Hey guys n gals,

Please hear me out before setting my topic alight with your flames and allowing it to burn to a rotten ember before being locked/deleted for eternity.

I'm writing a few tutorials covering some of the very basics in ROM hacking, some of the very simple stuff that I found hard as a noob which I either couldn't find information on, felt was too foolish to ask about or that got me ridiculed for asking about / suggesting. I know a lot of you will already be thinking *great another tutorial that doesn't go beyond the basics* but I think my tutorials and style of teaching will be helpful to a lot of people and they defiantly help me cement my knowledge whilst I write them. Also I spent two years at university level studying to be a teacher and then changed at third to study computer science instead so I think I'm in a pretty good position to be doing what I'm doing

I'm at the point now where I am just discussing getting an emulator, a rom and a hex editor and explaining what each of these things are and I'm wanting to point out to anyone watching that the requesting of ROMs is generally frowned upon in the ROM hacking community so that hopefully they won't come flying in here asking for every game under the sun. Now here's the thing, I'm interested in why this is considered such a bad practice? I'm most likely going to answer my own question with my thoughts on the matter but I'd really like to hear it from you guys that have been on the scene for a long time and perhaps even the mods/owner of the site if they don't mind contributing their thoughts?

My understanding is that there are several reasons behind it namely:

1.\tYou are meant to be a ROM Hacker and hence you are meant to be smart. If you can’t find a ROM on the internet then ROM hacking really isn’t for you.
2.\tThe whole copyright thing.
3.\tYou don’t want the forum covered in “Where can I download XXX ROM???”

Have I pretty much hit the nail on the head there or is there more to it? I’m really interested in this whole phenomenon because from my experience it is something that crosses well beyond RHDN and into many other ROM hacking sites so much so that I am even cautious about mentioning where such files are available from in my own tutorials.

So can anyone enlighten me on what the issue is and advise me as to why I should or should not mention XYZ.com as a good site for getting ROMs in my tutorials?

Even if there is not one single rule that everyone follows I’m interested in hearing the answers from a range of the community members so please post away, long or short answers I’ll read them all and respond to any questions/comments.

Thanks.

You got the big reasons down.

All you should put in your tutorial is something along the lines of, "Go to your perferred internet search engine and search for 'xxx rom'." 

Sites can/will go down due to any number of reasons.  Having a dead link in a guide helps nobody when you're trying to teach something to someone.

A very useable workaround to the copyright issue is to work with games that are public domain. This could allow you to teach in a manner that's completely legal, and supposing that the site you link to only carries public domain games; you would kill two birds with one stone.

Edit: The other aspect is something unique to the culture of romhacking; emulators and ROMs were not always commonplace, and there was (and may still be) massive influxes of people asking where to aquire such and such. On this board at least, that massive influx would lead to expended bandwidth, in a completely wasted manner. 

It comes down to the fact that the question is: annoying, been asked and answered repeatidly, eats up resources wastefully, and again is generally annoying.

http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php/topic,658.0.html

Mind, the ROMs link provided is a "Let Me Google That For You". But the principle still stands.

We did that, but people began posting links to ROMs/ISOs for current systems (which, aside from the moral concerns of encouraging piracy of modern games, is a much bigger risk of legal action).

As long as we're on the subject, why don't more readmes include something along the lines of "This patch should be applied to a ROM with a size of blah and a CRC32/MD5/SHA-1 of whatever" ?  Seems to me it would save a lot of trouble.

That's why Breath of Fire 2 requires an unheadered ROM. I could not freakin' find the particular header version that d4s used - well, I did, eventually, but it sucked having to find it. This way, any U.S. BoF2 ROM will work; you just have to strip the header first.

It's not as simple as slapping 512 bytes to the beginning of the ROM?
(not that I encourage it. Unneeded (except when using a copier) and bug-inducing. )