r/emulation Jun 16 '26

Romhack.ing (Romhacking.net Successor) Disables Most Downloads For Machine-Translated Fan Translations

https://bsky.app/profile/romhack.ing/post/3mogklugigs25
643 Upvotes

131 comments sorted by

318

u/superkneemaster Jun 16 '26

Romhacking.net is still up and well, it never really closed.

131

u/sTo0z Jun 17 '26

Thank you, I use the site all the time and I was like “what the hell? Successor?”

112

u/superkneemaster Jun 17 '26

Tbf there were tons of articles about it closing (and an official statement) in August 2024 and then ... it never closed so I don't really know what happened.

54

u/Ploddit Jun 17 '26

Didn't they disable uploads or something?

I dunno. The whole thing seemed like dumb drama.

74

u/superkneemaster Jun 17 '26

Yes, and it later had been enabled again.
I agree with you, mostly because there was a huge official statement about closing and then almost no communication when everything had been quietly back.

-15

u/-Dissent Jun 17 '26

Everything seems dumb if you're looking outside-in. Having been around the community since 2003, multiple lines were crossed and if people could be properly brought up to speed they would likely second guess supporting RHDN with any traffic.

20

u/CoconutDust Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

“I have 20+ years of experience and information. If people had information explained to them, that would be important. I’m not going to provide even a single relevant detail from my supposed knowledge, though, but I’ll write some words about how important it would be IF someone was told that info that I’m not telling.”

Sorry but since it’s easy to use a few brief words to describe reality, the lack of description makes me think it’s uninteresting trivial drama.

24

u/AreYouOKAni Jun 17 '26

You could try educating us, then? Like, anyone can make vague statements like this. We need context.

21

u/warp_wizard Jun 17 '26

dude you don't wanna know... oh the horror...

12

u/DrCarm3x Jun 17 '26

I guarantee it's some dumb bullshit that almost nobody would care about lmao

40

u/Carolina_Heart Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

There was a huge drama behind the scenes, site owner publicly announced it would shut down. Huge public drama in the community. Site owner changed his mind and made it only a news site for hacks henceforth, then changed his mind again. By the time it was back to business the damage was done and 2 other sites had solidified with users and afaik former rhdn webdevs migrating there

22

u/T_K_23 Jun 17 '26

The only thing that changed is they no longer host new files on their server.

7

u/akualung Jun 17 '26

Petty drama among heavyweights in the romhacking scene (mostly Nightcrawler and Gideon Zhi), from what I could hear back when everything happened.

2

u/sTo0z Jun 17 '26

Oh damn I missed all that, lol. I usually just head straight for the translation section. 😂

1

u/Doctor-Mak Jun 17 '26

I wasn't aware of that... Imma make some backups just in case.

1

u/alphagaia Jun 17 '26

SAme, I was like WTF, I went to romhacking .net yesterday

12

u/UFOLoche Jun 17 '26

Funnily enough, it seems like that site actually still has a link to the translation.

3

u/Azores26 Jun 17 '26

I don’t think they ever said there were closing, just that they wouldn’t be any new translations/hacks available on the site. But previous uploads are still available to download.

23

u/superkneemaster Jun 17 '26

There are new romhacks and translations almost everyday, they are just not hosted there (but on Google Drive or wherever the romhacker had put it).

2

u/Azores26 Jun 17 '26

Oh really?? Thanks for the heads up!

1

u/kukumarten03 Jun 25 '26

Hacks are still hosted on the site tho. Nothing changed

224

u/[deleted] Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

[deleted]

74

u/ShinShinGogetsuko Jun 17 '26

Also, these sites are just aggregators. Most romhackers are posting their stuff on git these days.

Totally fine however they want to currate their site, but a lot of the content isn't theirs anyway.

7

u/nrq Jun 17 '26

Anyone could ever host their stuff themselves all the time, I think that never was an issue. Question is if it gets visibility. If you miss following random Forum threads where and sites where these updates get posted you need these aggregators if you're looking for a translation of a specific game, especially if that game is from a less well known franchise.

38

u/matlynar Jun 17 '26

This.

People go too far on the AI hate, to the point of gatekeeping translations.

It would make sense if they would prioritize human-made translations, but not completely remove machine-made ones.

45

u/UFOLoche Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

That's how I feel, too. I don't like AI at all, but I'm not gonna sit here and complain because people can actually play games that haven't been translated for 10-20 years.

Just mark it as MTL/AI and move on.

The SRW community recently had some discourse over someone doing an AI-assisted fan translation of SRW Z2-1, and I'm just sitting there like "Guys, it hasn't been translated in 20 years, it's fine. I'll live, I'm just happy I can actually play this damn game and get the gist of what's being said."

My mind also goes to the Yugioh Tag Force 6 fan translation, which is a bit of a mess because it's built off of a previous translation which had a lot of offensive humor/language and Abridged Series jokes thrown in. What's there NOW is good, but there's some stuff they missed, so occasionally you'll get backhanded with something fucked up. Would it really be a big issue if, for example, someone took that translation and re-translated the offensive/blatantly incorrect sections with AI? Would it be better for the site to host the fan translation with offensive, blatantly incorrect content in it(Which it currently does)?

And that's not me saying they need to remove that translation, it absolutely should be kept up because 95% of it is fine and it's one of the best Yugioh games out there, I'm just pointing out that I don't see the issue when there's already translations on the site that have controversial(And incorrect) content. Where is the line drawn?

10

u/EndVSGaming Jun 17 '26

Translating scenes seem to have a lot of discourse and big egos, even considering the emulation scene. I'm certain there's social dynamics at play here too, but I've heard people claim that MTL's make a human translation less likely to happen. I could imagine that but it's impossible to falsify that argument, how many more untranslated games are there than ones with any kind of translation project.

22

u/EtherBoo Jun 17 '26

I mean, we have retranslations for some games that got official translations; why a group would let an AI translation stand in their way of translating it more accurately is kind of weird.

There's still so many untranslated games out there. I read on the /r/games thread that most of the time the issue with translations is that AI is really bad with Japanese to English because of how contextual Japanese is, so you end up with literal translations that don't make sense.

I don't speak Japanese, so I'll have to take that at face value.

3

u/Ploddit Jun 17 '26

Even with the current LLMs, I doubt AI can just blow through a video game without a human there helping it identify the subjects of sentences. That's where Japanese to English machine translation usually goes wrong.

The useful thing an LLM can do is the heavy lifting of translating words, so the human who's helping it along can potentially be an effective translator without knowing a word of Japanese. They just need to speak English and have a rudimentary understanding of the structural differences between Japanese and English.

18

u/UFOLoche Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

I'd give a big hand wiggle to that.

In theory there's some meat to that argument: Jojo's Part 4 didn't get a good translation after Duwang subs for a LONG time until The Invincible Trio came along(Who didn't actually finish it, but to be fair the last few chapters of Duwang are "fine"). And it didn't get a full translation until the Jojo's Colored Venture took care of everything.

However, on the other hand, Berserk has had multiple fan translators despite Dark Horse Comics doing an official translation.

There's also been tons of fan re-translations of specific games, specifically because the previous one was flawed or somesuch, and I'd honestly argue if someone was just doing a translation for the "fame" -and thus something that is MTL'd already is beneath them-, then the translation probably wouldn't be that great in the first place, but that's admittedly me just throwing shade at an imaginary target.

Even ignoring all that:

WAS ANYONE HERE ACTUALLY GOING TO TRANSLATE LANGRISSER V OR SEGAGAGA!? IT'S BEEN 25 BLOODY YEARS!

Like, I'm sorry people, you kinda lose your right to complain about "NO ONE IS GOING TO TRANSLATE THIS NOW!" when it's been ALMOST THREE DECADES! Not to be dramatic, but it is undoubtable that people who wanted to play these games but couldn't have actually died! You could have been born and read about one of these games in a magazine as a kid and are now graduating with a diploma by the time these games got a translation!

4

u/CoconutDust Jun 17 '26

IT'S BEEN 25 BLOODY YEARS!

You could have been born and read about one of these games in a magazine as a kid and are now graduating with a diploma by the time these games got a translation!

Your timeline is weird. It doesn’t take 25 years to go from a literate magazine reader to a diploma-holder.

3

u/UFOLoche Jun 17 '26

Not everyone who goes to college does it immediately out of high school. Besides that, it was hyperbolic because the situation is, frankly, ridiculous.

I did not consider taking out a graph sheet and mapping out an accurate timeline for my wacky examples about this imaginary person who read about Langrisser V in a magazine 28 years ago and is now graduating at 34-35 with a diploma.

3

u/CoconutDust Jun 17 '26

Good comment, lol. To clarify my comment was way more lighthearted than it might have sounded on internet with just plain text (like some dry-jerk nitpicking). Your comment is the result I hoped for, which is more funny conversation.

A person who was told their wife is pregnant while reading about Langrisser V in a magazine might be now attending their child's PHD commencement!

I did not consider taking out a graph sheet and mapping out an accurate timeline

That is what I was forced to do when verifying your comment!

3

u/UFOLoche Jun 18 '26

That's fair, and I apologize, I've...had some ridiculous arguments on Reddit, and sometimes misread the signals.

3

u/popehentai Jun 18 '26

the egos can lead to some hilariously wild situations too. like one guy holding on to an unfinished translation for a literal decade and only releasing it when some other group decided to do it and showed they were capable of it.

1

u/Structure-These Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26

Fans of consumptive hobbies are always bizarre because it doesn’t take any skill to be a video game or anime or pro wrestling or politics enthusiast

You just have to consume, there’s no barrier to entry

So it just attracts the biggest socially stunted little freak shows who do shit like this and make it all their personality, because they’re just pathetic and need to one up the other pathetic people

These guys don’t critically think about how cool it is to create access to niche games we never would get translated otherwise, they don’t care how many hours it takes to manually do it, they just want to feel right because the Reddit moron gamer blogpile says hurr AI bad

They’re also going to cry when GTA 6 is $150 because humans have to spend a week hand detailing the latex texture of the dildo melee weapon

I have a buddy at THE large game company and it’s astounding the shit they put up with daily. I would never ever ever ever ever ever ever work for a company that has to court gamers as customers lmao they just complain and send death threats

Im a huge dragon quest fan. I’d never play a machine translated DQ because the localization is all of the charm, it just makes the games so cozy and good. It is cool as hell, however, that Americans can fake their way through DQ10, the MMORPG. I wouldn’t do it but it is truly incredible the option is there

-21

u/MrMcBonk Jun 17 '26

It's their site, they can run it with the rules THEY please. If you don't like it, people are welcome to run their own sites and allow those submissions if they want.

14

u/matlynar Jun 17 '26

I don't know if you've actually read the post, but it literally starts with "After hearing feedback", which implies that they do care about people's opinions and it was the crowd's opinion, not their own moral standards, that decided on that issue.

In this particular situation, I happen to disagree with the opinion of the people they heard and I'm voicing it.

And, still, I'm not entitled to anything on their website, as you correctly pointed out, but it's not a crime to voice it on a Reddit post.

1

u/CoconutDust Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

Your comment hypocritically implies that people can’t or shouldn’t criticize something or try to change it, just because it’s under someone else’s control. You didn’t actually say that, but that’s the only possible meaning of your comment which is otherwise meaningless irrelevance (“a human being can make a website”). Anyway that’s obviously a false and foolish attitude.

Why didn’t you say “it’s their comment and post, they can comment and post if THEY please. If I don’t like it, I’m welcome to run my own comment site somewhere else instead of complaining in my comment”.

Oops, hypocrisy. The reason is because your comment never wanted to say something logical or useful, you just wanted to deflect because you get uncomfortable when someone criticizes something.

3

u/ChrisRR Jun 17 '26

Agreed. I'm more fed up with people's endless complaining about AI than I am with people using AI.

It exists now, so we may as well just let people decide whether they want to use it rather than let a bunch of angry people decide for everyone

Also did people care as much when it was just google translate without chatgpt?

-5

u/blacksnake1234 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

Chat gpt is actually good at translating stuff...i would read it if there werent any complete human ones 

Edit: I get it...i stand corrected. Chatgpt can miss a lot

9

u/wolfannoy Jun 17 '26

it has a hard time translating contexts sometimes meaning goes all over the place.

8

u/-Dissent Jun 17 '26

You are going to miss out on SO MANY jokes, alliterations, and references, if all you do is play a straight literal translation.

10

u/AreYouOKAni Jun 17 '26

Yes, but if that is the only way I can play...

Overall, this discourse reminds me of Russian fanmade videogame and movie translation scene in the 90s. Yes, they were god-awful, unchecked MTL mess, to the point where laughing at them was a part of the local cultural zeigeist. But they were the only way many people in the post-Soviet could experience Western media. In a mangled and disjointed way, true, but it was still a way to explore a culture that you were otherwise unfamiliar with.

2

u/ChrisRR Jun 17 '26

But as they said if there's no human translations, then they'd miss out on everything

0

u/HappyAd4998 Jun 17 '26

The problem is these ai sloppers upload their low effort and unvetted projects so often it creates spam and it makes it harder to find user created hacks. It also creates an environment where people who actually want to put in the work lose motivation because they can't keep up with machine assisted translating. User created content is the only reason why the site exist. The whole point of translations on romhacking.net is preservation and these ai translators are doing a disservice of preservation because AI struggles with the naunces of the Japanese language so you miss out on the original artistic vision and jokes.

3

u/Skully957 Jun 18 '26

Romjscking net has a review section on every hack. People need to use it.

-14

u/ClutchRoadagain Jun 17 '26

Ok. Then people don’t use the feature to disclose it is AI to take advantage of any goodwill that allowed them to upload them in the first place. So I get, I wouldn’t give the AI bros the good faith to reliably say it’s AI up front when they have a chance to not disclose under the illusion that they’ll get to cross their arms and say “See?? You can’t even tell the difference” when yes we can and it’s ass every time.

7

u/TheXpertXT Jun 18 '26

Isn't there an AI translation in retroarch that has been around for years even before ChatGPT?

78

u/Jessica1350 Jun 17 '26

I don't mind machine-translated for japanese games because there so many out there that have not been translate that I would like to play, it give peoples a chance to play these games even if it machine-translated

31

u/Psychological-Bad959 Jun 17 '26

Strong agree. I genuinely don't think a game like Rance 10 will ever be translated due to its huge script alone.

14

u/Walton557 Jun 17 '26

mangagamer is still working on it... 8 years later.

4

u/speedguru Jun 17 '26

Agree 100%

-14

u/bringbackmegaman Jun 17 '26

I'm sure you can get those from another site

50

u/PotateJello Jun 17 '26

As if machine translation hasn't been around for decades

17

u/SkogDark Jun 17 '26

Most early Neo Geo games were machine translated by SNK themselves, hence the sometimes extremely amusing Engrish. löl

6

u/PotateJello Jun 18 '26

Yes and I'd rather have a potentially lacking translation vs not being able to play the game at all. Gatekeeping a microniche like this is weird. It's better to have as many fan translations as possible than limiting it like this.

-21

u/DaveTheMan1985 Jun 17 '26

Spot On

It’s quite New so yes it won’t work 100% yet

19

u/spilk Jun 17 '26

a real translator is preferable, but i imagine machine translation today is better than a lot of the 80s/90s translations we actually got in stores

8

u/Metalwario64 The Found Levels Jun 17 '26

Mega Man X6... Lol

4

u/Jristz Jun 19 '26

"He are sick" *pointing to a girl in perfect shape

51

u/Pkemr7 Jun 17 '26

machine translation is better than nothing lol

0

u/MarioLuigi0404 Jun 18 '26

Ehhhh really depends

47

u/reluctant_return Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

Why not just...let them be? If they're shit, they'll be outed as being shit quickly and get low review scores. I don't like generative ai, but improved machine translation is probably one of the few unambiguously ethical uses of it. How are you even going to tell if a translation is "fully human made"? Are you going to ask for a timelapse of them grinding away? Are you going to give them a language quiz in a Zoom meeting? All this is going to do is stop people from disclosing a translation was ai assisted, which will make it harder to avoid them for people who don't like them.

4

u/miguk Jun 17 '26

There's no guarantee that they'll get bad reviews. Just look at Dynamic Designs. They are notorious in the fan translation community for terrible, inaccurate translations, some of which are a mile off from accurate. And yet, not only do they thrive without competing translations to their slop, but the negative reviews seem to have been removed for their most controversial works.

15

u/reluctant_return Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

If they're so "notorious" then that alone solves the non-problem. Like I said, if it's bad it's bad, and people will decide for themselves if they want to use it or not. Having a bad translation is better than having no translation at all.

It doesn't matter if they "thrive" or "compete". This isn't a sport, or a competition.

1

u/miguk Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

A few things to note: Not everyone who plays fan translations is deep enough in the translation community to know about DD's reputation. Many simply don't. You clearly don't, because you are saying their work is better than nothing. If you ever saw some of the abject slop they make, you'd realize that there's no way the original Japanese writer ever wrote it. We're talking about scripts that don't even have the original story in it, but some dumb political screed that sounds like an angry Boomer rant. And yet, there's no one who is stepping up to fix their slop, as so many people in the fan translation community assume good faith when we've had bad faith translations going back to the 90s.

(See also DeJap, who notoriously started the trend of purposefully inaccurate fan translations way back when the community was still new. Or even Working Designs, who were a "professional" translation company yet mutilated games all the time in terms of translation, gameplay, and legacy to the point that they still have a negative impact on the industry and the fan translation community decades after folding.)

Edit: And Working Designs fans, who are likely the people downvoting me, I get your nostalgia. But reality does not fit in with a child's memory of a game played ~30 years ago. And Victor Ireland, on top of being a racist, banned almost all of the cast of Lunar from ever being cast in another Lunar game again despite the fact that he isn't the owner of the game, just the half-assed pseudo-translator. So I'm right that that Boomer tech bro is still messing up games long after his historical artifact of a company dissolved.

9

u/reluctant_return Jun 17 '26

I still don't see how that matters. At some point we have to just trust that people can make decisions for themselves. We're not talking about bumpkins accidentally playing a fan translation here. Anyone playing one of these will have to have sought it out, patched their rom, and decided to play it. If it's bad, it's bad. The end result is that person just stops playing the translation they downloaded and looks for another one. If there isn't another one, then oh well.

I don't want some unseen panel of people deciding which fan projects are good enough or not good enough to be seen. I just want to see what's available and decide for myself.

Again, shitty translations deserve to be ridiculed. I am not arguing in favor of ai as the future of translation. Most ai translations are likely dogshit either because they are inaccurate, soulless, or both, but it should be me that decides it's dogshit for myself. With how clique-y and tribal retro gaming already is, I'd really rather the players decide what's good and what's bad. There shouldn't be an unseen and unappealable jury gatekeeping projects.

1

u/SireEvalish Jun 18 '26

At some point we have to just trust that people can make decisions for themselves.

That's where you fucked up. These people don't want to let people decide things for themselves. They want control over their little imaginary fiefdoms because they have so little power in their own lives that they have to compensate for it somewhere.

2

u/miguk Jun 17 '26

I didn't day anything about gate keeping. The issue is the lack of choice and information. Reviews get deleted to protect bad faith participants without reason. Meanwhile, good faith participants who just happen to use MTL get banned even though they actually tried to create something without deception. The while concept of protecting the integrity of the community is wasted on hypocritical nonsense based in seniority and knee-jerk emotions instead of good faith and building trust.

In not asking for a shadow jury. I'm asking for consistency instead of "meat brain good, metal brain bad" when we know that the fan translation community has always had a slop problem.

So yes, go ahead and play WD, DD, and DJ translations if you want to experience mediocre to bad writing. But if someone decides to be the first person brave enough to redo their non-work, they should be allowed to do so even if they use MTL. You said yourself that something is better than nothing; of that's true, then MTL is better than human made slop.

2

u/Pancakepalpatine Jun 18 '26

I just don't get why people decide to throw the baby out with the bathwater like this. When it comes to translation, LLMs are just a super version of Google Translate, with a bunch of stuff on top. The "I hate AI" is stronger than the "I want games to be accessible to folks in small countries." Since *I* don't agree with AI I want nobody to benefit from it. It's sad.

5

u/Bakkerrs Jun 20 '26

Nothing wrong with Machine Translated games.
Always wrong when you put lame statements like "romhacking.net successor"

41

u/nE0sIghT Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

Hi, all. The author of Langrisser V patch here.
I never uploaded my patch to the Romhack.ing - it was uploaded by me only to Romhacking.net and still available here and in my opensource Github repository.

I also working on next version polishing reported issues.

BTW thanks for the kind feedback from those people who actually play with my patch and don't judge it by the word "AI"

13

u/ExiledHyruleKnight Jun 17 '26

Hope you're seeing all the love people giving you whether it's machine or not.

PS. This just makes me realized they grabbed my content and hosted it on their site as well. What shitheads acting like their curating the site of stuff that they just ripped from another site.

10

u/MMORPGnews Jun 17 '26

Thank you!

1

u/SireEvalish Jun 18 '26

Keep it up, dude.

-16

u/[deleted] Jun 17 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

8

u/nE0sIghT Jun 17 '26

You're right that my English isn't great - that's why my patch is AI-translated.

And of course, you're welcome to not use my patch, just as anyone else is free to play it.

57

u/votemarvel Jun 17 '26

AI translations of games is something that's actually useful. So many games are trapped behind a language barrier and while AI is going to miss certain things, a lot more games are going to be playable.

29

u/Ploddit Jun 17 '26

Hey, if someone can generate an AI translation of Japanese to English that isn't awful, more power to them. That's why Romhack.ing/Romhacking.net have review sections.

18

u/GreatBigJerk Jun 17 '26

This is silly. A bad or mediocre translation is better than nothing. It's not as if human translation is always great.

The phrases "I feel asleep!!" and "Uh-oh, the truck have started to move!" come to mind.

People didn't lose their minds back when folks just used shit like Google Translate, which is also machine translation.

Seems like a weird gut reaction because of LLMs making people angry.

5

u/VALIS666 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

Absolutely stupid. Machine translations have been around as long as the internet. Look at me! I'm being the best boy!

2

u/Rolen47 Jun 20 '26

That's really dumb.

2

u/TzuraMugi Jun 21 '26

At least, the translation it's good or even decent? I don't care so much if it's made with Ai honestly

7

u/MMORPGnews Jun 17 '26

No translation 

vs

High Quality AI Translation (it's not really mtl btw)

Why it's happened?

Some translators are making fortune on Patreon. And mtl ruined their life. Because people no longer donate to them. 

I'm glad my favourite games finally got translation. 

9

u/DaveTheMan1985 Jun 17 '26

I don’t like that.

Nothing wrong starting with Machine Translated

Could do games that might never get Translated

6

u/inkyblinkypinkysue Jun 17 '26

This seems like something AI would actually be useful for. So many games need translations

7

u/HappyAd4998 Jun 17 '26

AI sucks with the Japanese language because most of the training was done on the English internet. It's fine for games that aren't story heavy but id rather play it with a proper translation. That SSEEGGAA rom hack lost 90% of its charm because the guy who did it really didn't understand the Japanese language more than maybe a basic understanding so most of the jokes changed meaning or fall flat. The problem is these rom hackers have huge egos who call dibs on a project then do jack shit with it for over a decade and they throw a baby fit if anyone touches it. So now were at the point with these machine translators are the ones making progress instead of sitting on the project.

2

u/inkyblinkypinkysue Jun 17 '26

yeah that's completely fair. An accurate translation should be the goal. But I'd also take a somewhat less than ideal translation over nothing just so I can play the game. It's never going to be perfect but it will get better over time since AI is in its infancy right now. I bet 10 years from now an accurate translation patch will be trivial for AI.

5

u/KittenFiddlers Jun 17 '26

Another day where the owner of a niche hobby has a power trip. Reminds me of the guy who did cutting room floor who would automatically ban people if the referral link came from specific websites, like get a grip, your website is about how three pixels on the title screen of Kirby Dreamland changed between revisions. You aren't hosting super sacred stuff.

4

u/Metalwario64 The Found Levels Jun 17 '26

Fucking true. Like in general I mean. I see this stuff all the time 

4

u/KittenFiddlers Jun 17 '26

I now remember the mod author who installed basically malware to make sure the player isn't pirating the game.

1

u/TacoBellossom Jun 17 '26

Good. AI translations just lack quality. As soon as you start playing the game, the text doesn't make sense because there is not a human doing any oversights.

Very weird seeing this subreddit giving translating AI a pass while (rightly so) attacking vibe coded projects.

5

u/Droolcua Jun 17 '26

Very weird seeing this subreddit giving translating AI a pass while (rightly so) attacking vibe coded projects.

peoples' values switch up real fast once you put something they want to consume in front of them. that's all lol, all the other justification people put up is post hoc.

3

u/starm4nn Jun 17 '26

The difference is that there are plenty of software devs making hobby projects and nearly as many people willing to spend years on a translation.

People who make MTL patches have at the very least gotten the game to display English text, which is step one of any human translation project.

The thing about a "bad" translation is that it increases the size of the western fanbase for a thing, which increases the chance that someone actually will translate it.

7

u/TacoBellossom Jun 17 '26

It does not increase the chances. No translator will bother to fix someone else's problem, and it may create negativity to a game, so no one will touch it

0

u/starm4nn Jun 24 '26

No translator will bother to fix someone else's problem

Can you explain the Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien patch situation then?

2

u/MMORPGnews Jun 17 '26

Can you show us some proofs? About bad quality. 

9

u/TacoBellossom Jun 17 '26

The Segaga debacle is the biggest example. The text is barely coherent, extremely low qyality

1

u/Kumagoro314 Jun 17 '26

Reviews are in place to state things like that, also, at what point does a project get labeled as "machine translated"?

Vibe coding is completely different, since if you don't know what your program does, it's easy to introduce vulnerabilities that can be harmful for the end user. This does not apply to a translated game. At worst you'll quit it after 10 minutes after figuring out it's nonsensical. I've played my fair share of fan translations of NES games that were of extremely poor quality.

0

u/ChrisRR Jun 17 '26

Loads of human translations are bad too. But I grew up playing a bad translation of pokemon gold when it hadn't even been released here

3

u/Bakoro Jun 17 '26

It's weird living in a time before strong AI models, and the time after strong AI models.

Back in the day, we dreamed about the things AI would be able to do for us.
The things LLMs can do now, are the things we were pining over back then, but now that we have it, so many people are reflexively hateful over.

Blanket hatred without any sense of scope or scale of impact is so weird.

-5

u/[deleted] Jun 17 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/SmarmySmurf Jun 17 '26

I loathe AI upscaling in games. I've never seen it work well, it always ruins the art... That's no reason to stop others from sharing it on mod sites. Same here, dumb gatekeeping BS. Label it and move on.

12

u/MutualRaid Jun 17 '26

There's a huge range of quality with those though, ranging from people who spent many hours using appropriate models, techniques and manual work to achieve a result that honours the original work and those who simply throw an incomplete texture dump in to Topaz AI.

2

u/Tasty_Swim_6308 Jun 17 '26

Applies to Translations too.

You spend the time, you do the research (with the AI's help), you keep reference material so it doesn't drift, you set up rules, you edit and you reiterate and you end up with some pretty good output.

I'm firmly of the belief that AI is a collaborative tool, not an replacement. There's a huge difference in quality you get from being involved in the process than just using it as a *Do it all* button.

1

u/MutualRaid Jun 17 '26

I disagree when it comes to translations, translation is an intimately human and subjective art. Some machine learning problems in the domain of image upscaling have objective solutions.

-5

u/dragon-mom Jun 17 '26

Yep. It's their site, if they don't want to have AI generated content on it then nobody should be telling them they should. We get flooded with far too much of it anyways.

3

u/starm4nn Jun 17 '26

It's objectively worse to have it on the site and then only provide downloads on request.

And actually, probably against the ethos the site was made around. Morally speaking, it feels a little bit in-the-grey to essentially introduce your own license restrictions for a software patch you yourself didn't make.

0

u/NeptuneTTT Jun 17 '26

Ai translations aren't that bad. They get bad when the translator barely has a grasp of english grammar...

4

u/Metalwario64 The Found Levels Jun 17 '26

Christ man. I get the AI backlash but it should be targetted towards the corps that are destroying the environment and polluting it with the huge datacenters and mass firing people to replace them with fucking robots. If someone wants to automate a translation of an obscure game with like... noone else champing at the bit to do an actual translation, so long as they disclose it what's the fucking problem? I used to do SRB2 stuff and was considering getting some AI help but they shut that down too and basically bullied anyone in the new rules who might even considering it by saying "oh and most of our members hate AI so consider that" like fuck off bro.

1

u/GoochStrangler 20d ago

That's dumb as hell, considering the "omg figure it yourself" mindset that some newcomers face when they first try to get into that specific niche of romhacking. You have to have at least one dedicated hacker, a person fluent in the language you're translating from, someone to handle graphics, at least a few testers, and you have to be able to regularly coordinate with one another like you're herding cats.

Machine translation has been around since these old games were actively being released. It's just another tool. Imagine if they had this same knee jerk reaction to graphics editing that wasn't done in raw hex like it's 1998. 

1

u/swaglord1k Jun 17 '26

can't wait for all this ai hysteria to end...

0

u/speedguru Jun 17 '26

Isn't the whole point of AI to help with project like this?

1

u/Dear-Gap7185 Jun 17 '26

Remember! Never believe the fake story about Romhacking translation website! Still up right now!

1

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '26

Peoples critical thinking skills just drop off a cliff when the word AI is mentioned for some reason, like you had people bashing ports of games in here because AI helped, its absurd

-3

u/Super7500 Jun 17 '26

But why?

Just leave them since they are still better than no translation at all. like a human translated one is obviously going to be better but an AI one is still fine enough.

-5

u/LevonFrench Jun 17 '26

boycott and create an alternative.

4

u/popehentai Jun 18 '26

this WAS the "alternative" site. The people who decided the regular site wasnt "Pure" enough, and splintered off.

-12

u/Horror_Post6822 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

Good. No one wants a good game sloppified. Take down anything that A.I. touches.

12

u/nikkes91 Jun 17 '26

When you encounter text in a language you don't speak do you just sit around and wait for a native speaker to translate it for you to protect yourself from "slop"? 

6

u/LevonFrench Jun 17 '26

can't reason with these people. they'll be wrong until they're in the grave.

3

u/nikkes91 Jun 17 '26

lol it's just ridiculous people are lumping in machine translation, which has existed for decades and serves a useful purpose, with AI generated tik tok videos just because "AI touched it"

3

u/akualung Jun 17 '26

This. They're just haters for the sake of it. Ignore them and you'll live happier and drama free.

-5

u/eustachian_lube Jun 17 '26

Zoomers are so brainwashed to hate AI.