I disagree with your premise about violation of the Berne Convention.
On what do you base such a premise ?

While the USA's DMCA may be violated through the reverse-engineering of works, the Berne Convention is not.
Nor is it violated in the case of "derivative works" based on an original game.
However, if you choose to redistribute the original work rather than a patch, or duplicate significant portions of the original work and distribute it as your own, then you could be found to be in violation.

I keep thinking of a giant reply for this, but unfortunately it's incoherent and scattered. It basically boils down to this: far too many people think they are entitled to do whatever the hell they want. This community is a giant honor system (and here I thought honor was dead, for the most part it is still).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Artistic_Works

"As soon as a work is "fixed", that is, written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically entitled to all copyrights in the work, and to any derivative works unless and until the author explicitly disclaims them, or until the copyright expires."

The key word here is derivative works, as that includes translations. Only the copyright holder has the right to translate the work, or grant those rights to others. This law is rather well known, I'm surprised some were not aware of its validity in our case, given what we do for a hobby ...


That's pretty much the only valid argument I could come up with. Honor amongst our pack, to hell with the corporations. An invalid philosophical stance, sadly. Which makes our actions hypocritical (and yes, that includes myself), as unfriendly a term as that is.

We cannot both say we respect the rights of authors, and subsequently choose to ignore the rights of others, based on criteria such as the size of the group involved in the project. That is an unfair bias, no matter how faceless corporations may appear to be.

I'm meaning this as kind of an "all or none", thing.


That doesn't really change anything. There has to be a copyright holder if it is not in the public domain. It can be very hard to track them down, but by law, that isn't their problem.

It is unfortunate that it becomes unbelievably difficult for us to even try to translate a work, given the way our legal system currently works.


Of course the companies would not. My question was more, "why are we special?"
We don't care if companies say no, we hack their games anyway. But if another ROM hacker says no ... it's off limits ...


Of course not. Virtually everyone wants recognition for their work, no matter how minor. The only exception being PD works, which are unbelievably scarce. But why is a corporation less entitled to this courtesy than a ROM hacker who "defaced" their hard work in the first place? Because they aren't individuals?

So what about translations of small PC games written by individuals who don't want their work translated? That would be off limits, then, because he is an individual?


Yeah, again, basically what I've summarized. We're cool with respecting and protecting ourselves as a group, but that doesn't extend to corporations. Kind of a social network of sorts.

In other words, we don't really have any valid, legal claims that promote what we do. We do it out of our own ideals and selectively choose who gets special priveleges and who doesn't.

I don't have a problem with this, and in fact it's quite admirable that we all work together like this. As technically, nobody is required to. Nobody unofficially translating a copyrighted work can claim any rights to their creations, as it is an unauthorized derivative work. Yet we attempt to avoid this and shun those who don't, ala pack loyalty.

It is still interesting to think about, though. I prefer to be as "all or none" as possible, to avoid the trappings of biasing and discriminating against others unfairly. But this is one area where I'm pretty much the same way. I don't have a problem modifying NCS / Masaya's work, but the thought of people modifying my work is somehow unsettling to me. And that makes me hypocritical. Say one thing, do another. It kind of upsets me that my best justification is to say that that's just the way things are, and rely on group loyalty to protect me from exactly what I have already done to NCS / Masaya's work.


God, I have a passionate disinterest for Terminus*, too. That's actually the number one reason we were so protective of Der Langrisser. Heh, even if they get through it, they'll be in for a nice surprise since our English game absolutely packs every last ounce of space from VRAM in every single text system. They'd have to rewrite everything to expand the widths of anything at all, add extra characters, anything. They're better off redoing the game themselves than attempting to modify our work. But they'll probably steal out script anyway.

But yeah, my point was ... why was it okay for you to translate the game from Japanese to English without asking permission, but not okay for Terminus to translate your work to French without asking? That's what I can't answer myself.

* - My problem with Terminus isn't that they translate stuff to French. It's the shitty ass job they do. We all know how the scene works. Once something is done once, nobody ever wants to do it again. And the community does not give any support to anyone to retranslate an already translated game. Ever. Translating from Japanese->English->French obviously loses a lot of context and meaning compared to Japanese->French. Second, they just hack like children.

Let me give an example, but kind of reversed a bit.

http://www.romhacking.net/trans/283/
Here's a project where the authors were simply too impatient to wait for Bahamut Lagoon to be translated properly. So they took a Japanese->French Terminus product, hacked it poorly to support English, and translated the French->English. The result? An incoherent, buggy, hideous piece of shit. It pains me to know that some people played BL with their work, and thusly missed out on what a wonderful game BL is. Sure, DeJap came through and released their version later on ... but that didn't stop a lot of impatient people from playing that shit.

I would be very much upset if our work on DL were ported and hacked to shreds like that linked patch was. To me, I'd rather the French hack DL from scratch, so that they do it right. Yes, it will take longer. But the best things in life are worth waiting for.

Kind of a funny sidenote, Terminus actually bragged that they finished BL before it was released in English. Yeah, no kidding. If we wanted to langfand00d BL, we could've beaten them. Instead, we wanted to guarantee a certain level of quality, which took more time.

Ah! I really like this argument. So basically, the act of translating from a source material to a new language that the original author refused to translate or allow to be translated within a reasonable time period is fair grounds. But attempting to take the already translated script is frowned upon, as that obviously causes great harm to the original script, which is exacerabated by the human nature to greatly frown upon doing something that was already done, even when intending to do it better.

I suppose that's the best answer I'm going to get, and it makes a fairly compelling stance to argue against others building on top of your work, when yours was built on top of someone else's to begin with. Thank you for the input.

... er. What? o_O

My main concern is with the quality of the resulting translation. It's, to use an example we used at school, like trying to translate the Bible.

Imagine we have the original version, and then someone made an English translation of the original version. Then someone shows up, and he or she wants to translate it to Russian; but he or she doesn't want to base the translation off the original manuscript (due to monetary concerns, or just because they're lazy), so they'll translate the English version instead. Lots of details will be lost in this second-hand translation because they don't want to do this from the source materials. That is what I meant.

I have no idea why you replied in that way, to be honest. I thought I was clear, and I sure as hell didn't think I said anything that would warrant such a reply. o_O

I understand exactly what you meant, and I'm agreeing with you.


Or in other words, "A translation from the source material is better than a translation of a translation of the source material." -- which is common sense.

I go on to state that this is one good reason to state that you don't want people to make derivative works, because you don't want them to translate your translation, instead you want them to use the source material. This is the part that differs from your opinion, as you don't care if it's double translated, so long as they talk to you and the translation meets your approval first.

Sorry if I threw you for a loop. I wasn't implying that you were justifying a no-derivative license. Merely that the problem you have with others taking your work is the same one I have, though we take different steps to avoid the problem.


Very unlikely. A person capable of finishing a game would most likely prefer to finish it themselves. Then you can claim full credit (and responsibility) for the resulting work.

I didn't bother with alamone's DL tools because I knew I could do better. There was no point wasting my time with them.

But, it does happen. DMM took my DQ3r tools, we'll see how far he gets with his translation. Compared to Chris' speed, I think he stands a good chance of finishing first.

The key here is that if the tools were made by someone more experienced, they will be useful to those less experienced, and not vice versa. Again, kind of stating the obvious there. If anything, I'd say just don't index "junk", like an uncompressed bog-standard 2bpp 8x8 font hack ;)
Instead, require at least a certain level of skill to accept the contribution.

At the very least, they're very useful references for people to see how others work, and solve problems like 8x8 VWF engines. I think my Daikai tools are the first publically released 8x8 VWF routines, but I could be mistaken. They're pretty trivial, they just throw one additional hurdle in the way: the management of tilemaps that can often be written during different frames than the tiledata.


The scene has stabbed me in the back a large number of times, thusly I am very jaded. I no longer wish to get involved with others in projects I know I cannot possibly finish on my own. That way, if the project fails, I have only myself to blame. And I know my work won't go to waste, like the work I did on Daikai, hoping a translator would show up.

That said, I really have little interest in ROM hacking anymore, as I seem to be completely incapable of learning Japanese :(

It is also more satisfying knowing you did something yourself, without the help of others. But that said, I myself don't mind collaborating when I know the assistance isn't strictly needed. Lots of people have donated code to bsnes, including blargg and his entire S-DSP emulator. Such things are very much appreciated, but I know that if I absolutely had to, I could implement it myself. No, it would not be as good -- but I could do it. I most likely wouldn't have started on the emulator if I didn't think I could do it all myself, hoping that someone else would come along and generously donate required pieces of code to me.

On things like a ROM hack, though ... that's such a small project that I don't see a need to collaborate with others. It would honestly just complicate matters more -- what if you both hooked the same routine but for different purposes? The actual ROM hacking, when I'm really going at it, only takes me a few months to complete. DQ5 took me ~2 months, for instance. DL took so damn long because it was stop for 6 months, go for 2 weeks, stop for 8 months, go for 3 weeks. 4 months later, "oh by the way you need to hack this", 6 months after that "oh, you still haven't done that?" -- very annoying.


You can't claim copyright over an illegal work. The work is still just as illegal if someone takes your work and uses it themselves -- no more, no less.

I can see the conflict... it's not so much an approval, but more of a "I can give you all the stuff I used and even explain how I did some things so you can do it better" uh, thing.

There is one exception, though.

I think someone contacted me regarding Akumajou Densetsu. They wanted to translate the game to another language. I'm fine with that, but I'm not so sure about BMF54123's title screen. He designed it, and he hacked it into the game, so I can't just give it out. They have to ask him if they can use it. And what about custom utilities? Will the authors of those programs let me give them to someone else?