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Sega now supports the romhacking community


TrishaCat
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http://www.sega.co.uk/news/mega-drive-and-genesis-classics-hub?

SEGA just recently added a BIG update to its Sega Genesis emulator. Originally, it was a somewhat meh emulator with very few features. It wasn't all that great. They recently improved the emulator to a tremendous degree, not only making it emulate games better, but also giving it a much nicer somewhat nostalgic frontend with more features like scan-lines and an adjustable CRT-like mode. The front-end takes place in a 3D environment. You start up the emulator and it shows a little room. On the right there's a shelf with a bunch of games, and in the center of the room is your TV and Genesis console. To play a game, you pick a game on your shelf and then the game is placed into the console and you look at the TV. Its really cool. If you exit the TV while the game is on, its paused and you step away from the TV screen while its still paused on the TV. To stop playing the game, you eject the game from the console. Its really neat.

But best of all out of this, is that Sega added support for romhacks. Now in the Steam workshop, you can subscribe to mods the community puts up which are basically romhacks of the games being emulated. You can now officially download romhacks legally thanks to Sega's support! And to play them, when you start up the emulator and access the frontend, when you select a game off your shelf, you can select to play the game or to play the modded versions of the game. Its really awesome!

Sega is the biggest support of legal emulation in the industry, and the only one to support romhacking! Isn't this awesome!

To compare to other game developers, just take a look at Nintendo's website. They have a little section in the legal FAQ that talks about emulation: https://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp#legitimize

In it, Nintendo answers the question of why they don't support legal emulation, and they basically say that it promotes piracy and is bad business. Obviously, they're wrong. To quote SEGA's past advertisements back in the 90s "SEGA does what Ninten-don't"!

EDIT: Here are some examples of some romhacks already available. Some of them are silly, some of them are really cool and useful!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=674634532

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=674578957

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=674686794

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2 hours ago, RTDragon said:

Actually you have to buy the original games from the sega genesis collection for it to work. Considering i got the games 66 off on steam.

Well yeah. You have to own the original game in order to get "mods" for them after all.

Although this has resulted in some unfortunate results that I'm not entirely sure SEGA understands. People are uploading roms, and consequently it doesn't necessarily have to be a rom of the game its supposed to be a hack of. Like, some people have put up "mods" for games that are actually just whole other games that SEGA hasn't put on sale, like Thunder Force IV for instance. No idea if SEGA is going to start policing the workshop or not.

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6 hours ago, Battlechili said:

No idea if SEGA is going to start policing the workshop or not.

Three options, really.

1) Policing or Curating.

2) Letting it go.

3) Stopping it.

They can't let it go, it reduces their ability to claim damages for pirates. And policing or curating it would cost money, even if it's one guy for like 12 an hour. 

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12 minutes ago, Summercat said:

Three options, really.

1) Policing or Curating.

2) Letting it go.

3) Stopping it.

They can't let it go, it reduces their ability to claim damages for pirates. And policing or curating it would cost money, even if it's one guy for like 12 an hour. 

Well, it seems like a high enough number of reports automatically remove them and that they're taking the policing route, to a degree.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/34270/discussions/0/357284767239063274/

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