I created Romhacks.org to address some things I didn’t like about romhacking.net. I made it for those who wanted to use it, some did, most didn’t. welp.
When I first made it public, it was almost ready, a group of people quickly joined discord and helped me with moderation tasks, mostly kandowontu and another person.
I knew kando from his fastrom hacks. I didn’t know the other person . Turns out they had beef with RHDN (which I had no idea) I guess it’s my fault for not doing background checks on people but what are you gonna do? You take the help you get. This was a year ago and I don’t remember exactly all the details, but at some point it surfaced that this person had made a script to increase RHDN download counters, and was actually pretty proud of it, as they mentioned it on my discord. Someone very passionate about killing RHDO (a site which I had worked on 100% alone and in good will) went on to reddit to tell the world to never use the site because we “sabotaged RHDN”. Awesome.
That somehow morphed into people believing I took romhacking.net database and used it to make romhacks.org (!) which I never did…and if you actually look at romhacks.org you’ll see the hacks we have are manual submissions by the creators of the hacks. Minus a handful of entries I manually created to test while developing the site. Anyways…
I woke up to those news without the slightest idea of what was going on. Getting people to use the site was already a hard task and now this?
Needless to say that person was removed from the moderation team. But it didn’t solve the problem. We were already the bad guys and no matter what I said it didn’t count.
So all my work was for nothing, got really depressed stopped working on it altogether.
Even now a year later people are reluctant to use RHDO, either because of that incident or because I (Aka Spike) run cdromance, a site that hosts pre-patched romhacks and that’s the worst thing you can do.
Whatever the reason the site is there for those who want to use it, as always.
The -20/40 scores on these posts shows that some of these people lack maturity and this whole reddit score shouldn’t exist on a romhacking website in the first place. This isn’t Reddit or Twitter.
And to think that RHDN was a good place makes me laugh, do you remember the incident where Tom and his projects got nuked by a mod seething over that Goemon 3 hack? And he got doxxed by Twitter insanos afterwards. The mods in question was one of those insanos that supported doxxing of a normal person over a translation. I don’t care what’s your take on that, this whole doxxing is wrong in anyway, and you’re a piece of shit if you’re doing that.
For a place that does this, why should I upload my work there? To get me in trouble, even if what I did was nothing out of ordinary?
And I’ve seen the Discord screenshots from this incident and what I saw was childish behavior and degeneracy. (The Astolfo art for making a dialogue in a discord server, very mature, totally not goofy and toxic).
What I thought this place is to be a competition to RHDN, one that is chill and reasonable. What I got instead, and by reading the comments on news related to this drama, is no different than RHDN. The one who I avoided back in the day.
And then you wonder why the whole romhacking scene is disorganized, little to no centralization (while said central places are specialized only to one IP like SMWcentral for example). Because of the shitty unions like these is what keeps reasonable people away from the immature manchildren who’s investing these places.
Do you want to make the community a better place? Have a better moderation without political biases in any way, this is a site for modifying read only memory not a political soapbox agenda in disguise and if there’s something wrong, do it in private and professionally like a admin should. Instead of making a whole song and dance over it.
I only came here for romhacking, not a Discord drama which caused a whole site to shut down out of juvenile reasons by the mods on both sides. Insanity in every level.
The upvote/downvote system will likely be removed soon.
I wish the people who downvote so much made comments as well. Why they’re such haters, would be interesting to hear it.
I don’t see the system. So it means it’s removed, right?
Yes.
That’s really a good thing, bro. Thanks for removing this.
I 100% agree with everything you wrote. Hopefully, this site won’t fail the way RHDN did and will learn from their mistakes. And yeah, the whole upvote/downvote system is indeed pointless.
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 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.
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.
As much as I can agree with the fact that companies can take down both pirates and romhackers, I think it is also fair to consider that RHDN has been up for almost 20 years, without any real takedown, which is impressive considering the huge number of hacks hosted there, while big ROM sharing websites such as EmuParadise, Vimm’s Lair, LoveROMS, LoveRetro.co (and we could keep going with the list), did not face the same luck.
So, although law-wise there is no difference, in practice I believe there is a substantial difference which we cannot ignore so easily.
While I agree about the copyright to a extend, especially how it’s outdated. And the hyporcrisy around the users here complaining to CDR despite romhacking is also a suspect.
Keep in mind that Romhacking was a thing for years, in the 90s to be exact.
And there were no incidents that revolves around DMCA a romhack, the only thing I know it’s the case is how Nintendo strike down Pokemon Prism, but even then it’s the exception rather than the norm.
In fact, Sonic Mania was made by the people who makes romhacks/fangames and a lot of them are made without Sega’s permission, so take it as your will.
But this practical difference between piracy and romhacking is precisely what I and other people are basing their complaints on. So, I do not see any hypocrisy: I do not see anybody here discussing the CDR vs romhacking “problem” by saying that they are perfect and just.
It is just that we are already in a gray area with romhacking, which so happens in practice to barely survive take downs and companies suing, and we fear the connection with CDR could exacerbate this very delicate stability, which took us years to establish.
You have literally not established anything, w.t.f, you are still modifying copyrighted work without express permission from the original ip holder and until it gets proven otherwise in court it’ll be illegal at the end of the day.
All you are accomplishing here is coming across as insanely petty and arrogant.
Except again, no corporation outside of nintendo attempted to take down a modified rom of their games, regardless if it’s pre-patched or not.
The only thing that’s really a gray zone is fanmade games, you know, games made from scratch.
It is clear we have different points of view on this matter and we will not converge. That is fine. So let me put it differently: me and essentially all other 99% of romhackers publish our work as patches for a reason. You, other people, or even the person who runs RHDO might not agree with that reason, and that is fine. But it would be very nice if people at least respected that choice, considering also we are giving away our work for free (of course companies do not need to respect anything, and can kill us whenever they want).
But, if even the person who is going to run our new romhacking home does not respect in the first place our choice by converting our patches to ROMs on CDRomance then there is a serious trust issue at the foundations of this community, and this home will not have much of a future, in my opinion. And no, saying he will remove the pre-patched ROMs upon request is just weak PR, because it is essentially saying: I don’t care, and I will keep doing what I am doing unless somebody figures out.
Regarding my tones, If I sounded petty, that was not my intention.
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.
Trust me, I had a gamebanana account to upload mods there, Now I only came here for the mods and nothing else. Because the admins there are just as bad.
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.
With all the flaming discussions and different opinions clashing against each other, I have to say:
Should I even TRUST this website or not?
Ultimately it’s a free service to host hacks. The objections so far have been greatly based on misinformation or opinions towards me, not the site itself. A lot of work was put into making this site, and we continue to make improvements and adding features. All we can do is continue working and hope people will give us a chance.
I don’t know, since people say their hacks/translations get uploaded as pre-patched ROMs on CDRomance without their permission. I do agree that this is not the way to share ROM hacks, since this is done without asking the authors first.
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.
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.
Credit or no credit, what makes me angry is that these hacks are uploaded with no permission from the authors at all.
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 removed it.
Thank you!
I will take them down if asked or not put them in the first place.
You can do whatever you want with anything I upload here, past and future.
Thanks man.
Same here.
They have no legal nor moral ground to demand anything beyond proper credit, it never was their IP in the first place.
You of all people should know that there is no end to trying to placate these folks.
I’ve been a lurker on CDRomance for years and years, I personally would say, it is one of the best rom-sharing sites. The speeds are great when I need to back up my stuff and, through CDRs, I’ve found great hidden gems.It is a shame that a archival site has drama, because we can’t have nice things in this mudrock.
Compared to other sites, CDRomance also doesn’t have a lot of ads. I use another site named WowROMs where every time you click on anything, it automatically opens a spam site and you have to wait for long to find what you need.
Very annoying.
Is the account I replied to (below Simone D. Alemanno’s reply) a spambot that slipped through the cracks?
Well, guess I’m here now. Hopefully it won’t be too painful figuring out what I already have archived and what I don’t.
I don’t know anything about all this. I just hope this site doesn’t go away because even if I do keep everything, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to host myself. You’re doing a service.
Don’t lose heart, Spike, there is always people that dislike what someone else do on the internet. you are doing a great service to the romhacking community by running RHDO and cdromance.
For me, distributing prepatched is much more useful if you want other people to actually use your romhack, since it is much easier for the final user to play them.
I’ve been meaning to publish my romhacks here since i found out about it but haven’t out of laziness.
Now, with the closure of RHDN and the drama around RHDO, i put some time aside to do it and show my support.
Thanks man I totally get where they are coming from. Everyone is welcomed to use this site regardless of their opinion of me.
Hopefully they can move past that, I don’t have problems with anybody. Nobody’s perfect.
I had a feeling RHDN would eventually turn into just an archive when I originally joined them back in 2016 and saw the general vibe of the site. A couple mods became convinced I was a badhacker over ice cream and dogged me at random until I said ‘”F this” and started actually making some on a different site. Ironically that got me into general graphics/text hacking, so if I ever come across one of them I’ll give them a genuine thank you.
Anyway, I feel lucky to have this site and BHDN to share the two sides of my hobby. Both have a ton of chill people that enjoy pushing rom hacking to it’s limits in their own ways and I hope they’re both around for many years to come.
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’s not “dubious legality” or “grey area”, sharing ROM images of games is illegal, dot.
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.
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.
My problem is that I simply cannot trust to give in the hands of a person that runs both websites my romhacks/translations for sharing.
As you also suggested, for romhacks.org to be on clear grounds, it should have an independent lead than the one behind CDRomance.
Unless the above happens, I don’t believe romhacks.org should actually gain any more attention.
We do! I am the community manager, and I have nothing to do with CDR at all.
Spike is still the admin, not you. And to be honest, among all people RHDO could have as moderator, having one of the guys who were laughing at running autoclickers on RHDN, stating that RHDN “can fuck off” and deserve to get a DDOS (it does not matter whether the DDOS actually happened or not) is the least reassuring state of affairs.
I am sorry guys, but you simply lost all your credibility.
If you did anything slightly wrong ever like say fuck or shit or laugh at something bad you must be banned from the internet permanently
-insane people, 2024
We are talking about a Moderator role here, not a random user. So, I would expect some neutral and mature attitude towards certain events. That is as simple as that.
Anyway, I don’t think it matters much who are the mods. The main issue for me, as I said, is the connection between CDRomance and this site.
There was no DDOS. At the time, RHDN had pissed off MANY romhackers with their treatment of submissions, had limited uploads to 1MB, shutdown for 2 days with no communication. I am a passionate person, and quite blunt, thus the “fuck rhdn”.
I implore you to watch this video which explains the entire situation quite well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYbtcsG8tUI
Nobody said there was a DDOS. I was very careful the way I worded my comment. Please ready it carefully.
Fair enough.
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.
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.
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.
It’s more than ok Phoenix, your opinion is also irrelevant.
That’s a very constructive comment! Thanks a lot for your feedback!
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.
All copyright has done is kill the games I love most. My respect for it is low.
If you want to feel like an product that can be replicated infinitely without further consumption of resources should be throttled for no other reason than money, a limited resource, then you are absolutely mad and do not understand technology. I get why we’re so behind now.
Spike can even upload the whole history of video games on CDRomance, for all I care. What I care about is that he uploads prepatched ROMs with my romhacks/translations without asking permission first. I simply do not want this to happen with my free-to-use work, and expect Spike to respect that, but he clearly does not. He completely ignores and direspects the work of the very same people he is trying to gather together at RHDO.
Fair, out of curiosity what hacks you made that I uploaded?
Regarding the prepatched ROMs, I filed the Google form on CDRomance to request the removal. Thanks!
I removed everything I could find, if I missed something let me know.
Thanks a lot!
Depending on when you released your patches and he put prepatched roms on cdr, both could’ve occurred long before Spike decided to even start RHDO.
In the 2+ days you’ve been mentioning this here in the comments have you tried to contact him and just politely ask him to take them down until he asks permission?
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.)
I already deleted my post there, I don’t want to cause confusion for anyone.
Thanks for your support, it’s always a risk when running a site like cdr.
Spike, you are my best friend, y’know😌❤️
I come here every day, and I will. I’m a gamer and that’s it. And you are my fresh water, y’know.
Waiting for new romhacks.
I said.
I did not know CDRomance was related to this site.
Thank you for both!
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).
So I just saw someone mentioned this site on RHDN and joined, cheers!
Admittedly i just found out about this place, like… less then 30 minutes ago? And from a RHDN forum post linking here as the download host no less (it was that Donkey Konga 2 hack btw lol).
I don’t really know much about this drama or anything of the like. But as a place that hosts hacks in light of the biggest one shutting its doors, I’m more than happy to give RHDO support! When I get the chance I’ll put up the couple of hacks I made here, and inject this place with some much needed love and attention <3
Until today I haven’t posted anything here because I was satisfied at RHDN (despite some setbacks), but it will be a pleasure if you accept me here, long live RHDO…
RHDO is my new home now. BHDN been my go to for gangsta hacks for years. Let’s make this community great fellas, Just because RHDN is done doesn’t mean that our love for the hobby is, let’s pump out those hacks and translations a’ight? A’ight…
Thanks, Spike, for your job. 👍
Don’t give up. We’re with you in it. 🙏
Long time lurker but a first time poster here. I remember seeing how screwed Romhacking.net was when they started rejecting decent translations because they “weren’t good enough”, despite working just fine. If this is the new place, I’m all for it. I can’t think of anywhere better.
I’m a longtime romhacking.net user. Hopefully, this can be the place we can download slowdown free SNES fixes, translation mods, etc. for the next 20 years here now instead. Romhacking.net you will be missed.
Thanks for all your efforts in maintaining the sites despite the people that have it out for you.
It’s actually disgusting how fast misinformation is spread and upvoted on Reddit. A lot of people still don’t know about this site and they end up seeing those lies.
What misinformation? As far as I know he really runs CDRomance, as he confirmed.
There is a lot of misinformation going around that RHDO was involved in RHDN’s site issues/closure. This is the misinformation being referenced here.
Found CDR last year and love it. Grateful you have this presence as well, thanks Spike
As long as “a” community exists, the metaphorical torch of romhacking will still be lit, thus if enough people gather here we will rebuild
came here via cdr; i had no idea that this site existed until just now, but if you want this to be a viable alternative for rhdn in its absence i will more than happily spread the word. thanks for all you do.
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.
They are 2 completely seperate communities. We do not allow anything of the sort in in this community.
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
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYbtcsG8tUI
If you knew anything about me, you’d know I’m a passionate romhacker who always fights for the rights of his fellow romhackers.
bullshit. we see you.
*redacted*, not much you can do about it, aside correct them every now and then.
I’d say just ignore those shitheads and focus on what you like to do: share amazing games with the world.
You may not think its much, but honestly, without your work, I wouldn’t have discovered so many obscure and forgotten games got translations by incredible people willing to put their time translating games that have been ignored by time, you and all these people really have my thanks for bringing these works to light.
I appreciate your support but please keep it civil. Hope that makes sense.
After ROM hacks shutting you should keep the torch.
I only recently found out about CDRomance and it’s my new favorite site. I beg of you, please have a plan to distribute the website data of it and of RHDO to archive sites so that when the day inevitably comes, some of us can pick up where you left off.
I wish you the best of luck.
<3