If there was something wrong with an old game, or you wanted to make a different version of it, and you wanted people to help you fix it, you usually did it on RomHacking.net. After this week, you’ll have to go somewhere else.

For nearly 20 years, the site has been home to some notable remakes, translations, fix-ups, and experiments. Star Fox Running at 60 fps., Super Mario Land 2 in colorA solution for Super Mario 64Bad smoke, even a Pac Man “Demack” spiffed up and resold by Namco.— and that’s not even counting what was dragged down by corporate cease-fires and cease-and-desist operations. This is a remarkable collection, containing both very obscure and mainstream games and is well preserved.

Stay safe, but it looks like the rom hacking site won’t go any further. Founder of the site posted a sign-off statement on the site Thursday night.Which in turn praised the community, condemned some of its members, and looked forward to what would happen to the “next generation”.

To paraphrase founder Nightcrawler: The site had come a long way, it missed the early small group days, now there are more options, and then, last year, it added a small internal group. Tried to hand over control. At the same time, Nightcrawler writes, he discovered “an extremely dishonest and hateful group,” which targeted him for removal from the site and harassment.

The site’s database, minus accounts and profiles, has been Submitted to the Internet Archive.. Room Hacking will have news posts and forums, but everything else is read-only, and the official Twitter and Discord “affiliations” are gone.

“I thank all the staff and community members who have kept the wheels turning and the lights on over the years. I am proud of our many accomplishments here together. I remember the good times, the bad times. But laughing, and moving on. Knowing she was right for the time, but time has a way of moving on,” Nightcrawler wrote.

Not the whole story.

Gideon Zhi, owner of Time Capsule Games and member of RomHacking for over 20 years, took issue with Nightcrawler’s monolingual coda. In a thread on X (formerly of Twitter), Zhi acknowledged the site’s technical debt, financial costs, and burnout from being its administrator. “But he existed as a single point of failure for the site and controlled the community-generated content with an iron fist, and apparently refused basically all offers of help over the past decade,” Zhi said. wrote

Zhi details the near-abandonment of the site last year, after the efforts of interested members, gathered on the site’s Discord chat server, to upgrade the site’s backend to modern storage and file serving, such as Amazon Web Services. S3, and last-minute refusal by Nightcrawler to implement the changes. He also denied that Nightcrawler was threatened or intimidated by the volunteers who attempted the transfer.

A moderator on the now “unofficial” Discord for the site confirmed the “rocky” relationship between the founders and moderators, as Reported by PC Gamer.. The Discord admin also denied threatening or harassing Nightcrawler.

While ROM hacking, translations, demuxes, and other game modding will certainly continue elsewhere, the gaming world has lost a sort of central repository for the most notable fixes, with many There is a community of experienced hackers.