How to extract legal ROMs from Intellivision Lives

Intellivision Lives italian cover

Last flea-market I went was cold, there weren't many sellers and most of the interesting things were overpriced. Just when I lost all hope of finding something interesting I spotted a few games in a bin: one of these was the Intellivision Lives package for PS2. It's basically nothing more than an emulator bundled with around 70 Intellivision games.
So... What if You're not interested in playing these games on your Playstation 2 but want to try them on a different emulator?
Keep reading if You want to know more.


The game rom  dumps are all packed into a single file named gameroms.rez, without any compression applied (which was to be expected: what would be the reason to compress games which reach a maximum of 48kb in size? :P).
The rez file has a footer at the bottom (beginning at offset 0x14E800) which lists every file included and the relative size (with an entry of 0x6C bytes for every game): sufficient information to split all the games back to separate files (in ITV format).

Thunder Castle, extracted from Intellivision Lives

Why going through all this trouble instead of simply downloading the games off the net? First of all downloading them might not be legal (or it's a grey area at best) even if You own the games, also I wanted to have some hex-viewing fun!

Here is my quick & dirty solution in C to split all the roms: GitLab repo
It builds fine with gcc 4.6.1 on a 64bit machine and it's tested on the italian PS2 version of Intellivision Lives... I bet it works on other versions too.
Once you build it (gcc sources.c -o binary), it simply takes the path of gameroms.rez and extracts the game in the current directory.

Have fun!

POST SCRIPTUM: I just checked the Wikipedia page about the Intellivision Lives! compilation. There is a list of all the available games in there, but some titles are listed as not available on Xbox or PS2 versions. Actually while most of the "missing" titles are really not present in the compilation, a few ones still have the rom image available (King of the Mountain or Land Battle for example) so You can play them once the data is extracted.