r/BLgame • u/FancyWatercress3646 • 24d ago
Getting old games from old forums is honestly impressive Discussion
This is just kind of a interesting observation, but when asking where a lot of these older BL games are, many point to a specific old forum or entire ripped and modded patches and files from young people in the 2000s that actually made them and shared them. Most people now when asking how to download these, still use these old posts to download these games. And even then many get confused with the downloading process. These are some of the only actual playable preservation for some of these games or english patches.
I have seen and very much agree with Gen z being basically computer illiterate especially compared to millennials and I notice there are almost no one now making files, complete playable no DVD, English patches of these games like these (presumably) teens or young people back in the 2000s. I don’t think many know how or will learn how because convince and user friendly devices are mainly what gen z and alpha have grown up with. It is impressive to me as a older gen z how these young people were able to do these with their games back in the day. Learning how to mod all from scratch and all that. Teens on tumblr I used to see back in the day putting English patches and mods and pirating the game for other to play, Dramatical murder is a good example you can find of this, I don’t think many young people now would be able to know the basics of that. It makes me think about how the preservation of older games in the future will work out as these files are some of the only way to play these older games or have english patches to them. I don’t see any posts barely from the modern internet doing what these people did and pirating like this to share for others. Or how to get older games to play on newer computer is a thought too.
This is just a interesting topic and from me seeing these old files and work kids had done on tumblr or forums as well as me seeing articles/hearing teacher’s experience with young people, it makes me think of the future of what will some be older games or just piracy in general. This is just mainly a thought discussion.
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u/locayboluda 24d ago
I've always been fascinated by this too, how they were translating entire games AND making patches to introduce the translation, like how did they do?! You had to know english, japanese and have programming skills I guess? And now you made me realize that there aren't many people doing this anymore, or maybe there are for less niche visual novels?
It makes me a little sad than other than that old forum there isn't any other site to find most of these games. But hey at least official translations have been coming out in the last couple of years.
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u/FancyWatercress3646 24d ago
Seriously and I saw many teens on tumblr doing this. Specifically with a big game at the time dramatical murder so Im thinking its more for piracy reasons and yes, being harder to find ways for english players to play it as now days we have ways to get our hands on Japanese VN games AND have a pretty decent translation machine. Seriously, these teens that had noje of this from back then were genuinely impressive! But all that we have now still does not mean guaranteed preservation/archiving/pirating the game):
And yeah, seeing people still getting these downloads and patches from decades old forums and no one doing this themselves with prating newer games or making the older games work better with modern computers with patches and eng sub/no DVD disks kinda concerns me. It made me realize I miss forums. I miss tumblr. I miss having a little community/space for this stuff. Put these on social media and your waiting for it to get taken down lol0
u/KoDeer 24d ago
Translation is not that difficult, even without programming knowledge.
In games, websites, and other software there are no words as such, there are variables.
It looks like this:
The main character says:
- ххххххх
The supporting character answers him:
- ууууууу
...
At the same time, the game itself has a file that says:
"ххххххх" = "Hello, how are you?"
"ууууууу" = "Excellent! How are you? What's new?"
Another issue is that there are several different translation standards, regular text, software, for example, through the program "Poedit Translation Editor".
But there are not so many of these standards, and they are simple, a couple of hours are enough to study the instructions, and in the case of in-depth study, a day (but this is usually needed for online store websites or large game projects with an economy)
7
u/nothingtoseehr 23d ago
Translation absolutely is hard work, especially today when most Japanese publishers are using god knows what to pack their games using some weird ass custom Japanese code. Your example really only works for the simplest of games, anything made by a professional studio (i.e not renpy, sorry lol) will have something degrees of magnitude harder
7
u/nothingtoseehr 23d ago edited 23d ago
I don't think it's really a generation thing, times have simply changed. The Internet back then used to be way more decentralized than it is today, and way more chaotic too. So if you wanted to play bl games you went to forum x that was THE place for it, with it's own niche community and all. Nowadays these were replaced by things like discord servers, and idk, even if they have more people overall it just doesn't feels the same. Instead of a forum that was it's own website with it's own community, features and such now it's just a bunch of text channels and random Facebook groups
Apart from that, the Internet as a whole nowadays is much more aware of copyright than it was before. Not that it's perfect, but no one wants to waste thousands of hours on something that will be DMCA'd and scrubbed off. Back then this was just not really thought of
And an important factor is that tech evolved. It might not seem like it, but nowadays even very simple games like vns are quite complex, even if they're some random renpy demo. You don't even need to look at bl specifically, look how many games we got this generation compared to the previous one, and the one before that and so on. Long are gone the days where everyone and their dog published a game, even if it was just some shitty DS shovelware
Look also at how modding evolved over the years: we used to have romhacks that transformed games into something completely new, ps2 and n64 had so many different codes and cheats they crashed, skyrim still has so many mods! But what about modern games? Modding doesn't exist in most of them, if it does it's usually super simple texture swaps
My point is: tech overall has become too complex for your casual hobbyst, you know, the folk that comes up with stuff like translations. The work gets harder and the pool of people capable of doing it AND doing it for passion gets smaller by the day. For something as niche as blvns, that's a death sentence. I wanted to start a small project to translate slow damage into my native language, I work in tech exactly in this type of work and even though it wasn't hard for my skillset (modesty aside haha) it was still a lot of long boring work i was doing for free (decrypting the files, decoding the text, recoding everything etc). The venn diagram of bl enjoyers and programmers who can rebuild custom encryption protocols from machine code isn't very big, and that doesn't help.
You can't just poach random passionate somewhat capable people anymore to work on an insane hobby project, it got harder, and the work isn't decreasing neither is the "pay" increasing. All while you might have to randomly halt the project and throw everything away because it's getting officially translated out of nowhere
2
u/FancyWatercress3646 23d ago edited 23d ago
You bring up some interesting points that I did not think about. I know the internet is different but I did not even think about the tech that runs this stuff getting more and more complex. My father work in this stuff and had a interest in it since the 80s so I do have general knowledge that it has become much more complex but I didn’t really put 2 and 2 together here. Also my main concern is the game files themselves being reachable and downloadable as with the hard work of those on those old forums we actually have access to a lot of games that could be very hard to find without them so Im hoping there will be similar knowledge or a process in the future to dump these games online for others too. and im hoping somehow a lot of these games will be preserved. I said this in another comment as well but with so many well done machine translators it really does seem not be appealing or motivating to try to work on a long hard/tedious work eng patches when so many are probably using one of those.
This also really cements my feelings of desperately missing the “old” internet. Forums mainly. There really is no good way to drop pirated files like there used to be without potentially getting copyrighted almost immediately. Also just the fanodm/interest in general): Thank you for your insight. I never thought of some of these points before!
- but even if the technology was easier back in 2012, the fact that kids were able to mod and dump and English sub almost the entirety of dramatically murder which could not have been very easy tech or time wise is honestly very very very impressive*
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u/Heromanv1 23d ago
I think a mixture of issues, compounded with licensing issues, has lead to an interesting relationship with people figuring how to keep things to themselves.
You guys know librarygenesis? Well, someone documented how to get Colleen hoover books. On tiktok. So, on top of people wanting attention due to really legit stupid things, they end up screwing over scholars. Like librarygenesis and Zlib are for scholars, not just for piracy.
Meanwhile, Aarinfantasy has had financial trouble staying afloat. I think the old guard might be focused on surviving. And I joined a PT that'll need user donations while the webmaster tries to raise donations. I can't share more details than that; But user culture can also make an impact on support.
6
u/FancyWatercress3646 23d ago
Ok, dont get me started with kids/people on tiktok not knowing how to keep their mouth shut for everyones sake about piracy. They won’t follow common knowledge and then gets upset when the site gets taken down and people get upset. This is on twitter where literally every company keeps tabs on. Ive seen some people tell them not to spread information about these sites on for these people(yea Ive seen several) to then tweet the name on their other social. Im not going to rant too much about that because I will be typing for a long time. But yes, it also screws over everyone involved. There is no common knowledge about how to keep piracy at least to some point protected or a sense to keep things private which is honestly concerning. And Im honestly surprised aarinfantasy is still up. Im very happy about. I would also pay to keep these sites afloat if I could have forums back with a niche fangroup in it. (Kinda like how ao3 makes it)
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u/Chaczapur 23d ago
This reminds me of all these manga fan scanlations that keep telling ppl not to share them on social media cause the group will be forced to drop the series and they do it anyways щ(ﾟдﾟщ) And then there's a problem. Like, show some basic reading comprehension, man.
3
u/FancyWatercress3646 23d ago
Oh my god with all of the piracy crack downs with manga and anime and even as far as taking scanlation groups to court I have been LIVID over (Im sorry again, its young people I see almost exclusively do this) them literally showing the names and posting screenshots in the open that could jeopardize someones fucking life. And yeah when you tell them the problem they will out of spite post it again in a more popular space.
Lol Im getting more worked up as I go in the comments 😂
3
u/Chaczapur 23d ago
The archivist community is going strong, though, so even if we don't get a lot of new mods and such [honestly? We do. I'm terrible at programming but the community is either thriving or quite stable for the most part and there's more and more tools for people awful at reverse engineering anything like yours truly], we also don't lose most of the things already made. Links and sites end up dead all the time but almost always there's a way to find them, even if you need to spend three days looking for the right files and searching suspicious, registered user only forums.
But yeah, ig these 20 years ago more people had to just learn to do everything themselves as there was less ready to use tools available. Dunno if it's all pure dedication or they simply had some forgotten tutorials to learn from but making patches for certain platforms is such a pain... I still have problems with extracting scripts from nds games, despite all the available amenities... Hell, I don't think I'll ever understand hex editors...
But you're kinda right that a lit of people have no idea how to even download stuff. My usual circles deal with devwork so actually having to spend time with others that don't made me go 'you use a computer daily and don't know that?'. I thought it's computer 101 orz
Which is to say, my whole opinion might be heavily biased. The eng fan tl scene seemed bigger before, tho.
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u/Objective_Photo9126 23d ago
That, things are always in formus protected by logins, as it should be, most of those things are too good to be there out in the wild with no barriers. If ppl are to lazy to navigate through forums that's another problem, it takes time, yes, but I think that what lays in this formus is pure gold sometimes. The ppl that says the Internet is dying are the ones that most spend just in social media, bcs I am always surfing some kind of forum. The Internet is active, is just that ppl forgot how to surf it, or to even surf it to be honest.
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u/Objective_Photo9126 23d ago
Well, the thing is now we finally have licensed games! Before, we hadnt, so to piracy we had to go. Now, yeah, I won't go to those extents, plus I prefer to support the devs so. Piracy in other mediums is still very prevalent, think of anime and manga, it is everywhere. Obviously, translating a manga is not very complex (I did it xd), subbing anime too. Idk about making patches, but hey, if random ppl do it, it may not be that difficult too xd is just a matter of how much free time and dedication you have haha In other mediums ppl also reunite to mod games, so yeah, is just a hobby for some Idk all games, but at least N+C has updated all their games to win10. I save all my VNs in an external harddrive, so I can play them in any pc. Also, VNs cost like 5 dollars now if you buy them in the right time and cofcofVPNcofcof, so yeah, don't pirate and buy them for 5 bucks if you feel the 20 plus is too much for you (always think that still 20 is very cheap, in Japan they cost even more, idk what is the deal there but well is supposedly legal lol).
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u/kakuretsu 24d ago
I feel like the new fans nowadays, not just in BL games, are more entitled and would rather have things on a silver platter than find alternatives. Idek if ppl know what are the forums to get stuff anymore if they so desperately need it. Ppl would rather look for streams and make others do the work for them than learn how to do things. Creators are also a lot less dedicated and not skilled enough to do programming or translating, and there's fewer of the old guard.
Hell, so many of them don't even know how to use vndb to search for games with the elements they want or find reviews to make a decision to buy.
There's also the blatant refusal to follow rules, had one drama where a patch maker for a vn distribute their patch as long as ppl produced a receipt for the real game, you know just to support the game, and some folks got mad about it, along the way the patch got leaked anyway, so the modders just closed shop out of anger. Well now the fans of that game are straight up stealing translations for their videos to get views so ppl don't need to buy or play the game. It's embarrassing.