N. B. There are no games supplied with Project64! It is your responsibility to acquire games. The Project64 team cannot help you find commercial games, for legal reasons. Requests for ROMs are not welcome in official Project64 areas of the Internet.

To use a game in Project64, the ROM file of that game simply needs to be available locally on your system. This could be your hard drive (recommended) or a CD-ROM or other removable media (since removable media is generally slower, loading times will increase but performance of the emulation itself will not be affected). It is not recommended to try to load games across a network, because apart from the increased time taken, there are possibilities of corruption, although this has been found to work.

To view a ROM or collection of ROMs in the Project64 ROM browser, simply tell Project64 where your ROMs are by selecting the folder via the File menu or by right clicking in the Browser.

Points:

1. Make sure that your ROMs are either uncompressed or are compressed in standard Zip file format. No other file compression format is supported.
2. The ROM file must have a standard N64 ROM file extension, such as .z64, .v64, .rom or in the case of a compressed ROM, one of these extensions inside a .zip file.
3. The byte order of your ROMs is not important, Project64 can read all standard byte orders. Byte order makes no difference to emulation performance.
4. If you are using zipped ROMs, there must be only one ROM per zip file, so compress your files individually (there are tools available to do this).
5. If you want to arrange your ROMs in subfolders, you can choose the top level folder and enable the Directory Recursion option. Project64 will search through all the subfolders and list all the ROMs together for you.
6. You cannot add ROMs in seperate trees. For example, if you have some ROMS on one hard drive and some more on another drive, you will have to pick one or move them together.
7. There is no practical limit AFAIK to the number of ROMs you can have in your folder(s), except for the amount of storage space you have.
8. Having zipped ROMs does not effect the speed a game runs at, only the loading time (which may actually be faster, depending on your system).