A Fanmade Mega Man Port For SNES Has Just Been Released

Sweet. Looking forward to it.

Unfortunate that the guy who ported NES games to the PC-Engine (in the form of ROM patches) had to quit because people started reselling his work.
At least one Japanese shop owner thankfully got sent to jail like they deserved for making us not able to have nice things.

"Genius"? For ports?

Good to see another quality port from infidelity.

@KingMike I'm not sure what the issue with that is? It's an old game so "reproduction" carts are pretty common, even in game stores here in the west. It's just a novel way to play a game on the original cartridge rather than an emulator, and of course the cartridges have material cost and they use shelf space. It's not like the port guy had anymore rights to sell the completed port than the shop owners. Of course in Japan the laws are heavy on this kind of stuff, but even there, the law intervened on behalf of the companies that hold the rights to the games IP, they weren't doing it because some guy that ported games was upset.

I personally find it really weird when people get angry over an IP being distributed that they have no rights to. You have to accept that, if you create your own work from scratch you will have the power over that work. If you create a work using someone else's property, you have to let it go to the wind.

@DestructoDisk Yeah this "Japanese Repro" story sounds like pure conjecture or there's a lot of info left out. Why would the programmer stop making ROM patches, because of repro carts? There's at least one ROMhack website that gets updated daily so it's not like they couldn't just make them available for everyone.

@Hexapus One major reason is that the ROM hack author could be seen as voluntarily contributing to the profiteering, which makes it much more likely to see Capcom get on them if they felt like it.
That's the whole reason that sites like ROMhacking.net have work distributed as patches rather than ROM links.
Also, maybe the ROM hack authors just don't want to be associated with doing their work as an illegal business motive, doing it for fun.

@DestructoDisk You want the novelty of playing on a console? Buy a flashcart. No reason to give money to bootleg cart makers who have no authority to sell "their" work. Plus with a flashcart you can update if the mod gets updated. The bootlegger isn't going to give you that service.

@KingMike Some people want the complete experience. For some it's putting in a cartridge for the game. Others want the whole cartridge, manual, and box experience. TBH nobody has authority to sell the work since the IP holder didn't write the code for the port, and the person who wrote the code for the port doesn't hold the IP. At the very least the shop owners are providing a service that people want and they have just as much right to provide that service as anyone else (which is no right at all), so it is weird that someone else would be angry about it. It's not cheap to manufacture these novelty items, so it's not like someone is making a massive profit off of sales. The money they make is just enough to justify putting them together and letting them sit on the shelf (or handle eBay services). I mean why be angry that someone is enjoying and discovering your work that you didn't intend to make any profit on in the first place? Seems like a weird jealous reason to stop doing a passion project. "Oh no, someone is enjoying my work in the format that makes them happy. Money exchanged hands for physical materials that cost money to produce and maintain! That's it, I can't allow this to go on!", is super weird.

I mean yeah they have every right to stop working on games they don't have the rights to, but it's cringe af to throw a fit because of what someone else is doing with a property they don't own. They only let their own fans down. There was no reason to stop their work other than to try and force control over IPs they don't own. But is that even the case here with the PC Engine conversions? Haven't seen anything from the dude saying this. Just speculation from others. Someone else was saying he got a cease and desist from a rights holder. The guy who made NES2PCE seems to have not updated his PC Engine blog for a almost a decade now. Seems like he just isn't interested in the community right now and has moved on. It was just a wrapper that anyone could use to take full NES ROMs and have the PC Engine hardware read them (it used hardware similar to NES). The end user just has to manually write in calls for the graphic locations in the code (which can be done with other free utilities that pull up the sprites from code).

So if true its essentially getting made that someone is dumping NES roms onto burnable CDs and selling the CDs in cases with artwork. Weird.