​

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]

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.

i highly doubt they can. As you said, it is based on someone else's work. Nintendo can already copyright strike fan projects. If they can, that means the project in question (rom hack) already fall under their copyright's rights. You can't copyright something that is already copyrighted

 

[ShadowOne333]

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.

This is why I find people who threat closed source hacks like they're the ones owning the thing as something absolutely idiotic, to claim ownership for something that you're basically backpedaling from a copyrighted IP, game engine and all, which is why I offer almost all my romhack projects as open source, because that's how it should be, and for both posterity and people to use them as bases for other wonderful hacks if they wish.

 

[Kwyjor]

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.

You can expound about clever legal ideas all day. It's not going to stop people from being jerks and loudly accusing other people of being jerks.

 

[zamastyle]

Awesome site. Bookmarked.

 

[orangy57]

for the love of god can one of these websites do the thing that simpleflips' romhacking dot com does and just add a Play! button that auto-patches games and launches them????

It'd be so convenient to have a version of Floating IPS that does everything automatically, you stuff all the source roms in a big folder, open up a FLIPS:// link from the browser and the program does all the patching for you. The fact that I still have to waste the 2 minutes manually patching every single rom one by one in the current year is sooooo lame. And god forbid you have Super Mario World (U) [!].smc instead of Super Mario World [!] (USA).smc shit just immediately hits the fan

 

[Kwyjor]

for the love of god can one of these websites do the thing that simpleflips' romhacking dot com does and just add a Play! button that auto-patches games and launches them????

If you're suggesting they should host the ROMs directly, then that would be brazenly illegal.

you stuff all the source roms in a big folder, open up a FLIPS:// link from the browser and the program does all the patching for you.

A lot of emulators already support "soft patching" and will automatically apply a patch that's in the same folder as a ROM.

"Hard patching" that permanently alters a ROM is undesirable since it makes it harder to apply different patches (or even just newer, updated patches) afterwards.

 

[SeventhSon7]

Hard patched please, I play on real hardware.

Spike's other site is good for that...

 

[DarkCoffe64]

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.

If someone doesn't want to have their work or whatever end up modified or used in ways they didn't intent to, then they shouldn't either release it to the public or not do it at all. I'm not saying stealing someone's work and claiming you did it it's alright, that's just scummy. But if you're thinking of releasing something online for anyone to use, it just should be expected that someone will take it and modify or use it however they want.

 

[SaulFabre]

Long life to the worldwide universal romhacking.

Many of these hacks improves games, adds new features, and other cool stuff.

Favs are BillyTime's SRAM hacks for Genesis, the DX hacks for GB games, and these improvements for multiple games (Road Rash trilogy code rewritten, GBA recolorized hacks, etc.)
Oh, and i didn't forget about those unofficial translations.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Take this as a lesson guys, if you're going to scrape an entire website, rate limit your code to a reasonable amount.

 

[Kwyjor]

If someone doesn't want to have their work or whatever end up modified or used in ways they didn't intent to, then they shouldn't either release it to the public or not do it at all. I'm not saying stealing someone's work and claiming you did it it's alright, that's just scummy. But if you're thinking of releasing something online for anyone to use, it just should be expected that someone will take it and modify or use it however they want.

The problem is that some people are seen as being in a position to stop other people from being scummy, and when they don't stop people from being scummy, then other people see that as being free to be extra scummy. And then different people decide that they're going to go off and make their own site where this time no one's going to be scummy.

There are already users who are saying they don't want their work on RHDN anymore, so does that mean that because they've released it online for anyone to use, people should just re-upload it there anyway?

 

[Spider_Man]

Admins at GBATEMP, can someone inbox me how I can contact the peeps behind this website.

I would like to assist them with their bandwidth issues and offer them free hosting of the site and allocate them dedicated hosting of its files.

 

[SeventhSon7]

Admins at GBATEMP, can someone inbox me how I can contact the peeps behind this website.

I would like to assist them with their bandwidth issues and offer them free hosting of the site and allocate them dedicated hosting of its files.

He posted in this thread.

 

[Dawn_Chaos]

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

I don't feel bad for shit, jack, but I did update my prior comment to make it clear that that Romhack is garbage. I didn't say I liked the story or that it was even good. It's obviously cringe as fuck. It's just the only NSFW romhack I know offhand so it's what I mentioned.

Like, some of the dialog in it has ladies busting a nut just from light touching - it was obviously made by a virgin with little to no sex education (sad) who also has no respect for women. It's distasteful and fuck, if it were my Romhack site, I'd deny it for being super rapey.

But again, it's just hard in general to find good NSFW romhacks because of prudes like RHDN.

 

[EvilJagaGenius]

Hrm.

I like RHDN, it's a wonderful archive/database of hacks and the forums are a great resource too. The recent issues with the data scrapers brought some good discussion out on said forums, I think my biggest takeaway is that RHDN is a single point of failure. If it goes either by C&D/bandwidth/malware attack, access to a lot of stuff goes. So to that end I think it's good to have alternative sites hosting the same hacks, like here at GBATemp, Zophar's, and this new site. I don't think "RHDN sucks, let's all jump ship" is a good response, but rather "let's host our hacks on all these sites" for preservation's sake.

The forum discussions brought to light another issue too, not sure how to put this tactfully... the RHDN staff need to work on their communication skills. There were other good points about the scrapers providing a backup of RHDN's database, or formatting the download links to discourage bots, or using torrents to reduce the load on RHDN's bandwidth that were dismissed or ignored. This is the second time in recent memory that a badly-phrased announcement from the staff has caused people to panic and hackers to leave the site, pulling their hacks.

From my own experience, RHDN's submission rules aren't strict as much as... cryptic. I tried submitting some hacks for Mega Man: The Wily Wars that I had adapted to the new optimized Retro-Bit release, but they got denied. I forget the reason specifically, I think something to do with repackaging others' hacks. I wasn't trying to claim any credit, just get my favorite features with less slowdown. But a simple titlescreen for someone else's translation got a pass as well as modifying one of PowerPanda's FF4A hacks (and my sloppy work on that one still needs fixed...) I put my Wily Wars hacks in a Google Drive folder and put it in a forum post, didn't want to fight it.

I think my own course of action going forward is to put my work on RHDN, here, Zophar's, Romhacks.org... if RHDN doesn't want my tiny tweak hacks, that's fine, but I hope they'll stay up in case RHDN ever goes down.

 

[Kwyjor]

I tried submitting some hacks for Mega Man: The Wily Wars that I had adapted to the new optimized Retro-Bit release, but they got denied. I forget the reason specifically, I think something to do with repackaging others' hacks.

I expect making such a hack available could conceivably be seen as encouraging people to dump and re-distribute Retro-Bit's valuable intellectual property. And maybe that's being paranoid, but maybe after years of experience someone has learned good reasons to be paranoid?

... Of course, a Google search for [retro-bit wily wars] immediately brings up the download of the game on archive.org, but archive.org does a lot of wacky things.

using torrents to reduce the load on RHDN's bandwidth

How is that supposed to work..? The site already doesn't host hacks that are overly large in size.

 

[EvilJagaGenius]

How is that supposed to work..? The site already doesn't host hacks that are overly large in size.

I guess a lot of scraping even on small hacks eats up bandwidth fast. The idea they shared is here: https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=38009.msg451136#msg451136

One suggestion I haven't seen in this thread yet is setting up a distributed/peer-to-peer file sharing system, e.g. one or more (un?)official RHDN torrents; I'm thinking of something like OverClocked ReMix's torrents page. That should satisfy most archival concerns while greatly reducing bandwidth consumption on the site.

 

[Kwyjor]

I guess a lot of scraping even on small hacks eats up bandwidth fast.

Well... It might take away some of their motivation to try to scrape, but setting up a torrent wouldn't necessarily stop people from trying to scrape.

I expect it's been contemplated before. I might consider that perhaps people who have uploaded hacks in the past might not have necessarily agreed to have their work bundled in such a fashion. (And telling those people "your work is public domain and we can do whatever we want with it, neener neener neener" would go over really well.)

 

[Pachee]

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

First time i am hearing about that, now i want to try it out too. Thanks for the tip.

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?

This. It's like arguing dog poop is a good alternative to human poop. Gamebanana has shown to have a quite corrupt rules for thee privileges for me selective enforcement of what they preach. It's just as bad as nexus.

I am glad to see a new alternative showing up.

 

[Nakamichi]

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

i wanted to post a thread about everyones "Holy Grail Fantranslations" and which ones they would love to see most.
It was removed by a mod because "requesting romhacks" was not allowed.

I wanted to give a good rating for a hebrew fantranslation of a smaller title, saying how its awesome to see content get made for users of that language. It was removed because as someone who couldnt speak the language i was not allowed to rate it.

Sooooo sick of romhacking.net's arbitrary bullshit