Status of Blizzard Arcade Collection (Is it extractable?)

[retroguy42]

I was just wondering if the Blizzard Arcade Collection is extractable like the other Digital Eclipse collections. Has anybody tried it?

[retroguy42]

Actually, I just learned it is unnecessary. Blizzard has the simple versions of each game free already in their downloads section. Rock N Roll racing simply requires renaming ROCK.bin to a .sfc file to run in an SNES emulator. The other two are DOSBox games.

[retroguy42]

(Opening it just so others are more likely to see this if they want the games).

[einstein95]

One of the games on Blizzard's site uses a modified DOSbox to get past the copy protection iirc

[jerellsworth]

There are an number of substantial differences between the Arcade Collection release and the games that Blizzard gives away for free

• The free version of Rock n' Roll Racing is a demo. It does not have any of the music and only a few tracks. The Arcade Collection release has at least most (maybe all) of the songs
• Blizzard gives away the Dos versions of Lost Vikings and Blackthorne. The Arcade Collection has the SNES and Genesis versions (32x in the case of blackthorne)
• All games in the Arcade Collection have "Definitive Edition" variations:
  • Rock n Roll Racing plays the actual version of the licensed music instead of the generated console version. As far as I can tell this is injected by the emulator rather than somehow encoding mp3s in a rom, which would be some magic
  • the SNES version of Lost Vikings adds extra levels from the Genesis version
  • Blackthorn has an automap, which I think is also injected by the emulator

In general, there are interesting variations here that make the Arcade Collection worth considering, even though these games are, in some form, available for free from the publisher

[Retro64]

At least the Switch version is quite easy extract-able, as the ROMs are quite easy to find in romfs (even the DE versions and sorted per system)

[Retro64]

...and the updated version as well

[retroguy42]

The PC version just has a folder with the roms at . . .assets\roms. SNES versions just need to be renamed to the right extension. No extraction is needed.