Preserving the classics since 1997
Welcome to Vimm's Lair! This site is dedicated to console videogame nostalgia. Inside you'll find thousands of games, full-color manual scans, user ratings and reviews, and much more! Whether you're looking to relive an old classic or discover a forgotten gem, Vimm's Lair has everything you need to scratch your nostalgia itch.
| Emulation Lair | The newest and greatest console emulators. |
| The Vault | Every game in the world for thirty-four classic systems. |
| The Manual Project | Thousands of full-color manuals. Add your own instantly! |
| ROM Hacking | Creative game mods of all kinds. |
| Message Boards | Got a question or comment? Come on in. |
| FFA Links | Browse the free for all links or add your own. |
| Last week a performance glitch that's plagued the database for months was finally fixed. Now pages load in a snap! Since then a server has crashed pretty much every day, but why? It seems that sluggishness kept the bots at bay, so now they're pounding the servers and straining resources. Then when peak traffic hits it thrashes and crashes.
Web scrapers are a growing problem across the internet. AI crawlers are devouring every scrap of information to power their data models. Vibe coders are building scrapers with AI and parading them on Reddit, oblivious to what they do. The time has come to start rate limiting. Basic limits have been placed on popular pages and are working well, yet servers are still crashing. Those limits will now be tightened and expanded site-wide. The average visitor should never be blocked but it will take time to perfect. Frankly this time would be better spent building new content and features, yet features don't matter if the site's down. Speaking of features, the PlayStation Vault now bundles .sbi files in its downloads. Certain European titles use a copy protection library called LibCrypt that requires this SBI data to run properly. The Xbox Vault is still churning out fresh .xiso files and is roughly 60% done. Over in the Wii U Vault, metadata is being cataloged for each title (players, year, & publisher) and is roughly 50% complete. |
| Now introducing the Wii U Vault! Launched in November 2012, the Wii U had a short lifespan and was discontinued in January 2017 with the Wii U eShop closing in March 2023. The Wii U Vault is currently 85% complete and should be finished in the coming weeks.
Recently the Redump project decided to stop cataloging disc keys which various tools need to decrypt discs for consoles like the PlayStation 3 and Wii U. Now people need a new place to find them, so The Vault will build the Redump keys zip with each nightly scan. They are now available in the PlayStation 3 and Wii U Vaults. Key submissions are verified using the encrypted ISO, ensuring all new keys are valid. The Xbox Vault has switched back to extract-xiso generated xiso files. Turns out many xiso files need an xbe patch to function which xdvdfs-cli can't do. Extract-xiso can, and each xiso is being rebuilt with the latest version for good measure. Redump has stopped providing .gdi files for Dreamcast discs so the Dreamcast Vault no longer includes them. |
| Last month some long planned hardware upgrades were completed. Everything's faster now though the database still gets sluggish during peak hours, so more work's needed there. More storage was also planned but the astronomical prices of SSDs have put that on hold. There's empty bays waiting for their return. Over in the Xbox Vault all xiso files have been rebuilt using the xdvdfs library. This should fix errors in many games that extract-xiso couldn't process correctly. |