While I was pre-loading games into my jailbroken 2DS, I kept happening across these corrupt ROM files. Super Castlevania IV, The Lost Vikings II, Donkey Kong Country, Paperboy, Tetris, just an inordinate amount of games that something was wrong with. Either it wouldn't load at all, sound elements would buzz or hang, or VRAM was randomised. As I was weeding through all this rubbish, I was realising more and more that all of these corrupt ROMs came from the No-Intro Collection. I brought it up with R and she's had the same problem with their ROMs.
Part of the problem is that No-Intro doesn't bother using any GoodTools cataloguing tags. Back in Y2K or thereabouts, an archivist called Cowering came up with a system of symbolic codes for game ROM cataloguing. If you knew how to read the symbols, you could tell important things about the ROM at a glance, such as how it was ripped, where it originated, whether it was stock condition or not, and whether it was very likely to boot up if loaded into an emulator. It was a common sight on ROM databases all the way up until the 2020s to see things listed like this:
Legend of Zelda, The (U) (GCN) [!]
This indicates the title, which in our example is The Legend of Zelda for NES; the region, which is North America ("U" stands for United States); the origin, which is a ripped ROM from the Wind Waker preorder bonus disc (if it were from Animal Crossing, it would say that rather than "GCN"); and that the ROM is verified. The [!] (exclamation point between square-brackets) is the ideal condition for ripped ROMs, since it is only applied to those files which are not only stock condition but are demonstrably functional on emulators, flashcarts, and jailbroken consoles. Another possible outcome looks like this:
Super Castlevania IV (U) (p) (b)
This code describes a North American copy of Super Castlevania IV which has been pirated (p) and dumped badly (b). While (p) is sort of broad and can mean anything, from a bit of commented-out code in the header that identifies who dumped it to a garbled or rewritten credits screen, that on its own means nothing. ROMs that carry the (b) marking, however, will most likely not run in an emulator and should not exist except in extraordinary circumstances. There might be a personal reason to keep a (b) ROM around, like it's a relic from dad's old website and he died but we want something to remember him by, there is no reason to include it in a game preservation archive like No-Intro. By discarding the GoodTools tags, No-Intro has removed any way to determine viability at a glance, requiring console unlockers to torturously either re-catalogue everything or attempt to start the ROM up and hope they hit the bad bit of code that made it a (b) in the first place.
In this way, No-Intro (and probably the Redump Hoard, by extension) seem more interested in completion than quality, which is not good for game preservation. I genuinely did encounter a pirated bad dump of Super Castlevania IV while populating the 2DS's game library. I also encountered bad dumps of several other high-profile games, such as The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap and Sonic & Knuckles. Even some relatively smaller-time games, like The Mask on SNES and Rayman 3 on GBA, had problems that would have been detectable if GoodTools codes had been employed. However, some archivist cut corners to make a complete datahoard and ended up folding numerous bad ROMs into it. I don't need to bring up the fact that this isn't good practise, do I? It's pretty obvious that, if the point of the collection is game preservation, and you're only preserving bad ROMs, you're not actually preserving anything. The point is to have a complete roster of all games ever released for a platform that can all load in an emulator. What happens when the very last Super NES breaks beyond repair? The Mask had a limited production run and wasn't held in high regard by players at the time, so cartridge copies of this game are Threatened to Endangered, so what happens when the Super NES console or The Mask game cartridge goes extinct in the wild? Fortunately, having watched a WoL video about that game and decided I wanted to give it a go, I downloaded it from a completely different database back in 2015; an old-style ROM site of long standing that I trusted so much I didn't even run their files through Kaspersky first. That site used GoodTools codes, so I could see there were 5 hacks, 1 bad dump, and 3 verified versions of The Mask available, and I downloaded the verified North American release version. So, if it comes down to it, at least 2 people I know of have useful ROM copies (me and Ravenlord).
Since there were about 6 people claiming to have No-Intro Collection datahoards on the Internet Archive until the latest content purge DMCA'd them all, I'm going to assume that I was simply the butt of some kind of elaborate joke, and the No-Intro project as a whole is not so tunnel-focussed on completion that they're willing to risk their integrity for it. I played the role of the n00b for science and I got trolled, we'll leave it at that.