Starting my own website for perserving Chinese originals, hacks, etc!

[Trenton_net]

Hey everyone,

As I've grown quite fond of Famicom World, I started noticing that we talk an awful lot about Chinese originals, hacks, and other strange oddities from Asia. But there isn't really too many English sites that cater to this kind of topic. You could register on some BBS, dig down for a 10 year old post in Chinese, and pray the links still work, but that's hardly practical for most people. I think the PGC forums are a pretty good resource for some of this information, but outside of that, I'm not sure if anything else exists?

Over time I've seen good friends come and leave the scene, and with them goes a boatload of knowledge and resources. To that end, I figure I might as well parley my computer skills and try to save some of this stuff before it all gets forgotten. So I created my own website that I am dedicating to saving these curious things before they get lost in the void! Right now pretty much everything (Forum, download sections, etc) are all bare, but given I just started, some of that is to be expected.

Anyway, I'm sure there are some people who probably feel the same way that I do, but even if not, everyone is welcome all the same. :-)

https://www.supercom32.net

PS: If anyone has any ROM dumps of odd Chinese games, multi-carts, or large amounts of anything they would like to see preserved, please do feel free to contact me. The more knowledge and information we can save, the better!

[fcgamer]

I have a blog that is mostly dedicated to this sort of thing:

https://fcgamer.wordpress.com/

I am also working on a Famicom book that will have a lot of feature info on these old games. 

I personaly don't like PGC forums and site because they jump to a lot of faulty conclusions, and also steal pictures / information without proper crediting.

[Trenton_net]

Ah, nice. I had no idea you ran your own blog!

As for PGC, I kind of agree with you. They do seem to make a lot of assumptions and things are somewhat unorganized. But I still have to give them credit for trying to do something about the situation. After all, getting off the couch and doing something is still better than doing nothing. Can't say I really condone stealing other peoples work though.

[mrdomino]

hey so I'm one of the admins on both the PGC Forums and Bootleg Games Wiki (under the name taizou) & I feel like I should clear some stuff up here -

So as far as stuff like faulty/unfounded assumptions goes - yeah that is a problem we have - we were the first, and for a long time pretty much the only, forum and wiki dedicated to these games, we've had loads of contributors over the years, and lots of young kids finding us after discovering bootleg games through some youtuber or whatever, getting overexcited and making shitty edits/posts. But many of those people become good contributors after they've been around for a while, so we prefer to gently nudge them in the right direction and avoid removing someone unless they're being outright disruptive.

But I don't think it's fair to tar the entire community with that brush - certainly I don't state something as fact unless I have a damn good reason for doing so, and I've spend a hell of a lot of time removing baseless assumptions and cleaning up articles - I want it to be a quality resource for information/discussion on these otherwise undocumented games and I am serious about that. But ultimately both the wiki and forum are open to anyone, and I know I and some of the other staff don't have as much time to keep on top of things as we used to, so if you see crap like that going unnoticed, please feel free to step in and challenge/remove it!

As for stolen content - again we sometimes get people copy/pasting stuff into the wiki without attribution which I will remove, rewrite or credit if I see (depending on the license of where it was taken from), I personally try to source any info I add but its kind of an uphill battle convincing people to do that.

I know you had a problem with someone uploading pics from your auctions/sale threads without permission - but we did remove those when asked. We are interested in documentation above all else though, and online marketplace listings can be super critical sources of information - there are many games where for years the only known picture in existence, sometimes the only proof it existed at all, was a pic saved from some dead old listing.

99% of sellers only care about selling the item, and have no interest in documentation or preservation; they took the picture only to sell it, and when the listing is gone the picture will be gone forever too. So we do sometimes upload those pics for preservation's sake, and in most cases I don't see any conflict of interest in us doing so, as they're now useless to the seller but tremendously useful/interesting for us. (Although credit should still be given, and again that's something I try to keep on top of) Obviously in your case it was different as you do care about this stuff, but most sellers don't and their pictures just get lost, which we'd rather avoid.

ANYWAY. Trenton_net - your site looks great and I'll definitely be signing up to it, I'm glad to see someone else setting up a resource for this stuff! Ultimately we all have the same goals here, so let's work together for the sake of this often-overlooked bit of gaming history  

(oh and I have a few of my own sites related to this topic - a rarely-updated blog at supermulti.org, me-only wiki with some notes/info at notes.supermulti.org,  gameboy dumping/emulation at hhug.me and some older stuff at fuji.drillspirits.net, and I often tweet about related things @taizou_hori)

[Trenton_net]

Hi there,

Thanks for writing! I'm glad you were able to clear some of that up. Like you, I was pretty surprised with the lack of anything being done about this area. I suppose I finally came to the conclusion that people *do* care, but not everyone has the technical skills and knowledge to pull something off, let alone the passion for the subject to do it.

So that's pretty much why I decided to throw my hat in the ring. I'd certainly be happy in collaborating with people, as we really do all want the same thing! :-)