ROMhacking.net Moves to News Only, Database and File Archive Released to Internet Archive

kugmo@sh.itjust.works to RetroGaming@lemmy.world – 178 points –
romhacking.net

RHDN is dead. RIP.

31

This is a real bummer. The hacks will say up, but no new uploads. At least there'll be people who still make rom hacks, though. (I hope they don't all operate on Discord.)

Yeah, the ideal outcome is someone using the site dump on Archive.org to create a sucessor site. The longer it takes to get done, the more people will rely on Dicord to host romhacks, which is terrible for discoverability.

Hopefully any new site keeps the high standards romhacking dot net upheld; it's way too easy to make a hack that unintentionally breaks other things in a game.

Regarding Discord, its un-openness to the 'net at large is definitely a prominent issue. But another problem (based on my limited experience) is that its people just aren't very friendly. It's like a large portion of them are annoyed at having to interact with other people. I don't know why that is or even if it's true, but that's the feeling I got from it.

I wonder if anybody would be interested in running a Lemmy community for them.

I'm glad everything has been archived. Where are people going to share rom hacks now? Super Mario 64 and Super Mario World stuff have their own website. Niche things are going to be harder to find.

Probably discord where they can be memory-holed automatically since it's such a terrible platform.

God, I fucking hate how small communities gravitate to Discord. It's such a trash platform for a complete community package, but everyone uses it because it's free. It'd be a lot better if communities just relied on it for chat, but no, critical information is left in ever expanding chat logs, and participation in any capacity at all requires explicitly joining.

And the client apps gradually get worse and worse.

https://bsky.app/profile/gideonzhi.bsky.social/post/3kypgqcah6k2p

Gideon Zhi has some more context on Bluesky. Sounds like the main (only) admin made things… difficult.

Here’s a post that goes more in depth at the shut down and it refutes the accusations of doxxing. https://x.com/gideonzhi/status/1819215914988196204

Seems like the discord community was helping make the site more resilient since it would often go down and stay down for days because only one person could bring it back up and no one could contact him. They also were going to reduce the costs by a lot and foot the bill. Seems like this was shut down by an overzealous ruler not anything else.

Sorry its a xitter link but its the only place theyve posted.

Aw man. At least it's archived.

So what happens if the Internet Archive goes away?

That would be like losing the Library of Alexandria all over again.

We need to archive the archive, and maybe have it in the middle of international waters.

Prevent it from being lost by seeding the torrent. (All Internet Archive items automatically have one.)

Fucking Nintendo

For once, it doesn't sound like Nintendo had anything to do with this one. Seems to have been some kind of internal conflict within the community.

With Discord and Twitter communities? I wonder how that happened!

My feelings are more so directed at this environment that Nintendo has fostered; maybe they didn’t have any direct involvement in this situation, but their constant litigations are fanning the flames and it’s depressing seeing this news so often. Their constant involvement is making this worse and more prevalent.

The increased police presence may not be the main reason your plug decides to leave, it may be because he’s losing customers, but having the increased police activity will still contribute to his final decision to leave the area.

It has nothing to do with Nintendo or litigation.

should also blame apple for the wave of emulators which no doubt saw a rise in downloading roms.

From what I have seen, it may be a good time to start an open source initiative for a new site. I'd love to hear about what projects you are working on!

Ok....how can the Fediverse can help?

Well... I'm glad I grabbed the translation patches for Metal Max two and three earlier this week.