I have a question,
I have a feeling we'd be wiser to do all of this stuff as legally as possible. There are a few problems here. For one only John and "Masked Gamer" (wherever he's been) own legitimate copies of SOM afaik. So I'm wondering if we shouldn't publish games under the auspices of these particular copies of SOM. We could say we're passing John's copy around but I think that would void anything prior. To be honest I'd like John to post any license that comes with SOM for us for scrutiny. I just can't imagine a game software that makes standalone apps intended to be enjoyed by other people not coming with some kind of publishing rights to the owner.
Another consideration is usually it is understood/printed on Japanese imports "for use only in Japan", so what the hell that adds up to I'm really not sure. But these are grey areas worth considering I think.
Another reason for considering this is I think I now have the technical abilities to translate a SOM exe without modifying SOM's runtime files in any way. That is to say when we change the bytes in the exe we're technically in breach of Fromsoftware's copyright, because we've made a derivative copy of their product. So I think it would be more prudent to instead of using John's translated exe to use the original exe in the future, and instead use other means of translating the text in the game, like I've done by dropping a ddraw.dll file into the game folder. That's still not totally legitimate, but it's something an end user could do for themselves, like patching a rom. Of course they could patch the exe as well, but it's cleaner I think to not encourage changing the product. Adding files to a filetree I think is less offensive than modifying files.
I'm not suggesting there is any reason to be paranoid. I just think it looks better to play nice/by the rules.
PS: Again, I'm not saying everyone should own a copy of SOM. But it would be appropriate I think for each major game to credit a particular hard copy of SOM as proof of license or something. Once we get in trouble we can always go underground and do everything illegitimately~
