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Release Groups

A number of people working together to obtain and release new games, utilities or patches on to the net. A release is made when a correctly packaged file is uploaded to a private FTP for other release group members to access. Release groups generally follow a set of rules governing the correct etiquette to package releases, failure to do so results in a Nuke. Many groups have specialised in releasing games for a particular console.

Releases that come from an individual not belonging to any group are usually labeled as Independent.

(There is a release group that has the same name like our website GBXR) GBXR Nintendo DS ROM Releases

A nuke is a release in the Scene that for some reason doesn't hold up to the rules set by the scene. Most commonly they are bad dumps, ie the data is corrupt or innacurate somehow. This would be a typical site-wide nuke.

Each separate site in the scene can also have their own specific set of standards for nuking.

The Scene is a community of people that are involved with organized underground piracy. It's a sort of web of trust, where copyrighted material is illegaly distributed between private FTP sites.

The people in the scene are organized in Release Groups. Various members in the groups handle different tasks, suppliers (obtains material), packers (packs the material for release), coders (cracks, tools etc), artwork (for NFOs, intros etc).

Often not even the nicknames of the individual members of the groups are known, which provides an additional layer of privacy, while at the same time lets the group as a whole take credit for their releases.

In some scenes Scene Charts are released to track how successful the various groups are. Both the GBC and GBA scenes have had scene charts released pretty regularly.

Each specific scene has its own standards and policies for how releases are compressed, packed and distributed, and during which circumstances they should be nuked. Some of these standards harken back to the days when the scene was on BBS and the technical circumstances back then.

Nintendo DS Scene has been mired in chaos since its inception. One of the main reasons is that it's taken a very long time for a standardized viable piracy solution to appear, so there has been no real standard for releasing or way of testing releases. The very first roms were dumped and released by Homebrew developers, notably DarkFader.

After that followed a long period of releases from Golden Sun Team, encrypted and usable only on NeoFlash. Once the NDS Rom Dumper tool appeared, all the releases from Golden Sun Team were universally nuked.

Some of the more active groups in the DS scene includes Trashman, Legacy, Lube, Wario, GBXR and WRG.

A good part of the groups in the NDS scene are either not real groups from the scene, or they are Joke Groups put together by members from other groups.

NDS Rom Dumper v1

The initial release, allowed for the dumping of NDS games.

NDS Rom Dumper v1.1

Released in late June of 2005, v1.1 fixed some bugs in the previous version.

NDS Rom Dumper v1.3 by WRG

In mid-January 2006 WRG released an updated version of DarkFader's NDS Rom Dumper tool, this new version allows the dumping of newer cards which were 'protected'. Supposedly, it can also dump GBA games.