The Team

BAO, BAO 1984, BAO Team, Bastusan Area Organization -

A versatile group who made major contribution in anime, rom translation, software/game development and hacking on the Internet. The group was classmates and friends since 1984 in The Gentle Shepherd School (In late 2005, some unknown group  acquired the institution and now known as Bloomington Middle and Grade School),  They were the one of the first rom hackers who introduced Japanese DOS (Ezjap, BAO's modified JapDOS) and using Norton Disk Editor, a simple hex editor. BAO was using JapDOS since 1994 to play hentai games from ELF Corporation like Isaku and Aishimai. Founded by Erickson, Nesty, kamuixtv and TJ. Leaders are Alfa, Galo, kamuixtv, Cahos Rane an

The first decade

This article took place in grade school to early high school years (1984 to 1994). The school held clubs for specified subjects, their class adviser required one but they joined three or more clubs without taking them seriously. The Gentle Shepherd School is the only school in their vicinity that offers computer [curriculum] that started with Commodore 64. The Computer club lead to the development of Batugan, a batch compiler, Pic2exe, an executable photo program and a virus-like data wiping program. At one school festival, high school [teacher], Virgilio Gabao was assigned to transform the nipa hut into a haunted house. The group laughed the idea when the opening day comes, they entered the haunted house and took advantage of the dim area so they beaten-up the high school crew and ruined the props. On a separate event, the school invited mascots from Jollibee and Sustagen. As the children went to the stage, the group sneaks in and pushed the mascots until they fell into the ground. They cut classes by crossing thru barbed wires or jumping thru fences just to play console or go swimming with some of their female classmates. These events made the group as the most notorious students at that time although some of them excelled in their academics that made them exceptional.

Fan translation

<p>The group was lucky to have an&nbsp;SNES game copiers which&nbsp;were expensive and rarities during that time (1993 to 1995). Game copiers can only be purchase at Greenhills, an upper-class district in the Philippines. The group immersed themselves on games like Dragon Ball Z, YuYu Hakusyo, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Front Mission and other titles that have sequels on current consoles. They even held fighting game tournaments. The group consider younger gamers who have play the current sequels/remakes of these games unfortunate,&nbsp; During&nbsp; summer of 1994, the group started to become curious on how the game copier system works since it uses 3.5 microfloppy diskette, they wondered if there can be a way to play SNES roms on a home PC. Their inquiry led them to Norton Disk Editor, a simple DOS hex editng tool. They notice that the headers of an exe PC executable) and SNES ROM have some similarity. They begun experimenting on several SNES roms by changing the game-scenario script and game credits by deleting some of the game creators staff and replacing their own names. During that period, the IT industry was still in its early years and not everyone had Internet access, because of this the group didn't realize that others were doing the same thing and it was apparently too late for them to establish themselves as one of romhacking worlds pioneers. Indeed, the romhacking culture became widely known at around 1996 onwards, the group actually began romhacking at around 1994, during the group's work on "EMIT" a Japanese-English reading and learning game for the SNES that was released only in Japan. The group do admit that at that time they only romhacked those games for parody like changing heroes' names and&nbsp;storyline like the bad ending remark on Chrono Trigger from "But the future refused to change" to one with a nasty meaning. One of the earlier hacking tools the group used was Japanese (JAPDOS) which allowed them to edit the Japanese text on certain games. Some of the better known ROM Hackers at that time and up until present have questioned the group's work and professed that JapDos didn't existed, primarily because some of them have no access to other Asian applications at BAO's disposal.</p>