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Post subject: Nightcrawler's interview with HG101
PostPosted: Thu Mar 17, 2016 9:55 am 
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Hey. While searching through the recent game article additions at Hardcore Gaming 101 from the past few months I came across this one. They did an interview with Nightcrawler of Transcorp's fame that they put up in early February 2016! Talking about his history of romhacking and how he does the activities within and how he helped set up romhacking.net. The whole lotta.

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/romhac ... erview.htm


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Post subject: Re: Interview with Bobby Vandiver (Red Comet)
PostPosted: Tue May 03, 2016 11:34 pm 
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HG101 now has an interview article, dated late April 2016, with Bobby Vandiver aka RedComet of Twilight Translations' fame, who've done a fair few Megadrive and SNES game translations.

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/romhac ... erview.htm

LOL! Poor him, he was resurrecting his The Amazing Spider-Man: Lethal Foes translation hack when he only realised just after that a second hacker had put up a properly translated hack of that game!

Also, in other news HG101 has put up a brand new Part 1 feature of Nintendo's racing franchise 'F-Zero' with an ample amount of screenshots this early May, 2016!

* EDIT 07/07/2016:
Found this F-Zero (Part 2 of 2) coverage of the original F-Zero feature that I linked up above. It was put up online between the Post Mortem / Still Life feature on May 11, 2016 and Omikron: The Nomad Soul article on May 19, 2016. Be sure to read about that audiovisual delight that is the Gamecube game 'F-Zero GX'. Also check those ridiculous Character Ending FMVs screenshots of all racing characters and read the bottom conclusion on how to unlock a special AX Circuit plus ten new characters and vehicles designed by Sega in the GC version OR even boot them up into the arcade's AX mode!

* EDIT 09/07/2016:
Ooh, found this retrospective (25 Years of Speed – A retrospective on F-Zero - November 21, 2015) but one that focuses on the first F-Zero game on the SNES mainly.


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Post subject: Re: Two interviews with romhackers, one with translating ski
PostPosted: Wed Sep 14, 2016 6:03 pm 
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* I had known about HG101's interview with a classic romhacker named 'FuSoYa' back when it was released online. But I hadn't managed to put it up here partly because I thought it was mainly covering things about FuSoYa's 'Lunar Magic' tool, which lets you to romhack the inners of the Super Mario World SNES game to create new levels, designs and other content into a new hack; therefore becoming an uber-popular editor in the romhacking community still to this day.
BUT, FuSoYa HAS built translation patches for several older RPG and non-RPG games a long time ago, too!

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/fusoya ... erview.htm (July 16, 2016)

If you read the above interview further in it's got nice details about how he found out about the Japanese-only games and got started in the romhacking community. Although he lamented about how many of the older romhacking sites that preceded the likes of Romhacking.net, which involved discussions of the trials and tribulations of the various romhacking and fan-translation groups, had disappeared over time. So it is very good news that this Dynamic Designs group's forum is still alive and kicking to this day and hopefully much longer beyond that. There are interesting anecdotes like how he came up with his tool's naming and his own nickname, which I had forgotten about, from a certain game! This interview was based on email exchanged up to over a year older than the date it was published online, wow!

Spoiler! :
Quote:
I'm really interested in the history of ROM hacking. It's been largely ignored by gaming magazines and news sites, so there isn't a lot of solid info on it. I was wondering what you can tell me about it. When did fans first start to hack video game ROM images? What do you know about different hacking communities, especially older, defunct ones that might not be very well documented? What do you consider to be the community's major milestones?

ROM hacking has probably been around nearly as long as the games themselves, as even Game Genie/Action Replay devices can be used to do minor hacking directly on the consoles. But if you're talking about hacking the ROMs on PC specifically, probably at least as long as the ROM copiers have been around.

A lot of the hacking/translating communities that sprung up hung out on various web forums and IRC. Unfortunately most of the early web forums and sites are long since gone, and memories are rapidly fading about those days. I can't even remember how many translation groups appeared then disappeared back then. The old ROM hack board (the Matt script one) and the CTC [Confederated Translation Center] board in the late 90s are ones that stick out in my mind as being the more interesting places for ROM hacking and translation, which I lurked in for quite a bit. I also remember DES [Dragon Eye Studios] and their forum, if only because that was where I first announced that Lunar Magic was going to be released. There was also CG Games [Challenge Games], which hosted my website for a long while. And Acmlm's forum, which lasted for a long time for both SMW hacking and hacking in general. Then there were the news sites (Zophar's [Domain], SGC [Snakeyes Gaming Corp.], ROMhacking.org, ROMhacking.com, Whirlpool, later cumulating into ROMhacking.net).

FuSoYa worked with Bongo` from here & others on 'Famicom Detective Club Part II'; Gideon Zhi & others on 'Star Fox 2'.


***********************************************************************************************************************************************************************


* http://esotericgaming.com/2016/08/23/ro ... -linachan/ (August 23, 2016)

I was lucky to find this other interview with another famed romhacker, that also had basic Japanese language knowledge, from the past; on Gideon Zhi's Twitter feed dated last month on August 2016. It's a massive interview because it's got a large preface on how the romhacking community really started in the 1990's and early 2000's regarding people's realisation of the existence of many un-localized Japanese-language SFC RPG and other console RPG games and their desires to translate it for the wider world. Lina `Chan was a very brilliant romhacker and made high quality patches with nice fonts, proper VWF insertion and readable text (she's retired now). The next step in the article details her activities with some of the tools she used to romhack a few games with several sample/official pictures of some software, and how she learnt to code on her own.
Quote:
With the help of Nuku and others, and at times joining other groups, Lina managed to complete translation patches for Magic Knight Rayearth, Sailor Moon RPG, Tenchi Muyo! RPG, Cotton Fantastic Dreams, and, after teaming up with Neill Corlett and SoMFreak, Seiken Densetsu 3.


However, unfortunately she has stopped her romhacking hobby a long time ago, but it seems that she's got a protege after her, nicknamed 'Excellence'. But I cannot find any information on that other person. She's left quite a big mark on the game fan-translation community, great! Nice job of her!
Quote:
Ultimately, Lina had to quit the ROM hacking scene. She says that she didn’t lose interest as much as she simply didn’t have time. ... However, Lina feels content in that she managed to leave a mark in the ROM hacking community. She says that she is especially proud of her protégée Christina, who goes by the nickname Excellence, who worked with Lina in some of her translations and has since gained some reputation of her own due to her work in Super Robot Wars.

Lina said that although she could have simply learned Japanese and played the games in their original form, that would have been incredibly selfish. She mentioned that she knew she wanted to play these games and that she knew that there were people who, like herself, wanted to play these games. However, she also knew that many of those individuals did not have the capacity to learn a foreign language from scratch as easily as she could, let alone master the ability of ROM hacking. She thus decided to translate games not just for herself, but for the gaming community as a whole.


Bottom of the 'Closing Comments' section:
Quote:
... if one thing is true, it is that without Lina`Chan, the ROM hacking and translation landscape would be drastically different and greatly impoverished.

Lina`chan collaborated with the aforementioned FuSoYa & others on 'Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon: Another Story'.

Overall I think I enjoyed the first HG101 interview more because it was fairly directly quoted from FuSoYa's answers to the written questions whereas the article with Lina 'Chan was written in third person about her, so it was not as much fun.


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