Help identifing this ROM..., Probably n00bish, but who cares.

No don't worry, I haven't broken the ROM posting rules, but I am very interested to know what the hell this is.

I got this ROM on a floppy disk waay back in about 1998. It's pokemon Gold, but I got it before it came out in the UK (And by the looks of it, the US too). Now, I don't know too much about this game, other than this copy. This appears to be the Japanese version, although I am somewhat puzzled because of this:

All the text is in a 'sort of' translated English. However, it hasn't been translated fully, which is why I want to know whether this is a pirate or not. When naming your character, you can only have 5 letters in the name, which seems a little strange to me. There are also a few changes in text (Or so says a friend who has the official English version of the game). I would have expected a Japanese game to have Japanese text which may explain the restraints on the letters.

There are also a few name changes apparently, and although a lot of things have been translated fully, some parts are a little confusing.

I'd just like to know if there's any background on this version of the game, and hopefully I haven't sounded to n00bish... after all, this was the last pokemon game I played...

I'm guessing that someone translated the game to english before it was released in America. Thus Japanesse names popping up where English names should be. So you have what seems to be a patched rom.

Probably a leak

Most likely, much like the translated (but not fully translated) version of Mother.

Yeah, It's a Translation patched Pokemon Gold.

Yeah, I was guessing it would be something like that. I'm just interested to see whether this ROM is actually known, or whether I'm one of the few people in the world to actually have this patched ROM (If that's what it actually is).

Yeah i got it on my 486.
i love the names on the grass pokemon in this one.

Oh god, I remember when I used to play those fan-translation hacks of pokemon gold ;_;

So much memories

But yeah it isn't a leak or anything, it's most likely a fan-translation hack.

I even remembering used to finding good translations hacks back in 1999, they always had the 5 letter limit thing on names and stuff like that.

This post has been edited by Naoshi on Jan 24 2006, 04:36 PM

Yep that's an early fan translation. I played through half the game in japanese months before it came out, then I got a translation patch, the names of the pokemon are different and I guess peoples names are different too, but by the time it actually came out I lost interest. My sister got pokemon silver and crystal though..

This was an illegal version of Pokemon Gold that was produced at the peak of Pokemon hype prior to the release of Gold and Silver. The games were known about for a long time by the rabid ass card-buying psycho-soccer-mom fanbase and as a result this translation began circling the internet and the piracy scene (on flash carts). To this day you can see Ebay records with similarly bad translations toting their negative feedback as the auctioneer tries to deny any wrongdoing; sick.

(also: have you just never played Pokemon Gold or something?)

I actually have pirated cart versions of these. =X

Serves me right I suppose.