News Romhacks and fan translations website CDRomance takes all downloads off-site after a DMCA threat

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One of the most popular websites in regard to romhacks, fan translations and other kinds of pre-patched modifications to retro titles has always been CDRomance. Chances are if you were looking for a specific mod or hack for a certain title, most likely you'd find it there in an already patched form. However, as of this past weekend, the way in which CDRomance operates has changed.

On February 11th, CDRomance's owner, nicknamed "Spike" received what seems to be a notice by the ESA (Entertainment Software Association), which effectively took down CDRomance's ads that helped maintaining the servers online. This action prompted Google to ask for the removal of any kind of file-sharing going on with the website, to which Spike complied and disabled direct links from the website itself. According to Spike, it seems like the possible action taken against CDRomance could have been from someone posing as the ESA, and not the actual ESA itself, but to avoid any kind of troubles as to whether or not the treat was made by the real ESA or not, Spike decided to remove the direct links either way.

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This is surely a big hit for preservation of a great amount of fan translations and romhacks all around, as CDRomance also helped preserve different revisions of projects themselves.

Not all is lost though, as many users online have already found a workaround for the direct links being taken down, and also there's certain scripts floating around that could also help with this endeavour, for those that wish to backup the catalog of CDRomance's files in case of a more dire situation.