When I was looking through the discussion of the re-released SNK classics (Samurai Shodown, King of Fighters, etc) I saw people complaining that those games are ROMs and released by a company some people don't like for alleged low quality.

My question is: In this instance, does ROM mean the same thing as the old ROMs for things like MAME? If I buy the SNK bundle, am I getting regular game executables, or am I getting the equivalent of ROMs you can download from some legally dubious site? If I buy the SNK classics from gog do I have to run these games through an emulator?

I'd prefer stand-alone games that don't rely on 3rd-party software prone to glitching out, especially since it's usually a pain to get controllers to work properly through emulators. Just trying to do my research before buying, any insight would be much appreciated.

Cheers

You are pretty much getting the exact same ROMs, packaged together with a poorly made emulator that is inferior to MAME.

EDIT: Just fyi, there is nothing wrong with emulating NEO GEO games per se, it is actually very accurate and is a solved technical problem. It's just that this particular emulator packaged with the games here isn't very good.

I don't think SNK has ported those games to PC, so they are probably ROMs. If the emulator is bad, I guess you find a better emulator and run the ROMs with it. I have not bought them so it's just my guess though.

Not probably, they are ROMs, the exact same ones dumped by the MAME community.

Do you need to extract them or something or are the roms just sitting in the install folder?

Can't speak for the release here, but the earlier Humble & Steam releases had the roms sitting out in the open.

I found out about this yesterday in ROM based GOG games compatible with third party emulators thread which listed many of the recently released SNK games.

In the middle of the first post it had a link to another thread saying how to extract and use the ROMs from those GOG games: Playing SNK releases in OpenEmu.