Godspeed RHDN

I checked my feed on Mastodon, of all places, and found that my beloved Romhacking.net is closing. Ars Technica has a nice writeup on it as well. It is a real bummer, a real shame. I consulted the site multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day, looking for new translations of retro games (mostly NES/SNES, but some PSX as well). And going forward it will stay up, for a while, but eventually become read-only, per the post. This is the end of an era.

Please note that RHDN has uploaded the entire contents of their site to Internet Archive and I highly recommend downloading it. The entire collection is 11Gb, which is a ridiculously small amount of space for all the riches contained within. I grabbed the torrent and I’m seeding it for awhile. I’m contemplating hosting a copy of it here, but I’m on the fence about it. Until then, you should definitely download the archive if you can and have the bandwidth and space. We don’t want this knowledge to disappear from the world!

I honestly can’t remember the first ROM hack I ever played, or when I started patching ROMs in earnest. Thinking back, it was probably when I played the then-new Radical Dreamers English fan translation, which came out in 2005. I vividly remember, come to think of it, patching it and playing it on my computer in San Francisco when I was starting my MA, either in 2005 or 2006. I’ve been into emulation for ages, using the ancient DOS emulator NESticle and ZSNES and SNES9X. IIRC, the first time I played Final Fantasy VI was on an emulator, and one of our family friends showed me the glory of emulation.

It was many years after that, though, that I started seeking out ROM hacks. Mostly fan translations of games we never got in the USA; I do not play a lot of “hacks” unless they’re enhancements of the game. I am not super interested in total conversions, but some people love that sort of thing, and more power to them. I just love being introduced to brand-new games that perhaps most Anglophones have never played. I consider fan translators to be performing a public service, making things accessible to people who may never have, and may never will, study Japanese or other languages these games may have originally been in. I honestly don’t remember the first fan translation I played aside from Radical Dreamers, but I mostly seek out RPGs, as so many of those are untranslated.

I taught myself how to use an .ips patch, by far the most common patching format for ROMs. For a long time, there were not that many IPS patchers out there, but there are far more now. I prefer Floating IPS (aka Flips), which can handle not only IPS but also BPS (Near/byuu’s excellent patch format). And of course there’s xdelta, which is used for a lot of the patches for newer systems, such as PSX, PS2, &c. I find that interface incredibly hostile, at least on the command line, but that may just be me. There are other pitfalls. Some SNES patches require the game to be headered or unheadered. Now NSRT (Nach’s SNES Rom Tools) can remove and add headers pretty easily, so it is not usually a big issue, but it is best if the patch specifies headered/unheadered (not all do). Another alternative to using NSRT is just to remove the 512-byte header by removing the first 512 bytes of the file. In Linux, this is trivial using dd: dd if=./headered_rom.sfc of=./unheadered_rom.sfc bs=1 skip=512

There are a lot of ins and outs to emulation and working with ROMs, and RHDN offered a lot of useful, helpful tools, in addition to fantastic fan translations, hacks, and other modifications to games. I’m eternally grateful for the privilege of spending so many years perusing the collection, and happy it will hopefully live on in some form, even if it’s only the archive itself. I encourage you to check out the site, and if there’s a fan translation that interests you, grab it, source a ROM, and get to patching!

Thanks for reading, friends <3