Why I cannot download ROMs ?
Since I kept receiving e-mails about it everyday, I decided to write up a clear explanation, that I hope will answer most of the questions you may have. The text below was written by myself (Omar Cornut) as founder and main maintener of this site, and represent my personal opinion. It may or may not fits with opinion of other SMS Power members, but I believe they basically agree with it.
SMS Power is there and kept updated by fans, for fans. I'm myself a big Sega 8-bit fan, and dedicated a big part of my life to this since seven years already. Maintaining a site is time consuming, and unfortunately time is money. Collecting cartridges from every obscure part of the world, for comparing and dumping is also extremely time and money consuming. Yet, it is an hobby, so I can't complain. But every cases, the average visitor of this site is not entitled to complain if he can't get what he want. Be nice, be polite, etc.. :)
We dumped and released many ROMs in the past years, and are continuing to.
However, having new, yet unreleased, ROMs available on the site has caused massive rushes of emulation fans and crazy ROMs collecters. This is severely pumping bandwidth, and it is something we cannot afford. Money is better spend on buying cartridges to dump and items for a future museum, than to pay bandwidth for crazy downloaders. Therefore, files download from this site are restricted to users who helped by donating to SMS Power. The download link named (P) is the Private area dedicated to those registered users. If you are not registered and you do not want to register, for whatever legit reason, we are linking to other sites, which are meant to provide download locations of SMS Power recent releases. I am however NOT responsible of those sites, and they may down or not up to date sometimes, I can't do anything about it.
About two hundred people have access to our download area, and they are all freely able to share the files they download there. So generally the files are made available on many other sites, a few days/weeks after their initial release on SMS Power. It's up to you to hunt and find them (hint: read our forums, people are often posting links there), we simply don't have the time to help with each personal request and send ROMs by e-mail.
And, if really you are interested about Sega 8-bit stuff, I think it is fair to make a donation, and it is very helpful for the site to continue.
If you feel a mirror is unavailable or out to date, please e-mail me about it, so it'll be removed. On the other hand, anyone willing to setup a mirror is greatly welcome. Please e-mail me if you are serious about doing this work, and I'll add a link to your site. Oddly enough, I noticed that many people complaining about other mirrors being not up to date, didn't update their own once they started one. Even without our mirrors, if you give it a bit of time and the right tools, I'm sure you can find everything on the net.
Thank you for your understanding,
Omar
