The End of an Era

[casterofdreams]

https://kotaku.com/spooked-by-nintendo- ... 1828207099

Sad to see go. God speed.

[Xeogred]

Terrible news. That Frank Cifaldi tweet really sums it up well.

Oh well, something else will more than likely rise from these ashes as it goes with the internet. Sorry Nintendo, this is a battle you will never win (plus weren't they selling us roms on the Wii and Wii U? Hmmmm... not to mention their own emulation was horrible!)

[Tanooki]

The whining entitlement of emuparadise taking a dive is pretty bad, and at face value only it has, but if you use their forums, nothing changed so really just them smartly not hosting them on a publicly open website is what went missing. Also kind of amusing blaming Nintendo due to loveroms, I mean I guess you can draw a line between the two but it would be nice to know more instead of just playing around with a jump to conclusions mat.

The blame really Frank covered well in that one set of sentences. No people shouldn't swipe stuff, but given no alternative, that's a good reason why those sites exist and not just for freeloaders to get a ride, but people who really would want to even buy such things but can not.

[nightrnr]

The end of an era indeed, and for other reasons too. I don't want my own thread, so here goes:

There have been troubling things happening to some of my crucial online resources: the latest being TIZ. Here is a post I found about it with a quote from the topic creator.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Roms/comments/ ... retrozone/

Posted byu/CurbsidePharmacist
4 days ago
Behind The Blow: What really TheIsoZone & RetroZone

Never fear Curbside is here!!!

[official public statement for all social media on behalf of CurbsidePharmacist]

First let me say I'm sorry to see yet another site has been infected by this cancer as of late.But we have had no means to communicate with the outside world until late last night, you'll really love this story guys so sit down and grab some popcorn.... if you don't want to read all this childish bullshit then I'd suggest you skip to the bottom under [TLDR] and get the sum of the situation I'm sorry in advanced if you decide to read thru my butchered grammar but this is a bit emotional for me right now.

I'm not going to get into a public pissing contest with the crew of JaMbos new site, I will however offer some information to this new crew to look out for and for the retro gaming community as a whole to prevent a douche canoe from charging people for games again, this information can be verified in our Discord server in General Chat under pinned messages for anyone who cares to verify my following comments. Or if you want to just come to our room and hang out and help us rebuild and chat in real time, and yes we're rebuilding.

A link to our temporary Discord server can be found on our website with a copy of this message posted as-well to clarify any confusion as to who I am because we have no functioning site/forums at the moment

What happen to RetroZone and TheIsoZone?

This is a 2- part answer so I'll split it into 2 answers RZ and TIZ.

**RZ - Staff truly believes it was sabotaged.**JaMbo and 3 mods from TIZ were set to create the retrozone.co site as a team then pass the site to the 3 former mods at completion and was funded by Pinky.Only 2-3 weeks into the launch the admin team became unsettled by events that came into fruition over a period of about 2 weeks when working on the new site. We all posted goodbyes on the TIZ forums and then within a few hours were were all removed from the TIZ team completely leaving TIZ without moderators and all files were disabled without warning even us mods didn't know it was coming as we were still backing up files we felt were irreplaceable.We started to feel that our work over the past 3 weeks and our community might be in danger of being lost forever due to the unexpected accelerated schedule we were being forced into for some unknown reason and other erratic behaviors that led to constant changes and this sudden urge to shut down TIZ, we DID NOT want TIZ's tutorials sections, DIY mods and other obscure titles and hombrew custom apps thrown away and lost in a last minute botch job on a patched together website that barely functions but we did as we were told and kept working because none of us can code but we would do anything we could for our members.

3-4 days ago we became aware that the that the sites were in imminent danger after a series of racist and hostile texts were sent out to all 3 admins Curb,Pinky and Z (Discord has the screens) after a member of RetroZone posted a topic asking about FireDrop services not working, we were instructed to remove them as to hide the fact he owns TIZ both and FD.Before anyone could get to correct this oversight he logged into RZ and renamed one of our admins into a gay slur and then sent multiple threats to me such as wiping the server and gave me an ultimatum to either "walk away from Pinky and Z and start yet another site with him or get left with no support from him anymore".

I then logged off my Skype and immediately notified my staff that we had a defon situation and needed to change our passwords after being suggest by jambo at the very end of his hate speech fill cluster of msgs to my team members. We then changed all our passwords and attempted to secure our site the best we knew now.

Our best wasn't good enough as you can see, as soon as I invoked the password change on the server I was locked out of the server completely and asked Pinky to look for a possible setting in the server panel for add/remove/whitelisting IPs to help me gain entrance again. Soon after that The server crashed completely and I was notified that our server has been wiped clean and JaMbo planned to repack the sites code and sell it (screen caps for his sites chatroom).

Over the next 8-10 hours Pinky, Z and I along with those that survived JaMpocalypse weighed our options and licked our wounds while sending a backup of the server we made a few days ago back to the server and were able to get the server up 2 times but it would crash and get wiped clean 20 minutes later.

So while in Discord with about 100 other members of the former sites to trying update each other on what had happen and then plan our next move.I then advised my team to comb the forums, chat logs and anything else that may aid us as evidence towards trying to prove what had happen because JaMbo was banning all the users from TIZ who asked about RetoZone's status after the deletion of our server. Later it was found he was spamming random comments all over 4chan and reddits like this to bolster his website that's being used to host 3rd party links that charge for roms that he actually owns, AND!!! using TIZ forums and public media outlets to spin his unsubstantiated claims about our team and basically kicking us while we were down after he stripped us bare.

​

TIZ

You users are the heroes here that killed TIZ, I cannot take credit for this as I played no part in it.

The community stepped up and stood for us when we were busted and broken could not stand on our own two feet after we were stripped of our home, and I'm honestly fighting back tears to type this right now but I''m just amazed by the people of the internet and what you can do with sheer numbers when angered or wronged.

Soon after the repeated deletions of RZ servers the community naturally visited their former home at TIZ to inquire as to why this had happen and were soon suspicious of JaMbo's blacked out drunk recollection of events.

Users started asking too many questions about what had happen the previous few hours, as more and more members showed up to the site and asked about what happen their questions soon start to result in waves of bans issued on all former staff and anyone that was listed in our Discord room... He had effective taken away 130,000 users voices with the click of a button to hide the very information I'm trying to give you all right now.

TLDRJam's a douche.We are ok, your home is coming back guys.Thank you for all the support you all are truly amazing and it's a pleasure to have so many loving retro gamers that want to fight for the community as a whole that we love so much.If you want to help you know where we are we can use all the help we can get right now.

Please keep the rom links out of our Discord server please we do not want to get it removed for a TOS violation, anyone posting links outside a DM will be removed from the server, don't worry everyone Curbs got a tip for you. The firedrop links can be obtained form the way back machine and with a little editing here and there magically work again. This may change soon so drop it like it's hot, because they are fire.

jaMbo87 - You were a friend to me for so many years, I would have jumped in a raging fire to pull you out without a second guess and yet you betrayed us with such surgical precision like it couldn't have been anymore "accidental".We were friends one moment and then enemies the next. I have no ill will to you and I will not contact you ever again, but I think you fail to realize this little fit you threw sends ripples across the internet and gaming communities and will soil your new rebranding and any other projects the community finds you doing. Good luck with reprime.

I was glad for the explanation, but very heavy-hearted to learn the reasons. So basically there was a mutiny/hostile takeover. How can we preserve the hobby when we are fighting big corporations AND having civil wars? TIZ was huge in it's scope and I hope most of it recovers when the real (sane) players rebuild (I'll be avoiding reprimed).

Nintendo just shut down a key pokemon modding fan site. Now I'm not a huge fan of the series, but I am a little taken aback of how Nintendo reacts to what I consider love letters to their flagship series.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/29/1779 ... andom-wiki

And then there is dumb (bad) luck in the case of RPGMPavilion (I'm not sure if this will ever recover, and I'm very sad to lose the resources of several games saves for the Playstation RPG maker series). I hope I'm overreacting and that it will rise again soon, but it's been like 5 months since it went down and I am getting doubtful. Here's a couple links and an archive (all links in the archive are dead) for reference:

http://web.archive.org/web/201703141920 ... ilion.com/
https://b-m.facebook.com/rpgmpavilion/
https://twitter.com/RPGMPavilion

These are turbulent times indeed.

[Tanooki]

Holy crap an internet assassination of many people just to use some soon to be ex-friends to package up a site to then rebrand and use as a money making scam to peddle roms they don't really own. Wow, and Nintendo got shit all over like they did it when it was some greedy small beans assclown on a power trip stealing resources and wiping out people for profit.


I didn't know they had a discord channel, what is it? I'd like to keep up to date and see what happens. I fairly recently got on there as I love the irc style format and hang out in the classic gaming space that sd2snes, analogue and a few others use as it's fantastic and friendly, very helpful.

[nightrnr]

Yeah, pretty messed up. I can't believe that one person pretty much took the whole thing down. Everything checks out with curbside's narrative though. But that's a nice summary of it all, Tanooki.

The discord link comes and goes on their site retrozone.co
I did run into the link once, but don't feel like I have anything to offer on my end.

It looks like (me speculating based off the "good news" update) they plan to have the forum up and running soon though.

[Tanooki]

Sounds good (going back up) for both RZ and TIZ under whatever new assumed identity or not. It really goes to show why you see it so popular in books and movies with the whole inside conspiracy angle that works so well. All it takes it one well ingrained trusted asshat to screw it up for many others. Sometimes it's real, just like those twat spies in the 20th century that sold out the US to the enemy in our history books, or in this case a so called highest ranking associate and friend to many who decided that the temptation of cash was more important and did it the worst way possible using soon to be ex-friends as suckers to do the dirty work, then shut them out, Mission Impossible style basically disavowing all knowledge, erasing tracks, and disappearing people to protect the shady stuff.

[samsonlonghair]

Dudes, I think we all just need to download complete “no-intro” type romsets onto our local drives. We can’t count on this type of resource being available online. It’s time to take our archives offline. Fill up a terabyte drive with as many iso files as you can manage, then shelve it. Make a clone of that drive whenever you can to keep a backup copy.

Reminds me of the end of Fahrenheit 451 when people had to memorize books because the firemen burned them all. I know that’s melodramatic, but that’s how I feel reading this stuff.

[ElkinFencer10]

I have ROM sets on my hard drive for PCE/TG16, NES, SNES, N64, VB, GB, GBC, GBA, SG1000, SMS, Gen, 32X, Sega CD, GG, 2600, 5200, 7800, Jaguar, Lynx, and MVS. You know, in case anyone's in need.

[Tanooki]

I'd be a liar if I said I didn't bother already, so I have, for a few. I wasn't really comfortable with it, but the reality of it was before this even happened it felt like the climate was there, so for any system I intended to snap up a kit for I backed up and tossed on a portable drive. The one mystery me though was the CD archives for the PCE/TG they don't seem very well made and the builds of them are a scattershot of formats so I left it alone.