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.

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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.

 

[zfreeman]

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

They have updated the script since then. They're still accessible.

 

[HarveyHouston]

Never a dull moment in the homebrew scene...

 

[Marc_LFD]

Just browsed Romance and it saddened me seeing the download links were removed.

Surely they're still hosted, but hidden? Any chance it'd be like Emuparadise?

Losing all that would be a huge loss for game preservation.

 

[SeventhSon7]

There's a workaround provided by Spike, don't know if it should be described here.

 

[Marc_LFD]

There's a workaround provided by Spike, don't know if it should be described here.

Emuparadise-style? A search on the web should show up.

Edit: Yep!

 

[therabbitofthenorth]

I supported Archive.org with a Donation to pay for their server & attorney costs. I'd urge anyone who can to do the same, the freedom of the entire Internet depends on Archive.org to continue existing without interference and censorship from mega corporations.

My only problem with Archive.org is they will restrict access to certain websites (such as Byuu’s) at the request of God-knows-who when the free access of that information is incredibly important. In that way, they act too authoritarian over their stranglehold on data they have no rights to, and in the former case *no one* has any right to anymore.

Just why? It's retro site, 99% of these games you cannot buy legally.

Because copyright lasts for 100 years and under German law (may be similar elsewhere) you must actively show you are fighting copyright infringement, else possibly lose access to copyright. Also copyright holders with assets in the millions or more tend to be greedy assholes and would rather lose money paying lawyers than making money selling in-demand goods. Keep in mind how much Nintendo could make from selling official repros of their older titles at like $100/piece and then realize they’d rather spend $500+/hr to pay some lawyer to DMCA a random website.

 

[91ajames]

My only problem with Archive.org is they will restrict access to certain websites (such as Byuu’s) at the request of God-knows-who when the free access of that information is incredibly important. In that way, they act too authoritarian over their stranglehold on data they have no rights to, and in the former case *no one* has any right to anymore.


Because copyright lasts for 100 years and under German law (may be similar elsewhere) you must actively show you are fighting copyright infringement, else possibly lose access to copyright. Also copyright holders with assets in the millions or more tend to be greedy assholes and would rather lose money paying lawyers than making money selling in-demand goods. Keep in mind how much Nintendo could make from selling official repros of their older titles at like $100/piece and then realize they’d rather spend $500+/hr to pay some lawyer to DMCA a random website.

This is what I think of Disney Fairytale Copyright
HAhahaha

 

[DarkCoffe64]

Some dare claim violent videogames make people violent... nah, it's bullshit like this that makes someone truly violent.

Guess at least the site is still up and functioning. Tbh, I more use it as a way to check for new game translations than anything else, lol. The games being already pre-patched is just a plus.

But yeah, whoever did this cancer move, I hope they get... dunno, the next worst disease know to mankind or something.

 

[Winduss]

whenever i hear people talk like this i think they work for some gaming corporation and troll gamers.

I mean if it's not a big deal, why can't we share roms on this site then?

 

[SylverReZ]

I mean if it's not a big deal, why can't we share roms on this site then?

Because, they don't want to risk a video game community to be taken down by the Nintendo ninjas.

 

[Winduss]

Because, they don't want to risk a video game community to be taken down by the Nintendo ninjas.

Hmm that means Nintendo is within their rights, right?

Also, people here are acting like CDRomance were saints for applying patches to roms and reuploading them, something simple people would normally have to do themselves.

 

[codezer0]

Just why? It's retro site, 99% of these games you cannot buy legally.

Nintendo legal really is that brain damaged.

Which is especially frustrating because everything I've seen and read of the development side makes it appear as an exceptionally good place to be if you wanted to work in game development at all.

Post automatically merged: Feb 13, 2024

Hmm that means Nintendo is within their rights, right?

Also, people here are acting like CDRomance were saints for applying patches to roms and reuploading them, something simple people would normally have to do themselves.

Now that I have a fenrir, cdromance was about the only site that enabled me to have ISOs that actually load on the dang thing. Most everywhere else, the ISOs might burn to a disc and launch from a cd-rom drive, but would never load correctly on the Fenrir. I didn't have that problem with cdromance. Likewise, their Dreamcast archive was one of the few, maybe only, places where I was able to find 1:1 GDI's for use with the GDemu in turn, which becomes critical to ensure the game will actually work.

So yeah, this major league sucks.

 

[krakenx]

I wouldn't have even known about the site if this hadn't happened. The Streisand effect in full effect.

 

[switchhunter666]

If there is a script I have a 22tb server to back it all up to

 

[lordelan]

Oh man... was great to quickly grab a pre-patched rom hack for testing.
However for anything that goes beyond "Playing 5 minutes in RetroArch on a PC to see how it turns out" I always just patched the rom myself with the amazing Rom Patcher JS (so convenient).
So yes, it's a loss but not a great one.
If something like *yri**t (only ppl who know that site will understand) would be DMCA'd, that would be waaay worse!

 

[Wolfy]

What's next? ----?

Shhhh...do not draw attention to it.

 

[DarkCoffe64]

Hmm that means Nintendo is within their rights, right?

Just because it is in their "rights", it doesn't make it right. And before you say "it's da law", I wonder just how many of these "laws" are there because some bigwig rich fucks bribed and corrupted their way into having "laws" to protect their profits.
A certain cancerous mouse (not Civvie's lol) comes to mind.

Plus, I wonder how much profit craptendo is losing over old games they don't sell anymore.

 

[DS1]

That’s a shame, not only did they host all of this stuff with clean links (like believe me, this stuff exists elsewhere, you just need to adopt a few viruses to get it), but there were a lot of good conversations around rare and cult titles. Like the real nerds who knew the obscure history
Of these games were hanging out there.

 

[MissingN0pe]

Distributing pre-patched was always illegal and dangerous. I'm honestly surprised PokeHarbor can still operate without issues to this day, they have almost every pokemon romhack pre-patched as well as most fan game worth your attention. It also comes up within the first few results for "pokemon hacks" on google and it has insane traffic.

 

[HandsomeJack]

Magipack Games is pretty good.