versions

There may be different versions of ROMs (e.g. Rev 1, v2.0, etc). For these, we will take the latest one per unique region combination as the latest and greatest version.

Priority

Some files are essentially stripped down versions of games and so should be de-prioritised versus others. To get a priority, we use the retool clonelists.

Regions

After the various cuts, there will still be a number ROMs that pass all check. We therefore do a final filter by region (e.g. USA, Europe) to get to a final ROM. ROMSearch will choose the ROM with the highest region preference for each game, so order is important here!

Others

There are some other cuts that go into deciding the best ROM. These include:

• Improved version tags (e.g. “EDC” for PS1 games)

• Removing of demos/preproduction ROMs

The final result is that you should get the single best ROM for your preferences. Hooray!