What with all the layoffs across the games industry to compensate for rampant budgetary overspending in publishing, the reality behind keeping retro games within a paid walled garden is about charging new money for old rope and controlling the market to force gamers to play new games.
The specific quote is that “there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes.”
This explains why people like Jim Ryan hate retro games. They think these older games would cannibalize sales from newer releases, which is uniquely stupid.
Any guidance for where to do such a thing? Seems like a lot of the retro stuff would be small enough to store locally without an issue, might as well grab it while it's possible
There's quite a few good places to download ROMs from:
Vimm's Lair have a lot of games, but downloads are slow.
The GitHub hosted page from r/roms megathread is great and have a lot of stuff with direct downloads, it is the most complete and has basically anything you might want.
Archive.org page of ROMs verified to work with RetroAchievements. (If you're lost and don't know how to access or download the ROMs, just click the show all button on the right. You'll probably need an account to download anything tho).
NoPayStation for PSP, PSVITA and PS3 games, updates and DLC. It downloads content directly from Sony's CDN.
WiiUDownloader for Wii U games, updates and DLC. It downloads content directly from Nintendo's CDN.
NXBrew for Switch games. I'm not a big fan of this one, but it's the best one I found. I just suggest you use uBlock Origin and ViolentMonkey with this script if you want to use this one.
I think that's basically it. I have been downloading a bunch of ROMs lately, so that's basically all I have gathered so far.
Now for storage, it only really becomes a problem with PS3, Xbox 360 and Switch games since there are a lot of really big games there. And the worst part if that you can't really compress these games right now, so, big storage is the only solution.
For other systems, you can usually compress .cue and .iso files into .chd files and most emulators will work with it. If you do a little research you'll find more about this.
Gamecube and Wii games can be compressed into .rvz files inside the Dolphin emulator.
And there's also DS and 3DS games where you can't compress, but you can trim the ROMs since it usually contain a lot of garbage data that is useless to running the game, just don't use it on ROM Hacks, because it might make them stop working.
There's also cdromance which in addition to just roms also has pre-patched roms with mods, hacks, fan translations, undubs, etc
torrents are a great way to grab entire catalogues of vintage games
I recently grabbed every NES/SNES/N64 game ever published in about two hours