Certain questions have been piling up in the comment section recently, so I figured it’s time we answer all of them. Please understand that we often don’t feel like answering individual questions over and over gain, so this is the big answer for all of you who felt ignored. Don’t worry we read everything you guys write, we’re not ignoring anyone out of spite. There are just more productive things we could do instead of replying to the same type of questions again, like hacking games or watching porn.

Nice news, but what about Project XYZ?

This is propably the most common question we get. I usually specifically mention the answer to it in every news I write anyway, but apparently people still wish to overlook it. So, once again:
All of our projects are going smoothly. We only write a news post if a notable milestone has been reached. That might be the completion of a big portion of the script (menus, story, battle text or whatever), or a significant hacking step, like adding a VWF or implementing compression. If we don’t mention a project specifically it just means that there wasn’t anything special happening. Not all of our translators are as insanely fast as Tom or Tyria, so their translations take some time. It might be still months or years until Xenosaga or Magical Vacation are finished at the current pace, but it doesn’t mean they’re dead or abandoned. There is just not more we can say besides “It’s still going”. We WILL write a news about it when we have some exciting to report. You can trust us on that.

Can you consider game xyz as the next project?

You guys have no idea how many more or less secret projects we still have on the backburner that we’d like to work on after the current ones. We’re stocked with projects for the next 3 years at least. When we take on new projects then because we want to hack them for ourselves, what people would like to see most isn’t really a big concern (although we propably wouldn’t hack anything that no one else in the universe would care for). Still – we are gamers just like you. It’s not hard to guess we’d often like to see the same games translated that you do. Just let us do our work and I promise you we’ll continue to positively surprise you with new projects.

Where can I download the games?

Two big misunderstandings here. The first is – most of our projects are still ongoing, the only one that’s finished and released is Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart. There is a project page for it in the sidebar to the right. There aren’t any public WIP or beta versions of any other projects to download anywhere. We won’t release incomplete work.
Furthermore we’ll never release the whole games in any shape or form. What we release are patches to be applied to the games. Releasing the games would be blatant piracy. We don’t have any illusions that 99,9% of you will apply the patches to a downloaded ROM later on, if we had a problem with that we wouldn’t release any patches either, but we have to uphold at least some standard of legality here on the site. If we would host the complete games we’d put the site in big danger of being shut down by any game company with a bored law office. Where to get the games is your responsibility, not ours. This is common sense to most of our visitors already, but apparently there are still new people all the time who never heard of it, so it can’t hurt to point it out again.

Can you send me the finished patch/game through E-Mail when it’s done?

For the “/game” part refer to the above topic. Generally, no, we don’t have the time or ressources to personally send the patch to 50 people some day. If we’d do it for 5 people, soon 5 other people would want that service too and we’d quickly be flooded by such requests. It’s the same treatment for everyone, there won’t be any patch delivery.
I can understand the concerns though, although we’d love it you visit our site regularily. It’s easy to forget visiting the site for a while and then you might miss the big release. The DQM release was quickly reported practically on every GBA ROM related news site on the net, so unless you stop using the internet completely you should hear about any releases in one form or another. Personally we’ll post news about it here (of course) and at Romhacking.net.
I’ll have to look if we can maybe create a mailing list similiar to that of the Mother 3 project. That way you’d at least hear about the finished patch when it’s time. I’m just worried many of you would completely stop visiting the site then until something is released, which would make me a pretty sad panda.

Can I be a beta-tester?

This question isn’t coming much yet, but I’m sure it’ll pop up when we’re announcing the next beta.
The requirements for becoming a beta tester are pretty high, but the most important part is that we have to know you. We’ll never hand the beta patch to a complete stranger, so don’t even ask about it if you’ve been a silent fan so far. Sorry, but the risk of a leak or of shoddy beta work is just too high. We already made some negative experiences with DQM’s beta test. You’re chances are best if we know you from a forum we frequent or even better, from IRC. Speaking of which, I think we never mentioned before that Kingcom and I are always hanging around #Romhacking.net @ the SynIRC network. If you ever wanted to chat with us, we’re usually there (GMT Timezone). I thought about creating a dedicated IRC channel for the group, but I don’t think we’d have enough activity to keep it alive, so we’re sticking with the RHDN IRC for now.