Introduction Topic

[joyeux]

Hi! I'm just a lurker to most retrogaming related forums, being a veteran in at least one. My first home console was an Atari 2600, which I played from 1985 to 1990, eventually playing some Nintendo in the house of friends. Then I went through most Sega consoles, Master System, Mega Drive, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast... And then I got back to Sega CD, 32X and Game Gear. Finally I went on to discover all I had lost in the SNES and then 3DO. Nowadays I own all the consoles I listed, and I have flash carts for MD, SMS, Atari and SNES! I registered here, initially, for just one purpose, to ask for a specific rom hacking, because my hacking skills sucks!

I also would like to say I appreciate romhacking.net a lot, and constantly check the amazing new hacks!

Thanks for the opportunity!

[HowlingWolf14]

Hey everyone. My name is HowlingWolf14. I've been lurking on here for a while and have decided to finally make an account. I'm 14 and I've been using emulators since I was 9/10 yrs old when I signed up for Vizzed. Eventually I started downloading emulators and Roms and I found out about this site about a year ago. I haven't hacked anything before except for editing text poorly(on Action 52) from tutorials I've read online and on here. I been wanting to learn how to translate roms and wanted to start on something with little text to get the hang of it. My favorite retro game system is the PS1 and SNES and my favorite type of games are JRPG's. The system I would like to try to start on is an old one like the NES or the Game Boy. Also, I wanted to know if the Wonderswan was hard to hack?

[Pennywise]

Welcome to the forums. I will tell you that hacking the NES and GB are some of the easiest systems to hack because of the availability of information and excellent emulators and debuggers. FCEUX is your one-stop shop for all your NES hacking needs. BGB also comes highly recommended from me for GB hacking.

As for the Wonderswan, I'm pretty sure it's fairly obscure and a lot of information is probably in Japanese for it. This means that there's not going to be a lot of technical info out there and hacking options will be limited. This makes translating a game harder than it has to be.

Now for some general advice from me.

If you don't know the hacking basics yet, check out the getting started section of the site and read up on pointers, text editing etc. Games like the original Final Fantasy and Zelda are good examples to learn on.

After the basics comes the more advanced stuff like learning how to use a debugger and learning assembly. This comes in handy when you want to remove limitations that force you to shorten your translation.

Learn how to use programs such as Cartographer, Atlas or even Kruptar. They are generic programs that allow you to extract text from a game and reinsert your translation back in with a click of the button. A lot of people new to hacking do everything manually through a hex editor which is very time consuming.

Also if you're going to translate games, please don't use a machine translator like Google Translate unless for it's for really basic stuff. Most people in the community frown upon that sort of thing.

Lastly, if you're serious about translating games, be prepared for a long-term commitment to the hobby. It took me several years to understand what I was doing and several more to get to the point where I am now. This hobby can be very difficult and time consuming.

[HowlingWolf14]

Thanks! FCEUX is actually the Emulator I use for playing NES Roms. And I would never use Google Translate.

[yoyotheyoshi]

I suppose that since I've had an account here for a short while and I've been involved in the emulation community for quite some time, I should make a post here.

I've been involved in the emulation community for a good long while now, I'd say since 2001. I started with a long-forgotten (perhaps not, by some) page called Atariland. Since then I've jumped page to page, started collecting retro titles (truth be told, I have been since the 90's, but I guess the right way to put it is that I've been taking collecting more seriously since near 15 years ago), hanging around emulation pages, dabbling in ROM hacks, meeting people and contributing in any way that I can, even down to just simple screenshots or reviews/comments on games and hacks, and I'm very happy to be a part of this wonderful community.

I love how often RH.net updates, how involved the community is and the ever-expanding library of useful tools, translations, hacks and so forth and it's been my favorite website related to the subject since I discovered it a few years back. I visit almost daily and always find something new to play with.

Thanks to everyone who contributes for keeping me coming as often as I do and always having something new to try out, and making this place as superb as it is.

[Negative Hippie]

Hi, I joined this forum to ask about the difficulty involved in doing some certain tweaks of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance to increase the pacing of text and gameplay (the poor pace really holds the game back for me! ). The reason I came to the website in general was because I've played so many retro games that I was hoping I could find some really solid games that feel a lot like the classics did.

Something I was looking for in particular is games that have a more balanced difficulty level. I like "Kaizo"-level games to an extent, but they're for a different kind of mood, and I was hoping I could get some recommendations for ROM hacks that are easier, as easy/difficult, or slightly more difficult than the game they are based on. So again, not implying that people who make super hard games aren't making something of value, just that what I'm looking for is something closer to the challenge of the original game. I didn't know where else to make this request, so I figured it fit here.

[Akazukin]

Hello, I'm Akazukin. Nice to meet you all. I enjoy most games but I particularly like old retro games that I grew up with.

[noize]

Hi. I am the 'noize' that the madhacker thanked in his guide to NES pointers. I wrote the FF1Edit savestate editor about a hundred years ago. I helped to found Translation Revelations - which burned out very quickly (or perhaps that was only my participation). Back then I remember looking at shufflepuck cafe, contra/gryzor and musashi. Now, I'll try to payback the community that taught me the art of programming.

Thanks for reading.

[Gideon Zhi]

Hi. I am the 'noize' that the madhacker thanked in his guide to NES pointers. I wrote the FF1Edit savestate editor about a hundred years ago. I helped to found Translation Revelations - which burned out very quickly (or perhaps that was only my participation). Back then I remember looking at shufflepuck cafe, contra/gryzor and musashi. Now, I'll try to payback the community that taught me the art of programming.

Thanks for reading.

Neat! I cut my teeth on the madhacker's document, and though I now have enough experience in me to know that it's filled with enormous amounts of misinformation, it still helped me get on my feet. Barely remember any of it though

Welcome (back?)!

[caminopreacher]

I'm Caminopreacher. I enjoy classic rock, classic games and classic cars (had three El Caminos).
I am a HUGE Castlevania fan. I got into it a bit late, but since I played Dracula's Curse, I have
beaten every title. My children WILL play the older games so they will understand and appreciate
the privilege of being able to change jumping directions in mid air...Old games made you commit!
I digress. I'm currently working on changing Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance around. I love the
gameplay, but the sprite coloring (especially the bright outlines on the two main characters) make
it look likt they were literally copied and pasted from something a different game. Also, some of the
dialogue are painful to read. That can be partially blamed on translation, but I'm hopefully going to
edit the entire story eventually. Just messing with Text and palettes, not getting into changing game-
play...

[BigTarantula99]

Bonsoir!  I'm BigT, H, or BigTarantula99, whichever you prefer.  I love software development, coding, and learning new code.  I am also a great fan of Nintendo and Mario, Kirby, and especially Zelda.  I own a site dedicated to Zeldahacking known as btri and I just submitted a link to it here; currently waiting for it to be moderated.

Anyway, I'll try to be somewhat active on these here forums and possibly the IRC.  I've also been a fellow SMWCentral user for some time now.  I have such a like for ROMhacking that I couldn't resist signing up for the main "hub" of all ROMhacking right here.

See yas around!

[gc8tech]

Hey All,

I'm new to the board.. But not new to retro games and systems.. I'm more of a sega guy, But have a soft spot for Nintendo aswell.

I'm a huge fan of the "wars" series on many Nintendo consults. I have even started a Jap To Eng translation on "Super Famicom Wars".. As it the only one left with out a translation... My hope is to full translate it.. Then build a flash or prom snes cart and play it in english on a real SNES... I'm not making a "repoduction".. as the english translated version won't be a 1 to 1 anyway. I have a thread on here with my progress

Looking forward to translatting it more... and release the IPS for testing at some stage.

D.

[Mr. Worm]

Hey everyone!
I'm Mr. Worm -- but you can call me Worm or Wormy if you want.
I work for an international logistics company in the United States. Our headquarters is in Japan, and most of our customers are US affiliates of Japanese companies. So, I do converse in Japanese quite a bit -- mainly via email, but I can manage over the phone for simple things.
I enjoy translating Japanese into English, so I'm hoping to learn a bit about ROM hacking...or maybe team up with people who have technical know-how, but lack Japanese language skills.

[Shiryu]

Greetings everyone.

I am know as Shiryu on the web and I live in Lisbon, Portugal. I have been an adept of emulation and retro-gaming all the way back to 1996 and it was in fact the very first topic I looked up when I first went on the Internet. Websites like Zophar's Domain became regular stops back in those days, days of discovery and very fast emulation evolution, with new versions of emulators coming out almost weekly supporting brand new features. I have been lurking around Romhacking.net ever since the site began, but my usually very busy life keeps me away from the forum until yesterday, when I decided to give a hand to tryphon beta testing his Psy-O-Blade English translation patch.

But why so busy, you might wonder? Well, besides my "real" work as an IT professional, I run my Youtube channel since 2006 focused mostly on retro-gaming (and raising awareness for completed translations projects) and my other hobby... or should I call it passion?

Music. I love music. I am but a newbie, but that hasn't stopped me from releasing music for free for the past 15 years. Under the label Shiryu Music I have been making both original  and video game remix/covers and releasing them for free. After much pressure from family and friends, last year I opened up shop at Bandcamp, but all my releases remains absolutely free so I hope you have fun discovering my stuff.

Since early this year, I have also became an author at Kotaku TAY, the user run sub-blog of Kotaku. A lot of people immediately turn away from it because of Kotaku's reputation, but this user blog is written not by professional journalists, but regular unpayed gamers like you and me. Ever since becoming an author there, I do my best to keep people informed of any new translation project that surface on my "Now In English" segment. It's been a ton of work, but I quite enjoy the experience.

I sadly never acquired the programming skills in college I hoped, because I would love to help out people in this forum. I've always been more into the artist part of things. Speaking of time, I am super excited with the progress people are making with byuu's MSU1 expansion chip and hope to one day have some of my SNES favourite games like F-Zero, ActRaiser, Sim City and many others playing to the sound of my orchestral covers! Please contact me if you're interested in doing this!

Well, I think that covers everything. Thanks for reading up to this point. When not at work, you can usually find me playing Wii U, Super Nintendo or working on my next music album.

Oh and my "holy grail" of English translations in case you're wondering is the SNES adaptation of my favourite anime of all time: Legend of Galactic Heroes (Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu). After all these years, I still don't understand how to play this!

Catch you on the bounce.

[arshes91]

Hi im arshes91 i like videogames and also play hack roms lately, i love  Romhack.net i checks last moded roms here i also a bit of knowlege moding resources such as texture replaces into a Hight Quality formula ive done in Pokemon Stadium 2 for nintendo 64. i hope i good place to talk hacking stuff and i hope to learning hacking resources here.

[UnDisbeliever]

Hi, I'm The UnDisbelever.

I have been wanting to develop a SNES game engine for a decade now and have finally have the free time and motivation to start such a long project.

I've previously attempted such a thing, but it never came to anything due to University Stress. I'm starting from scratch this time as I cannot understand my code from 5 years ago and I have lost my notebooks.

Thus I am setting up some webspace and creating a wiki where I hope to document the techniques I use to create the code. I've found that typing up the second design (even if it is just dot points, data structures and flow charts) helps minimises bad design choices.

I have managed motivate myself to preform ~10 hours work a week for the last 7 weeks on the project.

So far I have:

• Structure Macros
• A Fixed size text routines
• Multiplication and Division
• A demo of The Game of Life

This week I am setting up a wiki and some webspace to document my progress and publish the code. Next week I plan on coding more macros for things like DMA and PPU initialization.

Sometime in the future I may ask for opinions about how I should tackle parts of the project. But I think I'm ok for now.

[alcoatjez]

Hi all,

I'm alcoatjez, new to this board, but into emulation for about 16 years now. I use this site a lot, since I'm a sucker for Super Famicom translations. I'm trying a lot of them ATM, so I mainly made an account to submit some missing information on the website. These are small things, like should a ROM have a header or not.

I would also like to thanks all translators and hackers for the wonderful work they have done

[90s Retro Gamer]

Hey Bros,

I'm new here my name is 90s Retro Gamer. I don't really play video games much anymore but I find rom-hacking and romhacking.net very fascinating. I grew up playing 90s video games.

Anyway I registered an account here so I can submit content. I noticed that you guys don't have the Banjo Backpack utility in the n64 section which is odd considering it's been out for 1 or 2 years.

In the future I would like to compile a list of ALL the romhacking resource sites so that we have one database.

For example, there's supermariocentral.net and info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_Hacks
For some reason there's hacks there that are not here, I'm assuming no one submitted them? So I will do that.

-90s RetroGamer

PS: I also like Doom WADS and the Doom community at Doomworld and Zandronum.  I guess they don't count as romhacks but I kind of put them in the same family of "90s game mods"

[Rahky]

Howdy folks,

Name's Rahky, and while I love video games and have played them for 20 years by now (and have been goofing around with emulators for about... 9ish) I have to admit I'm basically coming in here blind, I don't know a thing about ROM-hacking. I do, however, know Japanese, and am hoping to be able to explore this place a bit and try to learn more about fan-translations and the inner workings thereof, and stuff like that. I've studied Japanese for around 8 years and majored in it, as well as Chinese and Arabic, but Japanese is what I hope to work with and improve the most, and what better way to work on it than through a medium I love? That's what I'm hoping, anyway. I've done a tiny bit if fan-lation, I ended up coming into the tail-end of the Ace Attorney Investigations 2 localization effort, so it wasn't a ton, but it was something. I took a freelance translation test for Square-Enix as well, though in the end I didn't make the cut, so I'm hoping I can find a niche here where I can hone that skill. I work as English/Japanese IT support right now so I'm exposed to the spoken language, I play Japanese ROMs of SNES and GBA games a good bit, so I'm exposed to the language and learn new stuff pretty regularly, so yeah, I'm basically just a guy who loves video games and languages and wants to find a way to help out and get better at the stuff I love.

Thanks for reading! Hope to get to interact more with you all soon.

[flame]

Hello.
I have been doing this less than a year.
I worked with more experienced folks on Brandish the Dark Revenant PSP (dropped, patch released).
I worked more on my own with Zero no Kiseki (in progress) and Nayuta no Kiseki (in progress, patch released).
For Nayuta no Kiseki, I did more than 95% of the work, although that number will go down as I get help for the parts I can't do.

I made this account to ask for help with Nayuta no Kiseki, which will be posted in a separate topic.