If you want to play old retro games on your computer, Vimm’s Lair is one of the websites you may want to visit. The website has a good collection of retro games and games for old consoles, like Sega Dreamcast, Sega Saturn, Nintendo Game Boy, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, etc. If you want to play these old games on your PC, you can download them from the Vimm’s Lair website. But the question is, are these games safe to download? Is Vimm’s Lair safe, legal, and a good site? This is what we are going to discuss in this article.
Is Vimm’s Lair safe, legal and a good site?
As described above, Vimm’s Lair is a website or a platform from where you can download old retro games and play them on your PC. Because the retro games are compatible with different consoles, like Sega Dreamcast, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, etc., you should have dedicated emulators installed on your computer to play these games. Don’t worry, emulators of these consoles are also available on Vimm’s Lair website.
Before we start discussing the legitimacy of Vimm’s Lair website, let’s have a look at what this website offers. The website has the following 5 categories:
- Emulation Lair: As the name implies, this category contains some of the popular console emulators, like Nintendo, Genesis, Super Nintendo, Dreamcast, etc. You can download your favorite console emulator from here. Most of these emulators are available for Windows OS. But some of them are also available for other operating systems, including Android, iOS, and Linux.
- The Vault: If you want to download games, you have to come to this category. Here, you can select the console and then download the games for that console from the available list.
- The Manual Project: The Manual project category contains manuals of video games. You can view them online in your web browser or download them as PDFs.
- Message Board: This is the original Vimm’s Lair Message Board where the topics related to Vimm’s Lair or emulation are posted. You can also post your queries and request a game here.
- FFA Links: This is a Free For All Links page. You can browse the listings or add your own. If your link is inappropriate, it will be removed.
Read: The Ultimate Vimm’s Lair Download Guide
Is Vimm’s Lair safe or legal?
While downloading files from the internet, security is paramount. Downloading files from unsafe websites can possess a security threat to your system as they may contain malware. There are many ways through which you can check the legitimacy of a particular website.
The reviews posted by users on different forums about a particular website will let you know whether the website you want to visit is safe or not. We followed the same procedure to check the legitimacy of the Vimm’s Lair website. To check its legitimacy, we used the following websites or forums:
Web of trust (WOT) report
WOT is a community of millions of users worldwide. Users post their reviews on WOT about different websites. These reviews help other users know about the legitimacy of a particular website. You can check the legitimacy of the Vimm’s Lair website here. When we checked the legitimacy of Vimm’s Lair website, we found that it has a security score of 87% on WOT. Also, it scores 91% in Child Safety.
Read: How to check if a Website or URL is safe using Online URL Scanners
SCAMADVISER
SCAMADVISER is another popular website where you can check whether a particular website is safe or not. The Vimm’s Lair website has a 100/100 trust score on SCAMADVISER.
Read: Website URL Scanners & Link Checker addons
Trustpilot
The Vimm’s Lair website has a 4.0-star rating on Trustpilot. In addition to this, it also gained positive reviews from users on Trustpilot. You can read all reviews about Vimm’s Lair website posted by users on Trustpilot.
Read: Secure yourself, avoid online scams and know when to trust a website
VirusTotal
VirusTotal is a free service that scans websites and software for malware. If you think that a particular website can be malicious you can check it on VirusTotal. After scanning Vimm’s Lair website on VirusTotal, we found that it is clean. Also, users have posted positive reviews about the website under the Community tab on VirusTotal.
Read: Online URL Scanners to Scan websites for malware
The website also has many positive reviews on Reddit. Many users who visit and use the Vimm’s Lair website have posted their reviews on Reddit. This is what one of the Reddit users says about the Vimm’s Lair website:
Yep, and the majority of his roms are verified with either No-Intro or Redump (NES is verified with GoodNES). Do note that download speeds are somewhat slow as he tries to preserve as much bandwidth as possible.
This is what we found in the recent announcement (January 12, 2023) posted on the Home page of the Vimm’s Lair website:
Recently No-Intro has decided to remove pirate, aftermarket, and homebrew titles from their standard .dat files, so they will be removed from The Vault automatically in the coming days. This should make maintenance easier since these titles generally cause the most changes.
According to the above announcement, it is clear that most of the ROMs on Vimm’s Lair website are verified by No-Intro.
Talking about the legality of the Vimm’s Lair website, it has been operational since 1997. The website continuously scans its database and removes pirated ROMs from its database. However, no third-party website has the right to upload and distribute ROMs. Nintendo and other developers take copyright infringement very seriously but Vimm’s Lair is still up and running.
Vimm’s Lair has avoided being taken down by focusing on archiving older games that are no longer commercially available. This emphasis on preserving retro games has allowed the website to remain online for an extended period.
What sites are safe like Vimm’s Lair?
There are many websites like Vimm’s Lair. Some of these include CDRomance, KillerRoms, The ROM Depot, RomsEmulator, etc. To know whether these websites are safe or not, you can check their legitimacy on different spam-checking websites.
What happened to Vimm’s Lair?
Vimm’s Lair is a website that offers ROMs and emulators to users. It also has Message Boards where users can request games. Vimm’s Lair has been operational since 1997.
Read next: Is it legal to use the cheap Windows Keys available on the Internet?
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