I can’t tell if it’s more evil than genious or genious than evil.

When you’re white hat, but you feel a little silly sometimes

I remembered back in the day, there was a virus where a small cat appeared on the screen and chase your mouse cursor. If it caught your mouse cursor, the computer would crash. It did no other damage. It was great fun.

oh man. back in school we made a lot of dumb shit like this. friend got a box of 128mb usb sticks with erroneous branding and we put autorun ‘viruses’ that just spammed popups, opened the cd drive, played weird sounds, etc.

same day as we left them in various places in the school there was an announcement not to use “fake usb sticks” found in the building because they have viruses

looks in Task Manager

“What the hell is ‘suspicious.exe?’”

These days this should not be an issue for emulation, but unfortunately it is since the solution takes a small amount of education, and because there are no legal, official places to buy roms other than the rare packaged emulator re-release that some companies make.

I’d guess most people here already know how to verify a checksum, but the average computer user does not. It’s a skill that should be taught in schools.

But roms don’t have an official distribution channel, so to know that one is good, you have to rely on community projects like Redump and No-Intro. Compare your hashes to theirs, and you should be good. A tl;dr: just do a search of “myrient”, as that’s the most recommended place to get correct roms these days.

There are practical purposes beyond avoiding malware too. The RetroAchievements project makes it possible for people to earn achievements in emulators, but for it to work properly you need to use exactly the right versions of a rom that each game supports. RA relies heavily on RetroArch, and RetroArch uses it’s own method for hash verification, so here’s a guide for getting started with that.