If you have dabbled in emulation beyond getting a pirated version of Breath of the Wild running on your Steam Deck you may well have come across the 20-year-old ROMhacking site, especially if you were keen on playing obscure Japanese RPGs that were never released in the West.
The reason for this is that ROMhacking was (note past tense) the home of hundreds of English translations of games that had had their ROMs, er hacked (making sense now?) to change the text into English.
It was also a place where you could get the likes of the Super Monaco Grand Prix for the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive from the 1990s, hacked and edited to include the likes of LeClerc and Verstappen as the drivers instead of Ayrton Senna and co.
Now, as of last night, ROMhacking is a different beast altogether after a dramatic switch to a ROM news site only, removing all submissions and social media and dumping its previous content in a nearly 12GB torrent on the Internet Archive for posterity and preservation.
A sign of the times perhaps as corporations, many of whom don’t really get emulation and preservation and simply see all enthusiasts as carte blanche thieves continue a legal clamp down on property they don’t even really care about anymore.
While some emulation software like PCSX2 continues to improve its software and boom in popularity, more and more websites are trying to avoid any impending action from copywriter lawyers.
Internet drama
In a post on ROMhacking a spokesperson said, “It’s been a good near 20-year run, but for various reasons, it’s time to wind things down. The site achieved almost everything it set out to do and far exceeded it. We joined hacking and translation communities together for the first time ever. We outlasted and eclipsed ROM hacking sites that came before us. We brought ROM hacking from niche and fragmented to global and centralized. We assembled the largest force of ROM hackers on the planet. We brought learning resources and accessibility to a much wider range of people. We made major progress legitimizing and pulling ROM hacking from underground dark web-type material to something much more accepted by the mainstream. We paved a much easier path for all of those who will come after us. No doubt, this site changed ROM hacking forever. It will leave behind the legacy of those accomplishments to remember.”
You can read the full statement here but it goes on to tell a tale of standard internet bad behaviour and backstabbing. It’s like the Julius Ceasar of the ROM hacking world.
Fans of Romhacking were quick to praise the hard work and dedication of the team and also to bemoan its loss.
“This was the place to be for not only ROM hacks, but also fan translations of games (such as Japanese-to-English, but also Spanish, Russian, and even Latin).
I’m extremely sad to see this great site go, but extremely happy all the ROM hacks have been preserved here for future generations.”
“It feels so weird to see everything you loved on the Internet slowly but surely dying. And it’s not like I was old, I’m only 27, been on the Internet for the last 22 years, and yet every time I see a website I used to use and love finally unplug, it hurts.
I’m glad it will exist on the Internet Archive forever now, farewell to one of the biggest homebrew sites that ever existed.”
“Thank you, so much, for all the love and care that you put into this website over the years. Your efforts helped many of us to find new ways in which we could play old favorites, and to discover gems from other regions that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
Rest easy. We’ll make sure this data doesn’t fade into the aether.”
With hundreds of seeds already the torrent file is set to live on containing the history and hard work of thousands of modders but now those files are no longer easily accessible for people to stumble across a world of gaming history and the home for people who work on these projects will no longer host them.
At the time of writing, downloads are still available and content has been set to read-only. Existing download links will continue to work as long as the content “is supported” and the forum will remain active.
How long any of this will be the case is unknown.
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