News About The Drama With RHDN…

While it is a shame to see the prior website go down in flames. I'm glad you kept on and continued the archive. Thank you.
 
I checked and you're right, they published a translation of mine without asking me, too. I don't support pre-patched ROMs in the first place, and surely I don't want to be associated with a website which does publish them.
 
I had to make a comment about this issue. The text is long because it’s a serious matter I had thought about in the past.

I see some people trying to fake moral superiority under the guise of "legality" in this issue, saying, amidst this drama, that romhacking shouldn't be associated with the CDR site, basically, because of copyright - presuming that a romhack dev isn't, under the eyes of corporations, the same as a pirate.

People need to understand that having a copy of a software does not give the user, in any shape or form, permission to modify the program any way, and even less, to distribute those modifications. Romhacking also violates copyright. There is no "gray" area here.

If the IP owner ~wants~, it will take the site down, and pursue legal action. It doesn't matter if it is because of piracy, or because of hacking. In the eyes of the law, it's basically the same - the only real question is if the violation of intellectual property had a commercial end or not.

The owners of companies like nintendo do not make the games available, let people on the internet maintain interest in their IP exactly by way of "warez" sites, romhacking, and emulation, and years later, they take these people down, with extreme prejudice. People like us, that cannot defend themselves, because they are not rich like the company’s upper echelons that make these decisions, and hire the (also rich) lawyers to act against us, using the (also rich) members of the courts and their lakeys (government employees, police, etc.).

They act against piracy more aggressively under the justification that such practices actively harm the profits that they extract out of the products - as if a person that acquires a software through illegal means would buy it, only if it wasn’t for the pirates and their practices.

But do not be mistaken, modifying a program without express permission is, also, illegal. Think, for example, about the cracking scene.

So the animosity between the romhacking folks and the "warez" folks, if based on these grounds of legality, makes absolutely no sense.

<ul><li>That said, given the analysis above, now, this here is my personal opinion:</li></ul>
We all need to band together against these old and outdated forms of copyright that stem from the Middle Ages, and against the real holders of such outdated power: the owners of the corporations that steal the work and the life out of the artists that make all these games that we love.

They take the best creators among us, steal the valor of their work, and deny us access to their art. In the past, they stole our lands and denied us the resulting wealth to sustain ourselves, so we need to work for them.

Fuck copyright. We all should have access to the media we love, paying the creators if we want and if we can, and the wealth stolen by shareholders/CEOs and the like should be put to the benefit of all of us.
 
Then there is a lot of misinformation going around. Many, many romhackers dispised RHDN for the way they treated romhackers. Passion comes out in blunt ways.

However, I had nothing to do with any "attacks" on rhdn besides from verbally.

Please watch this short video that clears up any confusion:


If you knew anything about me, you'd know I'm a passionate romhacker who always fights for the rights of his fellow romhackers.
 
Credit or no credit, what makes me angry is that these hacks are uploaded with no permission from the authors at all.
 
Personally I can completely vouch this statement, as I decided to peruse CDRomance just now after reading this reply... and noticed both of my undub romhacks I've made were just sitting there, listed alongside the other ROMs there.

Admittedly they were properly credited, barring one using my old username (but that was a RHDN being outdated moment lol). But nevertheless I straight up just didn't know they were up there at all, at least until I seeked out the site at all.

I suppose you could make the "Anything you put online is eventually going to be reuploaded/stolen" sorta argument here, as obviously I make my romhacks to be shared and played in any way! And it's not like they're taking/removing any credit when they upload pre-patched hacks.

But... at the same time I kinda don't wanna be associated with piracy that directly? Like, it just seems strange to list my Undub of Rhythm Heaven as just another version along the JP ROM. Like they're using these hacks being prepatched as a nice little incentive for visitors to prefer CDR over its contemporaries. It just feels sleazy.

I know it's ultimately an unrelated website to RHDO. Yet I still feel a bit... dirty giving such blind optimism just a mere few days ago in this very comment section. I just think there shouldn't be ANY hacks there unless they we're posted with permission from the author. And the way I see it, anything posted to this site is liable to be reuploaded over there, and I just kinda don't like that.
 
Still, as long as you can get past the art of sharing pre-patched ROMs, you'll find CDRomance a good site to find ROMs that, let's say, aren't bad dumps or something.
 
I don't know, since people say their hacks/translations get uploaded as pre-patched ROMs on CDRomance <em>without</em> their permission. I do agree that this is not the way to share ROM hacks, since this is done without asking the authors first.
 
Honestly, I'm kind of glad there's less people. That means less crappy ROMhacks to sort through. We don't need this site to become like gamebanana, lol.
 
Just want to say I found out this site exists because of the RHDN drama... And since I've used CDRomance plenty of times for hacks that have been troublesome to find the correct checksum for, going to err on the side of trusting you with this.

(And semi-unrelated, thank you for the prepatches, because once I had to find some spanish guy's personal archive of Pokemon games to get the correct version of english Emerald for PokeCommunity hacks from 2012 and I really don't want to do that amount of legwork when the romsets I have don't have the right checksum EVER again.)
 
i had Just found out about the entire RHDN n RDHO drama + the RHDN Shutdown late last week when trying to check for any updates to the Chrono TriggerPlus romhack, tbh i give little care about the drama , whats done is done it's in the past (in some situations that attitude leads to alot more issue but *shrug*) it is still leaps n bounds better to have a site centralizing hacks then going back to the days of it being scattered everywhich where, n letting things be lost to time.
 
Regarding the prepatched ROMs, I filed the Google form on CDRomance to request the removal. Thanks!
 


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