What Will RetroTorrents Become?

A community-powered "forever library" for retro video games and emulators. At its core, RetroTorrents will become a curated public collection of video game content such as ROMs, BIOSes and soundtracks (typically 21 years or older) that are freely available for everyone to download and play, ensuring video game history is preserved permanently.

Think of it as the next evolution of ROM sites, but with one crucial difference: No single point of failure, and the database can be distributed. RetroTorrents uses the BitTorrent file sharing protocol. This means the people who willingly use and preserve it can host the "library".

The Enemies of Preservation

• The "License" Chains Trap: Modern digital storefronts do sell games, but that service will eventually stop. When services close, history becomes harder to acquire.
• Physical Media & Hardware Decay: Disc rot, scratches, capacitor leaks, and dead save batteries could make the original hardware useless.
• Inferior Official Ports: Music is removed due to licensing, content is censored, or emulation is bad. RetroTorrents seeks to preserve the unaltered experience.
• The Centralized Bottleneck: Traditional ROM sites are expensive to run and create a single point of failure. A community with infinite backups is the final stand.

Operation R.E.T.R.I.S.

Stands for Rescuing Electronic Treasures & Restoring Immersive Stories. This serves as a call to adventure for everyone who believes in the cause and wants to join the movement.

File Formats & Compression

RetroTorrents utilizes reversible and lossless compression (like ZIP for cartridges, CHD for optical discs, and RVZ for GameCube/Wii). This saves hard drive space and bandwidth, enabling our swarms to preserve more video game history efficiently. The "1G1R" (One Game, One ROM) standard guarantees players receive the most accurate versions of a game without downloading duplicate copies.