Adding ROMs to your arcade

We suggest using our Retro Reload search tool to add ROMs to your arcade. This is available directly in the Dream Arcades menu through the "Add New Games" menu option, or "Install New Games" on some older arcades.

After reaching the Retro Reload search, use the trackball to move the mouse cursor to the search bar and left click inside it with the black button to the upper left of it. You can then type the name of a game and press Enter or click on the "Find Games" button. If your keyboard is not readily available, you can instead click on the keyboard displayed to the far right of the search bar for an on screen keyboard to use with the trackball.

After locating a game to download, click on its name and then click again to confirm the search. Finally, click on the text directly to the right of the large orange arrow on screen to begin the download. Sometimes this arrow and the link need a few seconds to load after the page loads. Your arcade will automatically return to the main search page when the download starts. In the bottom right corner a black box saying 'Downloading Files....' will confirm your download, then disappear after a few seconds. After you are done downloading games click on the Close button in the upper right.

While most retro games are very small by modern standards, some games are rather large and may take a while to download. If your arcade is still downloading a game when you return to the Dream Arcades menu then a small notification will be in the bottom right saying that a download is still in progress. The game will not be available for play until the download has finished.

If you'd like to install ROMs you have already downloaded, or download ROMs from another site it is possible to do so. Our menu does not support mass filtering of games that have been added, so we suggest that you do not add too many at once as this can clutter the menu. Snapshots may also be missing for games added without using the Retro Reload search.

To manually install MAME ROMs, place them into the corresponding system sub-folder in the ROMs folder on any of the drives installed in the computer. We highly suggest using the hard drive with the largest capacity. After copying the game files over, the Dream Arcades menu will automatically detect the game(s) and add them to the list.

If you would like to add Snapshots for manually added ROMs they must be named exactly as the matching ROM with ".gif ", ' .jpg ", or " .png " extention. Place them in the 'snaps' folder on same drive as your ROMs. Example - dkong.zip (Donkey Kong's rom) and dkong.gif (Donkey Kong's snapshot)