Romhacks and fan translations website CDRomance takes all downloads off-site after a DMCA threat

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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.



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.
 

duwen

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it was called nicoblog before it was cdromance....wonder how they gonna name it next to evade dcma.
Nicoblog and CDRomance co-existed - NB hosted current platforms while CDR hosted older systems, that's what made Nicoblog a target for takedown while CDRomance remained.
 

Metoroid0

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Nicoblog and CDRomance co-existed - NB hosted current platforms while CDR hosted older systems, that's what made Nicoblog a target for takedown while CDRomance remained.
CDromance did not existed when nicoblob was runing. Nicoblog had all the files that CD romance had/has.
 

duwen

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CDromance did not existed when nicoblob was runing. Nicoblog had all the files that CD romance had/has.
Technically you're correct, except Nicoblog became Nitroblog AND CDromance. Two sites. Nitroblog continued hosting the more 'current' platforms and CDRomance took on the more retro stuff. As the traffic for Nicoblog auto redirected to Nitroblog, it was considered just a name/domain change. CDRomance was a 'new' site that most definitely co-existed with Nitroblog.
Here's a 5 year old Reddit thread that proves this.
Some google-fu shows that nblog and cdromance co-existed until nblog closed down about 3yrs ago.
 
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Metoroid0

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Technically you're correct, except Nicoblog became Nitroblog AND CDromance. Two sites. Nitroblog continued hosting the more 'current' platforms and CDRomance took on the more retro stuff. As the traffic for Nicoblog auto redirected to Nitroblog, it was considered just a name/domain change. CDRomance was a 'new' site that most definitely co-existed with Nitroblog.
Here's a 5 year old Reddit thread that proves this.
Some google-fu shows that nblog and cdromance co-existed until nblog closed down about 3yrs ago.
i was only aware of nicoblog and that it had all the retro roms and later it became nblog than cdromance. thats my awareness of it.
 

LingFox

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archive.org is becoming more and more important...
Yeah until some dumbass mod decides to take down some archive because it hurts their feelings, undermining the whole "ARCHIVE" part of the Internet Archive.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. It's not even federated, the moment the server is overloaded or goes down, it's all lost.

This site was def my go-to for PS2 & Wii ROMs. However, the site can still be accessed from its .org domain instead.
To me it still is Myrient. May whoever has the power to, protect them.
 

depaul

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It's not like they're hurting anyone by preserving 20 y.o+ games.

The newest systems on the website are PS2 and GCN, which are both more than 20 y.o.
 
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