Best Site for Roms 2023 | Tested & Safe!

If you’re looking for the best site for roms, you’ve found the right article! In recent years, we’ve seen a lot of the popular roms games sites disappear. A big reason for this is Nintendo issuing cease and desists and pursuing legal action against many of them. Nintendo has even sued multiple ROM sites and has won multiple different times now.

Some of the largest Rom sites that Nintendo has gone after are RomUniverse (which was selling premium access to pirated Nintendo ROMs), LoveRetro (no longer up), and LoveRoms (no longer in existence). We should mention that the list of now defunct ROM websites is much larger than just the three we shared, but you get the picture here. Hosting ROM sites these days is risky business with the Nintendo ninjas in full swing.

So we’ve lost some of the best safe rom sites, but which ones are still left? Do they have a large selection of games? Am I able to browse them and download roms safely? Unfortunately many ROM sites has garnered a reputation for malware and shady practices so we want to remind you to please be careful when browsing and downloading from any ROM sites online.

We’ve compiled a list of the top rom websites that we believe are free and safe, but always do your own research and make sure you trust the sites you use when downloading anything. We also should mention that this article is intended to serve for education purposes only and we do not condone illegally downloading roms for games that you do not actually own.

Before you consider downloading anything, be sure to look into the laws and legality for where you live.

What Is The Best Site For Roms 2023?

1. Vimm’s Lair

Vimm’s Lair is an OG video game ROM website that’s been around for years now. People have been using Vimm’s Lair to download game roms easily since 1997. Vimms is #1 on our list for downloading roms and emulators and feels like one of the few safe rom sites available. While the site’s UI looks like something out of the late 90s/early 2000s, it serves its purpose well.

Vimm’s Lair is broken up into different sections:

• The Emulation Lair – this is where you can browse and download popular emulators to play your Roms
• The Vault – here you can browse and download game ROMs categorized by console
• Manual Project – a collection of video game manuals

There is a wide variety of ROM games available for download. Vimm’s Lair has ROMs for the following consoles:

Nintendo Roms and Emulators

• NES (3,271/3,278 games)
• Game Boy (1,873/1,873 games)
• Game Boy Color (1,860/1,860 games)
• Game Boy Advance (3,349/3,349 games)
• Super Nintendo (3,915/3,915 games)
• Virtual Boy (31/31 games)
• N64 emulator (1,063/1,063 games)
• Nintendo DS (7,367/7370 games)
• GameCube (1,966/1,970 games)
• Wii (3,770/3,770 games)
• Wiiware (3,279/3,279 games)

Sega

• Master System (649/649 games)
• Sega Genesis (2,540/2,540 games)
• Saturn (2,358/2,358 games)
• Dreamcast (1,456/1,458 games)

Playstation

• PS1 (10,688/10,708 games)
• PS2 (10,268/11,113 games)
• PS3 (1,465/4,310 games)
• PSP (2,678/2,704 games)

Xbox

• Xbox (2,524/2,582 games)
• Xbox 360 (3,181/3,196 games)

You’ll notice that the Wii u, 3DS, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and the Xbox One X are not listed. That’s because Vimm’s Lair has a strict rule that they will not list ROMs and emulators for consoles that are currently in production or were in production within the last 2 console generations.

Honestly, I can respect this decision and while some say this comes from a moral standpoint, I can’t help but also think that this is likely in part why Vimm’s Lair has managed to stay online for over 25 years now somehow dodging Nintendo’s lawyers.

Vimm’s Lair also has a neat little internal project where they’re compiling a catalog of classic video games manuals. Over the years they’ve amassed a large amount!

2. Emuparadise

Another OG of the rom sites is Emuparadise. This site has been around just about as long as I can remember – for over 20 years at this point. They have compiled everything from ROMs and ISOs, video game music, gaming magazines, game guide scans, gaming related books, gaming movies and documentaries, and gaming tv shows.

Emuparadise goes beyond being just a simple website that hosts roms, but is a genuine video game resource. Like many other rom sites on this list, they also have an entire emulator zone to browse and download what you need.

Aside from Vimm’s Lair, Emuparadise would be my second choice for sites to download roms. They’ve been around for ages and are an established well known site used by many. Their passion for backing up and archiving everything video game related really shows.

They’ve also got a community section with a chat and forum where you can reach out to other users. A nice welcome touch that we haven’t seen on any of the other sites so far.

3. Rom Hustler

Rom Hustler isn’t exactly the prettiest site on this list, but it is easy to navigate and find the emulators and games that you’re searching for. While browsing the site, I noticed something interesting. I wasn’t served a single ad the entire time. While inspecting the site I also didn’t notice any ad code in particular.

This alone makes Rom Hustler immediately move up the list for me in terms of usability and a safe rom site user experience. I can’t tell you how annoying some ROM sites can be with the intrusive ads they plaster all over every single page.

That being said, Rom Hustler has a solid collection of ROMs and emulators available on their site. They’ve got all the classic consoles you’d expect but similar to Vimm’s Lair, they seem to not list any emulator games for the current gen system or the system directly before it. They don’t have any Nintendo Switch emulators or Wii U games listed on their site and the most recent Nintendo console games available are for the Wii and for 3DS emulation.

You can easily search each console games section to find the exact roms you’re looking for. The site loads quickly and it’s simple enough to navigate. Rom Hustler is a basic site at its core that fulfills one purpose only – to help you find the classic games and emulators you need and be on your way.

4. RomsMania

Unlike Vimm’s Lair, RomsMania contains plenty of roms for consoles that are currently in production. They have an entire section dedicated to downloading roms for the Nintendo Switch. The UI of the website is definitely nicer than Vimm’s Lair, but in some ways RomsMania is lacking as well.

For one, there is no easy well to tell exactly how many games the site has total for each console. For those looking just for specific titles this isn’t too big of a deal because you can simply search for the games you’re looking to download, however for players looking to download complete rom collections for consoles, this can be a bit of a deal breaker.

RomsMania loads quickly and the rom file download speeds are nice. They have a solid selection and while they don’t have every single rom available, they do have plenty of free roms. The ads are a bit annoying and pop up on every single page you visit, but that’s something that a simple ad blocker extension can fix on your PC.

5. RomsPedia

Hands down the best designed Rom site on this list, RomsPedia feels less like a shady rom site and more like a quality database of video games. That being said, while trying to browse the site a bit to gather some more research for this article, it kept timing out and was failing to load. Not the best user experience having to wait over a minute to load a single page, especially considering you’ll need to be browsing multiple pages to find the free roms you need.

RomsPedia has a lot of roms available, but not for every console. At the time of writing this article, they were missing the Nintendo Switch, PS5, and the Xbox One X, but they did have roms for the PS4. It seems like they don’t include ROMs for current gen systems.

The site shows the total number of downloads for each rom and uses this to display popular games on their homepage. A cool feature for potentially finding new games to play that you may have otherwise overlooked.

Nicely designed or not, a rom site needs to load quickly in order to serve its purpose. While this could have just been a temporary outage, it caused us to put this one a bit lower down on our list. Still worth checking out due to their extensive list of games and intuitive UI.

6. RomsDL

Another well designed of the ROM sites to download roms and emulators is RomsDL. They’ve got tons of consoles available including some even more obscure ones like the Capcom Play System, the 3DO, Atari ST, and the Neo Geo Pocket. Along with those they also have the classic consoles and games that you would expect.

Their website is broken up into two separate sections:

• The ROM collection
• The Emulator collection
• The Rom Hacks collection

You can tell that a lot of care went into creating this site and that the folks behind it genuinely wanted to create a solid destination for finding and playing classic games. RomsDL also doesn’t seem to list roms or emulators for the Nintendo Switch, PS5, or Xbox One X.

7. Reddit /r/Roms Megathread

Reddit has an entire subreddit community with ~250k members. This subreddit has their own “megathread” which you can use to browse and download game roms from. This megathread is the top stickied post on the subreddit.

Once on the /r/Roms megathread, you can use the top menu to navigate to the different sections. Along with popular games, you can also browse by video game category (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc). Retro games, Arcade games, and BIOS files can be found on the dedicated Retro Games page.

The Internet Archive restricts items that get a high amount of traffic from being downloadable without being logged into an account. They do this to prevent spam/abuse of the tool. Locked files will show a lock icon beside their file name in the list.

If you try to download a file which is locked, you’ll be shown an “Item not available” error, but really you’ll just need to register an account on archive.org and log in to access the free roms files. This megathread contains a large number of games and while the layout isn’t exactly the most user friendly or intuitive, it serves it purpose just fine

It’s nice to have these backed up by the community and we have to give a major shoutout to the folks over at /r/Roms for all the work they put in to make this happen.

What Are The Best Safe Rom Sites To Download Roms?

Vimms Lair and Emuparadise have been around for 20+ years. Both ROM websites have been supplying the internet with game roms, emulators, and all sorts of additional video game archives to ensure that video game nostalgia is backed up and freely accessible for all.

While video game emulation and roms are a bit of a grey area, backing up video game history is important. It’s because of members of the gaming community that we are still able to access and play certain games today that otherwise might have been lost to time.

Is Downloading ROMs safe?

The answer is that it depends. Some ROM sites can be quite sketchy and there have been many reports of certain sites installing malware and viruses on user devices when they download certain files. You should always be careful of content you choose to download and only browse trusted reputable sites.