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Saturn Homebrew drama

Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2022 12:19 am
by TrekkiesUnite118
So I shared this with some of you on Twitter but figured this is as good of a topic as any to put here. Basically for the past few years I've been involved in the Sega Saturn homebrew community working on Translation patches for games like Grandia, Lunar, Sakura Wars, etc. while also working on some of my own homebrew projects. Overall it's a fun community with some interesting stuff going on.

That said there's some people who run a Facebook group that have been causing issues for us. Basically the owners of this group have been either posing as developers, "releasing" our patches and homebrew projects to their members without really giving credit, selling repros, and other generally shitty things. For example one person ported Wolfenstien 3D to the Saturn. This group quickly "released" it and started selling it as a rare prototype. The big problem with this was they were selling it with the full retail WAD, which violates id's license for the Wolf3D Source code and is just asking for a Cease and Desist. The person who ported it pleaded with them to please not distribute it with any WAD other than the shareware one. They promptly erased his requests and banned him.

Fast forward to this week. For the past year or so I've been working on a port of Final Fantasy. I've been reading over the disassembly of the NES game and recreating the main game logic in C and writing code to read and translate the data from the NES ROM so you can play it on the Saturn. However it requires the NES ROM to work. Similar to Wolf3D though, I've only released it without the ROM with instructions telling people to patch their own in. Recently this port showed up being distributed by this group with the ROM patched in. I asked them politely to not distribute it with the ROM for the same reason as Wolf3D's retail WAD. I was promptly banned for asking that.

So discussing it with other Saturn devs we were thinking about creating a splash page to put in our projects that simply says something like "X Group is dishonest. If you go this from them it was most likely stolen. Don't trust them. Please support the actual Saturn Homebrew scene at <insert site here>." We also discussed possibly putting code in to troll them if they attempted to remove said splash screen. That's when the lulz began. In less than a few hours I got this letter in my Discord messages:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSuy8_oLN8c

Honestly this is probably the most unhinged and nonsensical thing I've ever been sent in any kind of PM. And that's including the deranged stuff I got over the years on the official Sega Forums.

Re: Saturn Homebrew drama

Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2022 8:33 am
by Diadu
Like I said, you got a real philosopher on your hands
Does free time even exist?
That's quite deep and thought provoking.

That guy wrote a whole lot of words without really addressing the issue at hand nor did he really "say" anything - that essay is just fluff. It's like he is trying to tell you a multi layered story about friendship and learning but never really gets to the point of it.

Re: Saturn Homebrew drama

Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2022 4:56 am
by Elec
Diadu wrote: Fri Jan 07, 2022 8:33 am It's like he is trying to tell you a multi layered story about friendship and learning but never really gets to the point of it.
just like anime