A few years back I think I used to visit HG101 occasionally. Sad to see it went the way it did, but now he can go fuck himself. I am genuinely annoyed that in all of their exceptional snowflake glory they made a translator quit. I'm not super knowledgeable about the scene as it is anymore, but there aren't a whole lot of people willing to actually translate ROMs of non-English old games that people really want to play without learning moonrunes, are there? And now there's one less.
There aren't a lot of translation groups for a lot of reasons, but the biggest hurdle to ROM translation is that technical skill is required. With fansubs and manga subs, it's a piece of cake. All you need to do is find a raw (either from torrent sites or from a "supplier"), translate the text to English, replace the text or add subtitles, and redistribute a MKV file with the subtitles included. It's no wonder that there are not only a ton of sub groups, but even hentai doujin translators in booru comment boxes.
With video game translations the whole game changes (pun intended), especially with classic console games. Translating the scripts is the easy part, and if DDSTranslation finds another guy (and didn't have his bridges burnt by Kurt) this might be a lesser blow to the scene than thought. Developing on the other hand is the real hard part. See on consoles developers were already fighting against barriers including a slow CPU, kilobytes of RAM, and ROM space limitations. Then with translation patches you're basically having to do a lot more work than just simply inserting the text in. You'll often need a new font since lots of games either had no English font or only a monospaced one that doesn't work well for dialogue. Then you'll have to work around tile maps, crazy engine programming and idiosyncrasies, and maybe do some
assembly language (or ASM as it's called) tweaks here or there. It's not uncommon for some translation patches to break ROMs, and the Shin Megami Tensei translation was infamous for this
until someone put out a bug fix patch years later.
Translating moonrunes is just one part of the equation. To do all this properly requires ASM knowledge, knowledge of the platform the game you're translating is on, and some spriting knowledge. While games popular with ROM hackers might be documented to the point where there are tools for modifying them,
decompilation projects on github or arbitrary code execution speedruns, the same can't be said about more obscure games. DDSTranslation became well liked because they were translating those in demand games that other groups had slept on or stalled translating. Even in the general romhack scene, there's a massive difference between ROM hacks someone made using tools designed for modifying specific games, and ROM hacks made by someone with underlying knowledge of the console and ASM.
So to recap, to translate a game on a console like the SNES you need programming knowledge (both ASM and SNES specific knowledge), a good emulator with a debugger and/or a decompiler like IDA, someone to translate the script, someone with spriting skills, and knowledge of the game's engine. It's not something a forum poster can do, which is why they're crying at the fact they scared off the guy who was actually doing it for them for free.
To add to this, Kurt Kalata has tons of clout in the retro gaming scene thanks to running a site that talked about various obscure games pre-YouTube, even if the descriptions of said games were wrong or inaccurate. Kurt has
published books, ran a
successful kickstarter for one of them, makes
$2k a month on Patreon from 400 patrons (
graphtreon archive here), and still rides off the success of a site that hasn't been relevant since it switched to Wordpress. He didn't just join in, he spread the word about ResetEra's mob. He has more clout than any translator could possibly have.
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