Recalbox already ships with games! More than 160 free games, homebrews and demos are installed out of the box across about fifty systems: see the included games before looking elsewhere.
Recalbox ships with no games: building your collection is up to you, and doing it legally is up to you too. This page lists perfectly lawful sources — commercial compilations you can extract roms from, games given away by their rights holders, and homebrews freely published by their authors.
This list is indicative. Commercial offers and prices change: always check on the relevant store before buying.
- Atari Vault (Steam) bundles around a hundred Atari 2600 games, whose roms can be extracted from the installation folder: Steam page.
- Some games can be downloaded legally through the DaphneLoader tool shipped with the Windows distribution of Daphne.
- For the others (Dragon's Lair, Dragon's Lair II, Space Ace…), you must own a valid licence for the game — a retail DVD edition, for example.
See the Daphne guide for setting the files up.
- GOG.com sells many DRM-free MS-DOS games (Disney's Aladdin, The Lion King, The Jungle Book…). They run under DOSBox and therefore work in Recalbox: see the DOS guide.
- Several historical publishers have released their older titles as freeware or shareware: look for the "classics" or "legacy" pages on their official sites.
- The official ScummVM site offers a selection of freeware games for free download: scummvm.org/games.
- The remake Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap (Steam) ships with the original Master System rom: after installation, it sits in
bin_pc/rom/wb3.sms.
- SEGA Mega Drive & Genesis Classics (Steam) creates an
uncompressed roms folder on install. Just rename the files to .md or .bin for Recalbox to recognise them. The pack contains around sixty titles: Steam page.
- Developer Shiru freely publishes homebrews for Megadrive, NES and SNES on his website.
- GOG.com sells around twenty DRM-free Neo-Geo games: SNK titles on GOG.
- Humble Bundle has also distributed a DRM-free Neo-Geo compilation, available as a pack or per title.
- The Capcom compilations sold on Steam and Humble Bundle — The Disney Afternoon Collection, Mega Man Legacy Collection (first pack) — contain the original
.nes roms, extractable with the romextract utility.
- Shiru's homebrews, mentioned above.
- Mega Man X Legacy Collection (Steam, Humble Bundle) contains the original SNES roms, extractable with romextract — first pack only.
- Publisher Piko Interactive sells several SNES catalogue titles on Steam, shipped as an emulator bundled with the rom.
- Shiru's homebrews, mentioned above.
Many systems have an active homebrew scene whose creations are freely distributed by their authors. That is notably the case for the NES, the Megadrive, the Game Boy, the ZX Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC and every "fantasy" system shipped with Recalbox (Pico-8, TIC-80, Vircon32, WASM-4…), whose games are by nature created and shared by the community.
Know a legal source worth adding to this list? Come and suggest it on the Recalbox Discord.