​

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

 

[Daggot]

Good! I'll be using this from now on.

 

[Brand Newman]

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

Thanks! I had heard about this website recently, and might upload my existing translation patches (as well as the incoming one) there, especially if the authorized size is bigger.
I hope they'll make it possible for people to leave reviews, although I guess that'd probably need some moderation.

 

[chrisfand]

Interesting, just found the Discord icon on the website works (Twitter link did not) and found out Spike is the owner.

Found the rules, it was only on the Discord as of right now:

 

[BaamAlex]

I can smell Nintendo's lawyers there...

 

[duwen]

Interesting, just found the Discord icon on the website works (Twitter link did not) and found out Spike is the owner.

Found the rules, it was only on the Discord as of right now:

You may need to edit that first screengrab to remove/censor the name of Spike's site... it's against the gbatemp rules to provide details of wares/rom sites

 

[Jayro]

I wanna know why that shit-hole doesn't have all the downloads mirrored off-site. It's like they're retarded or something. 1 MEGA account could handle all of the bandwidth.

 

[romhacks_org]

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.

Hi, please send it. That kind of things is why the site was made.

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:

That stuff will be removed as is against the rules of the site. The site started allowing uploads due to RHDN disabling theirs, otherwise is not ready so many things are missing.

While the site design feels generic, it's always cool to see another rom hacking site be made!

Thanks! it will definitely change, very little time was dedicated to design, functionality was the focus.

- Default layout that I dislike
- No imprint or at least about us and contact form
- No source / open development of the site (fun fact: vndb gave me the idea)
- big Discord logo in the upper right edge and mentioning Elon's playground as contact way — both proprietary walled gardens.
- Google Fonts and Google Apis as it seems like (where is my GDPR consent banner?)
- Site apparently hosted at Cloudflare (boo)

I think I won't use the new site. Most of that is similar for romhacking.net (and some for gbatemp), but I expect new sites to try better at things I care about nowadays.

(Btw. small funny thing without really trying to imply something: I get a response from 188.114.96.3 when pinging romhacks.org and from 188.114.97.3 when pinging romhacking.org)

Cloudflare is not a hosting it's a reverse proxy. It is used to protect the site from attacks like DDOS.
Having the same IP is not rare, it only means you are connecting to the closer CF node to you.
GBATemp is using cloudflare now...

Discord and X are used for convenience not because I align with Musk views of the world.
A huge amount of romhackers use them. I need to communicate with them easily with something they use without forcing them to adapt to me.

The site is still being coded today, If this reasons are enough to not give the site a chance then i guess don't.

have a nice day ppl.

 

[SeventhSon7]

based Spike

 

[ShadowOne333]

Hi, please send it. That kind of things is why the site was made.


That stuff will be removed as is against the rules of the site. The site started allowing uploads due to RHDN disabling theirs, otherwise is not ready so many things are missing.


Thanks! it will definitely change, very little time was dedicated to design, functionality was the focus.

Cloudflare is not a hosting it's a reverse proxy. It is used to protect the site from attacks like DDOS.
Having the same IP is not rare, it only means you are connecting to the closer CF node to you.
GBATemp is using cloudflare now...

Discord and X are used for convenience not because I align with Musk views of the world.
A huge amount of romhackers use them. I need to communicate with them easily with something they use without forcing them to adapt to me.

The site is still being coded today, If this reasons are enough to not give the site a chance then i guess don't.

have a nice day ppl.

Nice to see you hanging around here
I asked you a couple things in Twitter, but I think the questions got overlooked with the main post image, so I'll ask here:

• How will non-dev submissions get handled?
  As-in when a hack is submitted by someone else that wasn't involved in the project's development, and then the author doesn't want the hack uploaded or something (since I've seen cases similar to that)
• How are you planning to deal with submissions that could have ROMs included in their packages?
• Similar to the first question, but what if someone who didn't make the hack reuploads it and claims it their own?

 

[romhacks_org]

Nice to see you hanging around here
I asked you a couple things in Twitter, but I think the questions got overlooked with the main post image, so I'll ask here:

1. How will non-dev submissions get handled?
   As-in when a hack is submitted by someone else that wasn't involved in the project's development, and then the author doesn't want the hack uploaded or something (since I've seen cases similar to that)
2. How are you planning to deal with submissions that could have ROMs included in their packages?
3. Similar to the first question, but what if someone who didn't make the hack reuploads it and claims it their own?

1. it is unfortunate when an author doesn't want their hack to be hosted. When someone else uploads a hack and the author registers he will be able take over those entries, that's so they can edit them and update the patches if needed.
If they don't them on the site at all, they would have to contact me to get it removed.
Later I will have a blacklist of things that can't be added so it doesn't get re-added by someone else in the future.
That is not to say that because of a minority of people who doesn't want their hacks hosted elsewhere that I will forbid non-creators from uploading.
2. This already happened. The verified people that are romhackers know they have to upload patches. With new people that are not verified, when their entry is on the queue we download the file and look inside. The user is informed he has to upload a patch not the full rom, it's up to him to do that, until that happens the entry stays on the queue.
3. It would be hard for someone to claim ownership of stuff they didn't make, most things we can track down who made them. if you mean they are impersonating an author and uploading stuff in their name I couldn't possibly know. I will not ask for personal information of the members to verify their identities.

 

[ShadowOne333]

1. it is unfortunate when an author doesn't want their hack to be hosted. When someone else uploads a hack and the author registers he will be able take over those entries, that's so they can edit them and update the patches if needed.
If they don't them on the site at all, they would have to contact me to get it removed.
Later I will have a blacklist of things that can't be added so it doesn't get re-added by someone else in the future.
That is not to say that because of a minority of people who doesn't want their hacks hosted elsewhere that I will forbid non-creators from uploading.
2. This already happened. The verified people that are romhackers know they have to upload patches. With new people that are not verified, when their entry is on the queue we download the file and look inside. The user is informed he has to upload a patch not the full rom, it's up to him to do that, until that happens the entry stays on the queue.
3. It would be hard for someone to claim ownership of stuff they didn't make, most things we can track down who made them. if you mean they are impersonating an author and uploading stuff in their name I couldn't possibly know. I will not ask for personal information of the members to verify their identities.

That pretty much clears up all the questions I have.

I will try to submit the rest of my hacks to Romhacks.org, since I only uploaded my Zelda NES Redux projects, all the rest still remain
I will also see if I can upload my Other M Redux hack, but since that one's quite big in size, I'm not sure if it will go through, nor what the limit size is.

Thanks for the answers!

 

[romhacks_org]

There are no size limits.
I would be thrilled if everyone upload their hacks and also invite their fellow romhackers to do the same.

I know the site isn't perfect.
RHDN is 18 years old.

I started working on a file upload system by chunks to a remote server 1 month ago on my spare time.
That's all it was initially.

Now we have a functioning site.

So i ask for patience if we are not immediately better at everything.

 

[schrmh]

Cloudflare is not a hosting it's a reverse proxy.

Due to that reply, I replaced the "hosted at" with "using" in my previous reply.
Cloudflare does have a hosting option but yeah.. Even without looking at stats I'm pretty sure it is correct that their reverse proxy is way more popular.
I saw increasingly more people talking about the hosting within the last months however.

Having the same IP is not rare, it only means you are connecting to the closer CF node to you.
GBATemp is using cloudflare now...

It really was just a non-hostile minor funny mention — extra in ( ) at the end and not part of my points. Funny since a digit in a tuple has a difference of 1.
I thought about putting the IP I got when pinging gbatemp.net there as well but decided against that since it did not add to the funny and to keep it shorter — thought more or less: »Three IPs within such few sentenes? Meh«.
Instead I added the info that some of the stuff also applies to gbatemp.

Discord and X are used for convenience not because I align with Musk views of the world.
A huge amount of romhackers use them. I need to communicate with them easily with something they use without forcing them to adapt to me.

The main point first, then slightly into the blabbering (that will now be a bit shorter since it was quite a bit — see end of post):
IRC has had some usage in the past as well. If you don't want to use FOSS-licensed chat software due to missing idealistic reasons or usage concerns — tho it seems that users that really care about a project would still use the niche chat service —, you can also use a bot and Webhooks in Discord to mirror messages to the more open service (and vice versa).

When the contact form will come, Twitter won't be needed for contacting you — well, now that we know you have an gbatemp account, gbatemp can also be used I guess. (Not that it is that important but it is still nice).
romhacking.org mainly seems to use their Twitter as a news feed. Would be nice to have a Mastodon equivalent for that but is an extra account to manage somewhat.

The social networking services and chats likely aren't really needed for the main function for the site, so they may be avoidable pretty well if downloads of tools and finished projects are downloadable via the site and most related useful information is as well (e.g. in form of a wiki) — which is to be expected for a romhacking database anyways.
But it is a bit worrying that Discord is kinda a information black hole. Discord message context is usually not well indexed on websites since there is a certain hurdle for that (and tbf there is an argument against doing that and even an additional legal viability when it is done) and thus is is not search-engine searchable.
And while special purpose sites with information are better anyways and while the general homebrew scene might be in the millions when it comes to users, the niche within the niche can get very small. Thus it could be that it only consists of few hundreds or thousands users that are in a community on a chat platform and that a fraction of those are almost equal to the amount of people that you could ask or get information from when it comes to those niche things. (Well, I'm a bit contributing to that shitty situation as well but I try to change what others or I put out int he past and what I have partial control of. It is however a bit of a time and resource issue.)
The "Nintendo Homebrew" Discord guild has over 100k users on it while romhacking.net has a bit over 5.5k. (Fans translators guild — which should also be pretty popular for rom hackers—, has a bit over 3.3k btw.)

The site is still being coded today, If this reasons are enough to not give the site a chance then i guess don't.

Address (some) of the complaints early and have earned success.

---

Reply will be there in an hour our so, a person just cut out power in this building while I was writing a reply that was pretty long.
I then saw only a gray box in the reply area after visiting this place again, I was half hoping that I may have saved the text but it didn't.
(Actually took a bit less to get something that should contain most but expected due to remembering what I wrote ago within the previous hour.)

 

[DarthDub]

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.

You should feel bad for liking that ROMhack. I just tried it out and it feels like it was made for rapists and incels.

 

[Kwyjor]

It would be hard for someone to claim ownership of stuff they didn't make

Not at all! People can easily take other people's work and combine it with something else or make a few minor changes and claim that it's their own original creation. It has happened so very many times before.

 

[rsc-pl]

gamebanana exists

The same gamebanana that is not accepting mods that are against their political agenda and the same gamebanana that rejected Fire Emblem Engage uncensored translation? This is supposed to be an alternative?

 

[duwen]

...it feels like it was made for rapists and incels.

Nah, rapists are raping and incels are playing Tears of the Kingdom and visual novel dating sims.

I jest of course. For how purile the Girls Hunter rom hack is, I felt that with a lengthy rescripting and a little sprite work it could've worked as a fun homage to the pinku eiga Nikkatsu films of the 70's - romhackers, feel free to use this inspiration

 

[SeventhSon7]

Not at all! People can easily take other people's work and combine it with something else or make a few minor changes and claim that it's their own original creation. It has happened so very many times before.

This is the concept of "public domain."

 

[Kwyjor]

This is the concept of "public domain."

Yes, you're very clever. But people who release romhacks don't necessarily want them to be "public domain", and even some people who think they want their stuff to be "public domain" might find out afterwards that they were mistaken about what they wanted. There's no shortage of romhack authors who will probably get very angry if you steal their stuff without asking permission or providing proper credit and if you then tell them that their work was "public domain" and that they shouldn't get angry. And then you wind up with authors who insist that their work should only be distributed through particular sites, and so on.

 

[SeventhSon7]

Yes, you're very clever. But people who release romhacks don't necessarily want them to be "public domain", and even some people who think they want their stuff to be "public domain" might find out afterwards that they were mistaken about what they wanted. There's no shortage of romhack authors who will probably get very angry if you steal their stuff without asking permission or providing proper credit and if you then tell them that their work was "public domain" and that they shouldn't get angry. And then you wind up with authors who insist that their work should only be distributed through particular sites, and so on.

Do the hack authors have copyright / IP right to the thing being hacked? They are creating a derivative work based on someone else's IP.