Well if you could say... my grand adventure of ROM Hacking began back in late 2007. So you'd wonder to yourself "how'd I discover it in the first place?". It all started back when I was basically watching YouTube videos of gameplay on some video games that I have never played before, apart from also watching some of the Australian TV identifications, since I'm dignosed with autism... and you could probably say it was very high back then, I was an immature sort of person who couldn't understand how to get along with others. During the time I was watching video games... I gradually came across Pokémon ShinyGold, I have trouble remembering exactly how I did or anything like that, but I then learned that downloading the ROM and of course downloading the Emulator was how I managed to be able to play it. But I didn't play ShinyGold for very long though, since I very soon discovered the tools to edit the maps, which was none other than... yep you guessed it, AdvanceMap! When I downloaded AdvanceMap... it was the version earlier than 1.90, I started to play around with this ROM hacking tool editing the maps on Pokémon ShinyGold... the good old FireRed ROM hack. I messed around with it such as fixing the map and making the map bigger than it was, to suit the style of mapping in how FireRed and LeafGreen was done, like 3-square pathways instead of being exactly like Gold/Silver. I did those experiments with ShinyGold and that's pretty much how it started. Then I later on discovered other ROM hacking tools, but the problem was... that I had to be a registered user in order to download the tools. So PC was indeed my first ever website that I created an account on, but knowing back then... I was very much the sort that would avoid creating an account on a website/forum. So when I did... I got more into ROM hacking and I did even more simple experiments on ShinyGold with the tools. Then on April 1st 2008, I noticed how everyone was made to look like staff for April Fools Day. I was yet outstanded... but I noticed how that badge didn't appear until posted in that celebration thread, yet before I knew it... there was a user that spammed saying "I like this alot" several times in a post, something like that anyways. And of course... the user was indeed breaking the innapropiate content rule in his signature and knowing me back then... I was kinda a mini-mod in how I posted stating that I was reporting the user and all that, then a few minutes later... the user was banned, and I gradually started to post more in the thread. My username back then was indeed "PokémonShinySilver", and I had an avatar of that DS Pokémon silver remake box, that I assume was fanmade. Then later on in April 2008, someone posted in my visitor messages. I remember back when I first created my account... there was no visitor messages back then. That someone who posted in my visitor messages... was none other than my first ever friend on the internet that I got along with on PC, his name's Kyle and his username was chimchar 9, which it is today. Though there was times when we both changed our usernames and all that, I still remember when I changed it to "Silver Riolu" then "Platinum Lucario", we were both into ROM hacking and that was how I also started looking into other things and meeting new friends. Over the years... I matured and got more into doing DS ROM hacking and seeing ways of editing the ROMs. And today... some of my memories of ROM hacking might've rusted away a bit since I went onto a chat site called xat.com. But I did return again and now I'm back into wanting to learn to ROM hack more on the DS and on the GBA. And that's pretty much how my history of how I discovered ROM hacking was like, it just felt like a brand new adventure which it just feels the same way for researching the Nintendo DS ROMs.
~Davin (aka Platinum Lucario)