Virus

From Retro Arcade Guides

Detected virus on Pleasuredome torrents are false positives or genuine but harmless virus.


Checking

Submitting the file to https://www.virustotal.com/ helps verify if it really is infected with a virus. If most scanners detect nothing, it's probably a false positive.

"Force recheck" the torrent to detect if the file was modified after it was downloaded. Another possibility is using a ROM Manager. If a file was modified after it was downloaded, your computer must be infected.


Antivirus

It's recommended to always have one antivirus installed and updated.

Windows' built-in antivirus "Windows Defender" deletes files detected with virus automatically, which can do bittorrent clients download more than necessary. Folders can be added as exceptions.

qBittorrent can give I/O errors on qBittorent when antivirus software scan files while downloading.


Genuine Virus

Pleasuredome has mostly old software of many different systems supposed to be run on emulators. Most can't be run on current computers, but the few that are still runnable, are harmless if infected.

One example of genuine but harmless virus is below:


Example
In MAME Software List torrent, there is a 7 floppy disks software with the following description:
Windows Version 3.1 (German, infected with Parity_Boot.B virus)

There is a comment about it in ibm5170.xml (about a PC model released in 1984 and discontinued in 1987):

[...] all disks except disk 2 appear to be infected with the Parity_Boot.B boot sector virus, so at least some shipped infected from the factory [...]