News About The Drama With RHDN…

Everyone is aware of that. Personally, I don't really care, since the overwhelming majority of these ROMs are not even being sold anymore. But regardless that was my point-- CDR is clearly on shakier ground than sites just sharing romhack patches, and should be spoken of quietly, while this site should be able to gain mainstream attention as RHDN had, because it doesn't tread on any legal toes.

And even in terms of romsharing legality, if people have physical copies, they can just say they dumped those roms themselves.
 
I didn't say anything about this website, I'm just against those which share full pre-patched ROMs. ROMhacking may be "grey area", but ROM sharing is illegal.
 
It's not "dubious legality" or "grey area", sharing ROM images of games is illegal, dot.
 
I also agree. Since I published my hack as a patch I don't want someone to reupload a pre-patched version on another website, since it's illegal and I don't want to be linked with the one who did it.
 
I liked RHDN and CDR both, and have zero issues with this guy running both sites. But it would certainly benefit Spike to place public responsibility for this site on a different leader, to keep this site safe from the grey-area CDR exists in. The reason RHDN lasted so long was that it provided the patch to turn your ROM into the ROMhack, without any ROMs on the site. An equivalent of that system must persist to keep the romhacking scene alive, without merging it back into the side of the community who are indifferent to the "dubious legality" of rom sharing.

tl;dr don't give the big mean corpos any excuse to just shut down things that have thrived in a 'grey area' for so long.
 
It is irrelevant what you or other people believe is "right". Copyright holders can do whatever they want with their IPs, and if they want to shutdown a website sharing illegal copies of their 30+ years old games, they have the right to do so, and more importantly, if they want to legally go against individuals involved in sharing illegal copies of their IPs, they have the full right to do so.

If Spike wants to fight this battle against "corporate greed", or whatever you want to call it, and take the risk, fine. But he has no right to involve in such a risk other people such as romhackers/fan translators by uploading ROM files *with their patches already applied* to the ROMs. We all, as romhackers, provide our works for free and we only ask just a simple thing: *do not upload ROMs with our patches already applied*. This is written literally everywhere in our READMEs.

However, Spike simply refuses to comply, probably because the convenience of having the ROMs already patched (although it takes no more than 2 minutes to apply a patch to a ROM) is the main selling point of CDRomance, which makes him get some reasonable money out of number of visits/ads watched/donations, all of this exploiting other peoples free work.

This is one of the main reasons why no reasonable romhacker would ever take Spike or romhacks.org seriously.
 
Who is hurt by this "illegal warez" site? The only entity losing money from those old games being available to download is second-hand resellers (aka scalpers and wannabe speculative investors). Those are the people that made buying "legal" copies of these games prohibitively expensive in the first place, so I see no reason for these romhackers to be so uptight about it, unless they also have some stake in the retro games speculative market.

On semi-related tangent, it's also really irritating how the rightsholders are doing their damnedest to try to keep people from playing these games by any means necessary. They refuse to sell them, but they won't let people obtain them any other way. Seems like a waste of resources that could be better spent on protecting assets they're actually profiting from. The whole industry is due for a crash either way, and I'm happy for that.
 
Regardless of all the drama, and of whether Spike/romhacks.org has anything to do with the shutdown, Spike has to understand that romhackers that spend hours/days/months or even years of their free time to build their romhacks/fan translations will never want to be connected to a person that runs two completely incompatible online activities: an illegal warez website (CDRomance) and a tentative romhacking.net replacement.

In 20 years, one of the key contributions of romhacking.net was precisely to make the masses understand that romhacking and general warez/illegal rom sharing were not the same thing, and that romhacking should be normally accepted as a healthy and legal practice. That is why Spike's position as both the admin of CDRomance and romhacks.org will prevent any reasonable romhacker to EVER contribute to romhacks.org. Warez and romhacking are two incompatible worlds nowadays, and Spike knows it very well, and that is why he keeps CDRomance and romhacks.org two separate entities.
But, no matter how different the URLs of the two websites are, the issue remains.

I think there is a decision to be made here: what do you want to be Spike? The admin of yet another warez website that will be inevitably shutdown because of yet another DMCA letter, like all others that came before it, or the admin of a flourishing new romhacking hub? No matter what you pick, the crucial thing here to understand is that there is no way to be BOTH.
 
I simply posted my sincere concerns about Nintendo taking down the site on the CDR and received a lot of blows, is this how people treat those who only want the best for them? (A little disappointed, but that's life.)
 
Why did you do it kando
? the screen caps are being posted on cd romance people are beginning to learn about your attacks on rhdn
 
<span>Spike, you are my best friend, y'know😌❤️</span>
<span>I come here every day, and I will. I'm a gamer and that's it. And you are my fresh water, y'know.</span>
Waiting for new romhacks.
<span>I said.<span class="ql-cursor"></span></span>
 
They are 2 completely seperate communities. We do not allow anything of the sort in in this community.
 
well it only took one day for me to pretty much do a full 180 on this. cdromance's "community" is infested with unhinged fascism and bigotry, and i'm not gonna be here for that shit.
 
Thanks for the site. Sorry to see RHDN go, but glad there is a potential replacement. As I stumbled across this site before,it was literally the one I thought of as my replacement. Good luck.

P.S. we can "thumb" replies, why not news?
 
So sad to know about that. I recently knew about this website, and I hope this will be from now on the site to keep the preservation of hacks and translations.

So my dear friend, please be prepared, cause you'll be getting many people coming to increase the work in this great undertaking. All my best wishes for this site (and of course for the AMAZING cdromance too).
 


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