Re: Apple II ROMs???

[CUTjefbla@bconnex.net (Jeff Blakeney)]

On 6 Dec 1998 19:48:57 GMT, labelas@hotmail.com (Labelas Enoreth)
wrote:

>Man, I really hate to jump in with this and sound presumptuous, but I
>really hate how everything for an emulator is a 'ROM' nowadays. Is it that
>hard to make a connection between 'disk' and 'disk image'? I could
>understand if the Apple II had even one cartridge-based game for it, like,
>say the C64, but still. People just throw the term 'ROMs' around way too
>gratuitously and way too often when pertaining to an emulation or any kind
>of cross-platform transfer (well, ok, really it's only for emulations).
>And then, to top it off, you get sites going on and on, lumping these
>'ROMs' into a piracy category...<sigh> I guess it's just a meaningless
>rant of mine...

Especially when you take into account that the term ROM is an acronym
for Read Only Memory and "disk images" are readable and writeable.  It
would be more appropriate to call "disk images" RAMs (Random Access
Memories) than to call them ROMs.  :-)

But you are correct that a lot of the console system emulators are
using the word ROM to describe the programs and it is a little more
accurate in that case.  Some cartridges also had RAM on them so the
term ROM is a little too general for those particular programs.

For Apple II emulators, the word ROM should only be used in reference
to the copies of the actual ROM code and disk image should be used to
describe the programs.

But I'm not going to worry about it too much.  It kind of bugged me at
first but I find it way easier to use my real Apple IIs than to use
emulators so I know I'll always be using the correct terms to refer to
things.  :-)

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