One of the most popular websites in regard to romhacks, fan translations and other kinds of pre-patched modifications to retro titles has always been CDRomance. Chances are if you were looking for a specific mod or hack for a certain title, most likely you'd find it there in an already patched form. However, as of this past weekend, the way in which CDRomance operates has changed.

On February 11th, CDRomance's owner, nicknamed "Spike" received what seems to be a notice by the ESA (Entertainment Software Association), which effectively took down CDRomance's ads that helped maintaining the servers online. This action prompted Google to ask for the removal of any kind of file-sharing going on with the website, to which Spike complied and disabled direct links from the website itself. According to Spike, it seems like the possible action taken against CDRomance could have been from someone posing as the ESA, and not the actual ESA itself, but to avoid any kind of troubles as to whether or not the treat was made by the real ESA or not, Spike decided to remove the direct links either way.

​

This is surely a big hit for preservation of a great amount of fan translations and romhacks all around, as CDRomance also helped preserve different revisions of projects themselves.

Not all is lost though, as many users online have already found a workaround for the direct links being taken down, and also there's certain scripts floating around that could also help with this endeavour, for those that wish to backup the catalog of CDRomance's files in case of a more dire situation.

 

[raxadian]

PSP eboots are a problem. Loads are custom built.

In the PSP forum here at GBATemp there are threads on how to make your own. You will need a Vita for some of them due to needing the extra stick.

Besides that even a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 can run quite good Playstation emulation nowadays although with cables and extras it tends to be about 30 dollars? If you already have everything is just 15 bucks for the Zero 2 alone and of course you need a PC monitor or TV to plug the display cable in.

Anything that needs lots of reading or attention to detail needs a bigger screen.

While I can't link them there, there is a lot of Translation to English and hack collections on the Web Archive.

For anything 16 bit and under you can use an online rom patcher once you get the hack and patch the roms yourself.

 

[Jayinem]

just wish archive.org download speeds were not shit.

Try putting them in Jdownloader. You can just paste the link of the page of say PS2 ISOs and they'll all show up at once and you can just choose the games you want. I get a lot better speeds than through browser.

 

[therabbitofthenorth]

No need to. There is still a workaround to download from cdromance. Just Google it.

There is need to, archival of media is *always* needed.

 

[raxadian]

I guess nothing lasts forever.

 

[chrisrlink]

and here we go

 

[danuffo]

I'm cancel target #1 now.
But yeah, I get why many people are angered by this, it's always the corpos doing their shitty bidding

Well, there are also translators and romhackers who never liked CDromance for making a profit out of their works without their permission. $$ Not my case though.

It's a piracy site after all, it makes money from others, and it may host some isos with unknown quality: outdated, stolen fandubs and whatever.

 

[Metoroid0]

and the cdromance.org site is still working.

it doesnt host roms = not working

 

[raxadian]

Well there are also translators and romhackers who actually hate CDromance for making a profit out of their works without permission. $$

That's fair, but the end user had a convenient site to find a lot of hacks and fan translations and it helped to give visibility to those hacks and fan translations as otherwise many people wouldn't know they exist.

For example, I wouldn't know of many of those otherwise.

 

[impeeza]

it doesnt host roms = not working

but you can... you can... but I can not tell you ;(

 

[subcon959]

It's ridiculous how many people post in threads without reading them.

 

[raxadian]

It's ridiculous how many people post in threads without reading them.

Well, of course the roms are getting hosted somewhere else but we can't link or mention that site so...

 

[ichig0]

just wish archive.org download speeds were not shit.

Use download manager if you are not already doing so.. I use NeatDL and get better speeds than CDR any day.

 

[TheXpertXD]

This is the greatest tragedy of our time

 

[jackkane]

Same happened with emuparadise. There was a workaround in the beginning but after a while stopped working.

that workaround still works for me.

 

[Ettino]

It's not that bad....... yet. For now anyway.

 

[linuxares]

It's not that bad....... yet. The org site is still working, just need to copy&paste CDR ticket code before you can dl anything. It's added extra 3 second to the whole thing. For now anyway.

I love how everyone blabs about this and will just give the people that issued the DMCA even more of a reason to take the site to actual court.

 

[Ettino]

I love how everyone blabs about this and will just give the people that issued the DMCA even more of a reason to take the site to actual court.

True. My bad. I'll edit the post.

 

[linuxares]

True. My bad. I'll edit the post.

I mean it's to late anyway. It's on github and public on google so it doesn't really matter.

 

[BlusterBong]

I wonder what could possibly allowed th~

On February 11th, CDRomance's owner, nicknamed "Spike" received what seems to be a notice by the ESA (Entertainment Software Association), which effectively took down CDRomance's ads that helped maintaining the servers online. This action prompted Google to ask for the removal of any kind of file-sharing going on with the website, to which Spike complied and disabled direct links from the website itself.

Oh.

Score 1 for *snip* and *snip* (For now, anyways), becuase if you're not doing it all from your own pocket or donations, then you should expect every DMCA threat that you'll get.

 

[Xdqwerty]

I think its back, I can now download the roms normally