​

Over several decades, romhacking and everything else related to it, like fan translation projects, mild graphical modifications to existing games and other significant changes, has been mostly centralized into the popular website of Romhacking.net (or RHDN as its also known), and while there are bound to be other hacking-related websites, most of them are franchise-centric instead of being a site for all kinds of consoles/games, with some examples of these being the famous SMW Central, MetroidConstruction, Zeldix, PokeCommunity and ProjectPokemon, to name a few.

For context, and as important side notes, it's worth mentioning that RHDN Staff has mentioned that they will no longer accept new submissions for Homebrew games, and while the Homebrew section will remain on site, only the existing homebrews will remain and they can only be updated by their author. Adding to this, RHDN seems to have been hit by scraping services, crippling the site resources and their bandwidth, which prompted a response by the staff to limit downloads at the moment, making downloading anything from the website unavailable currently until further notice. The scrapping was most likely done by people who wanted to download all of the available patches and homebrews, given the misunderstanding online that the Homebrew section would be removed, which has since been rectified by RHDN staff.

All of this, and other reasons, amounts up to possible factors and needs for several people to start the creation of a new romhacking website, and starting on 2023, this could change to give developers, players and avid romhacker enthusiasts alike another option.

A new website called Romhacks.org, which has been in development throughout the month of November of 2023, has opened to the public today, with the site opening hack submissions to the public on November 14th, 2023. Since then, the site has seen almost 50 new users being registered and around 40 romhacking projects (ranging from main hacks, translations, homebrews and tools) at the time of this writing, with the numbers growing steadily by the hour. The amount of projects and users registered almost doubled compared to Nov 14th, when it had around 20 users and 20 hacks uploaded compared to today, November 15th.

This new site aims to be a viable option for romhacking developers that seek to have their project readily available for fans to enjoy, and without some of the nuances that some people online have shared about other websites of the same vein, with one of the most prominent features of the site being that the uploads and entries are done without any kind of waiting time, as soon as the user creates the entry, it is available to the public instantly, instead of having to wait for an approval or queue of sorts.

Popular romhackers like "BillyTime! Games" (known for his SRAM hacks for 16-bit games) and "kandowontu" (known for his FastROM hacks of the SNES library) have started to upload their repertoire to this new romhacking website, with other romhackers following suit as well and mirroring all their projects into it for posterity's sake, and it's also a good way to have a second option where to download main hacks from in the dire case anything could happen to one of the other main websites. Some romhacks by yours truly have also been uplaoded to Romhacks.org, with the rest of following suit in the upcoming days.

​

While the website is still in early stages of development, only recently opening to the public just some hours ago, we can only expect more features to polish it up and more people to be aware of it to make it grow.

It's worth mentioning and bringing up front that all of the romhacking websites listed above, including Romhacks.org, are all managed under the same premise of ONLY offering the modifications made to the base games (these ones being new custom code/patches themselves) and NO ROMs are offered in any of them. If a user uploads a ROM, be it purposefully or by mistake, the entry is either rejected or taken down.

Romhacks.org Website
Romhacks.org Twitter account
Romhacks.org Discord server

 

[Noctosphere]

Yay! Ill be watchint it closely. Especially Pokemon roms hacks

 

[AmandaRose]

Competition is always good but I think I will stick for now with romhacking.net. That site is well laid out and I can easy find whatever rom hack I need.

 

[Scarlet]

I tend to stick to reading the specialised sites (mostly PokeCommunity nowadays) but hey ho, the more options the better.

Probably worth adding that hacks can be mirrored on our very own download centre too ;D

 

[Dumbfreak]

Competition is always good but I think I will stick for now with romhacking.net. That site is well laid out and I can easy find whatever rom hack I need.

Yes it's a very well managed site. Specially the admin and mod team. They really know what they are doing, no doubt.

 

[dudeguy2022]

This just convinced me to learn how to make romhacks

 

[ShadowOne333]

Yes it's a very well managed site. Specially the admin and mod team. They really know what they are doing, no doubt.

I mentioned this in the second paragraph of the article, but yeah the situation is really adding up on RHDN.
It hasn't been confirmed, but I wouldn't be surprised if the whole ordeal of situations going on with RHDN is what prompted the site devs to create Romhacks.org in its place.

 

[duwen]

Always great to have more options for material like this.

While the website is still in early stages of development, only recently opening to the public just some hours ago, we can only expect more features to polish it up and more people to be aware of it to make it grow.

Really? Hours ago? I grabbed some stuff from there at the weekend and I didn't need to register (still haven't, but will soon).

 

[NinStar]

I remember that I once tried to upload a translation for Mario Kart 8 to romhacking.net but it got rejected, the reason given was that Nintendo is still selling the game (despite it being a translation for the Wii U version), that was so weird and nonsensical to me because that could also be applied to games that used to be available on the Virtual Console at the time and are sitll available on the NSO to this day.

 

[VinsCool]

Always good to have alternatives.
I think what hurt RHDN the most is the fact they stretched the early 2000's internet mentality way past its prime, and decisions taken now are detrimental to themselves, otherwise no one would have bothered creating an alternative website in the first place.

 

[duwen]

I remember that I once tried to upload a translation for Mario Kart 8 to romhacking.net but it got rejected, the reason given was that Nintendo is still selling the game (despite it being a translation for the Wii U version), that was so weird and nonsensical to me because that could also be applied to games that used to be available on the Virtual Console at the time and are sitll available on the NSO to this day.

Well, technically they were still selling the Wii U version until the store closed earlier this year - might be a different story now.

 

[AmandaRose]

Yes it's a very well managed site. Specially the admin and mod team. They really know what they are doing, no doubt.

Did I say anything in my previous post about the admin/mod team? No I bloody didn't so what's your point?

What I did say is that it's easy to find any rom hack I am looking for unlike the new site which in my opinion isn't very well laid out.

 

[Kwyjor]

Eh. I'd bet that it will get quickly overrun by low-quality crap, or "edgy" political stuff, or brazen rip-offs of other people's work, or stuff that just plain doesn't work at all, assuming it doesn't get caught up in some actual legal unpleasantness. Moderation ain't easy.

Same story goes all over the Internet, really. Not sure if there's anything we can do about it. The good times are over, if they even started at all. It's like that recent line from the Omegle shutdown:

I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection.

 

[JuanMena]

Yeah, I'll be using this in the near future.

 

[Dawn_Chaos]

As a freedom-loving pervert, I will 1000% switch to this site as my go-to if they allow lewd mods. RHDN does not, and that bums me out, because hacks like Pokemon Girls Hunter really are kinda fun once in a while (or, would be if they weren't creepy with shitty gameplay and dialog).

"Hacks like" being the operative phrase - Pokemon Girls Hunter is rapey trash made by someone who knows little to nothing of the female orgasm. But because of prudish sites like RHDN, I just don't have an offhand example of an actually good NSFW romhack.

 

[wiiAdventurer]

@Brand Newman - you've probably seen this but fyi

 

[Xdqwerty]

what is a scraping service?

 

[Kwyjor]

what is a scraping service?

It's something that tries to download all the content from a website all at once. Of course things like archive.org also regularly download all the contents of various websites, but they do it gradually enough that it's not an issue.

I am somewhat surprised that scraping services can still cause problems these days; I thought they were more of a problem many years ago when bandwidth was much more expensive.

 

[SeventhSon7]

now make an alternate to nexusmods

 

[Xdqwerty]

now make an alternate to nexusmods

gamebanana exists