Recalbox ships with a selection of free games, homebrews, demos and open source software: 166 titles spread across 50 systems. They are installed on first boot into /recalbox/share/roms/, which lets you try a good share of the emulated systems straight away, without providing a single rom.
These games are distributed legally: they are original creations from the homebrew scene, games released under a free license by their authors, or demo versions cleared for redistribution. Each game folder ships with its author's readme and license — please keep them.
These games are only copied on the first boot, into an empty roms folder. If you delete them they will not come back on their own: you have to restore the files from a Recalbox image or from the project repository.
Some systems that ship with games only appear in the menu when their roms folder holds at least one game. Deleting the included games of a system may therefore make that system disappear from the interface.
/recalbox/share/roms/<system>/
The folder is named after the short system name (nes, megadrive, c64…). The artwork and descriptions shipped with these games are already filled in the system gamelist.xml: no need to scrape them.
| System | Games | Titles |
|---|---|---|
| 2048 | 1 | 2048 |
| Amiga ECS/OCS | 2 | Flower (Europe), Flower - For The Love Of The World Enchanted Road |
| Amstrad CPC | 4 | Joe Contre Les Pharaons, Relentless, The Dawn of Kernel, Uwol 2 |
| Amstrad GX4000 | 1 | Baba's Palace |
| Apple II | 3 | Hi-Res Adventure 1 - Mystery House, Lamb Chop Source, Retro Fever |
| Apple IIGS | 2 | Cogito, The Tinies |
| Atari 2600 | 4 | Anguna 2600, Cave In, Halo 2600, The End 2600 |
| Atari 5200 | 1 | Beef Drop |
| Atari 7800 | 3 | B*nq, DungeonStalker, Meteor Shower |
| Atari 8 bits | 3 | Crownland, Ridiculous Reality, Time Pilot |
| Cave Story | 1 | Cave Story |
| ColecoVision | 1 | MazezaM Challenge |
| Commodore 64 | 10 | Adventure Park, Adventures in Time, Digiloi, Rescuing Orc, Trance Sector Ultimate, Vortex Crystals, Wolfling, X-Force, Xplode Man, Zap Fight 2 |
| Dinothawr | 1 | Dinothawr |
| Doom | 2 | DOOM, Sigil |
| Game Boy | 4 | Into the Blue, Pong Boy, Retroid, Tuff |
| Game Boy Advance | 9 | Anguna - Warriors Of Virtue, Gemini, Lindsi Luna Blast, Space Twins, Uranus, Uranus Zero, Uranus Zero Ev, Uranus2, Waimanu - Grinding Blocks Adventure |
| Game Boy Color | 3 | Inspector Waffles Early Days (demo), Mohkey, WingWarriors |
| Gong | 1 | Pong |
| Lynx | 2 | SiIas Adventure, Super Nutmeg |
| MAME | 4 | Gridlee, Looping, Super Tank, The Adventures of Robby Roto! |
| Mattel Intellivision | 3 | Deep Zone, Hotel Bunny, Princess Lydie |
| Minecraft | 1 | Minecraft |
| Mr. Boom | 1 | Bomberman |
| MSX1 | 5 | Night Knight, Wingwarriors, XRacing, XSpelunker, Yazzie |
| MSX2 | 2 | Los Amores de Brunilda, The Sword of Ianna |
| Neo-Geo AES | 1 | GladMort (Demo) |
| Nintendo Entertainment System | 24 | 2048, Basse Def Adventures (Demo), Blade Buster, Böbl (Demo), Chase, Cheril Perils Classic, Driar, Kubo 3, Lan Master, Lawn Mower, Lizard (Demo), Micro Mages (Demo), Nebs 'n Debs (Demo), Nova The Squirrel, Project Blue (Demo), Sir Ababol, Streemerz (English), Streemerz (Français), Super Bat Puncher (Demo), Tiger Jenny, Twin Dragons (Demo), Underground Adventure, ZDEY The Game, Zooming Secretary |
| Oric / Atmos | 2 | Oricium, Pulsoids |
| PC Engine | 2 | Reflectron, Santatlantean |
| Philips P2000T | 1 | Basic Programs |
| Philips VG 5000 | 1 | Mabool |
| Pokémon Mini | 3 | Cortex, Galactix, Psychic Seeds |
| Prince of Persia | 1 | Prince of Persia |
| Quake | 1 | Quake |
| Rick Dangerous | 1 | Rick Dangerous |
| ScummVM | 8 | Beneath a Steel Sky (English), Flight of the Amazon Queen (English), Flight of the Amazon Queen (Français), Lure Of The Temptress (English), Lure Of The Temptress (Español), Lure Of The Temptress (Français), Soltys (English), Soltys (Español) |
| Sega Game Gear | 1 | WingWarriors |
| Sega Master System / Mark III | 7 | Astro Force, Digger Chan, Galactic Revenge, Papi Commando in Ceplusplus Land, Pong Master 4k, Silver Valley, WingWarriors |
| Sega Mega Drive | 11 | Astebros (Demo), Bomb on Basic City : Special Edition, Bug Hunt, Demons Of Asteborg (Demo), Gluf, Griel's Quest for the Holy Porron, L'Abbaye des Morts, Misplaced, Old Towers, Papi Commando, Yazzie |
| Sega SG-1000 | 1 | Cheril Perils Classic |
| Solarus | 1 | Yarntown |
| Super Nintendo Entertainment System | 1 | Uwol Quest for Money |
| The Powder Toy | 1 | The Powder Toy |
| Thomson MO/TO | 1 | Mission: Liftoff |
| TIC-80 | 5 | 8 Bit Panda, Cauliflower Power, Secret Agents, Shadow Over The Twelve Lands, Todor |
| Vectrex | 5 | Armor Attack, Mine Storm, Scramble Wars, Thrust, VecZ |
| WASM-4 | 5 | Antcopter, HAMMER JOE, Lake Shooter, Seal Adventure, Skip Ahead |
| Wolfenstein 3D | 3 | CATALOG, ecwolf, Wolfenstein 3D |
| ZX Spectrum | 5 | Cray 5, Genesis - Dawn of a New Day, Gommy Defensor Medieval, Los Amores de Brunilda, The Sword of Ianna |
Six systems show up in the ports list with artwork and a game entry, yet the game itself is not provided: Recalbox only ships the free engine, and you have to bring the original game data. Until those files are in place the entry is visible but will not start.
| Port | What Recalbox ships | What you must provide |
|---|---|---|
| Caesar III | the Julius / Augustus engine | the contents of an original Caesar III install, in ports/Caesar3/c3.exe/ |
| Doom 3 | the dhewm3 engine | the retail game files, including game/doom3.pk4 |
| Quake 3 | the vitaQuake 3 engine | the Quake III Arena .pk3 files — or the demo, through DOWNLOAD GAMES |
| Star Trek: Voyager — Elite Force | the engine, an id Tech 3 derivative | the original baseEF/*.pak files |
| Theme Hospital | the CorsixTH engine and its assets | the files of an original Theme Hospital install |
| Tomb Raider | the OpenLara engine | the original game data |
Quake 3 does not ship with the game. Unlike Quake and Quake II, whose shareware release is included, the Quake 3 roms folder starts out empty. Open the system menu and pick DOWNLOAD GAMES: Recalbox fetches the official demo, extracts it and refreshes the game list. A network connection is required.
That DOWNLOAD GAMES entry only exists on systems with a built-in downloader. In 10.1 those are Quake 3, Theme Hospital, Tomb Raider, VVVVVV, TIC-80, WASM-4, Vectrex and Uzebox.
Recalbox also ships Artemio Urbina's 240p Test Suite, in a dedicated virtual system. It is not a game but a set of test patterns used to tune a CRT screen or an upscaler: twelve versions are provided (NES, SNES NTSC and PAL, Mega Drive/Genesis, Mega-CD JP/US/EU, PC Engine HuCard, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, PlayStation and Dreamcast) so that each system can be tested on its own emulation hardware. It is not counted in the 166 games above.
Just drop your files into the roms folder of the relevant system, then run a game list update from the menu. The accepted extensions are listed on each system page.