Monday, September 11, 2017

AGTH H-code wiki resurrected


A widely-used wiki for AGTH codes has been safely mirrored after the former site went offline.


Text-hooking is a method for extracting the text from Japanese-language visual novels and eroge in real-time, allowing players with incomplete Japanese knowledge to easily look up words and phrases with electronic dictionaries or convert the text to romaji, and for those with little or no Japanese knowledge to follow the story with machine translation.  While modern text hookers like ITHVNR have built-in engine support for most games, many others can still be hooked using custom H-codes coded by savvy users for problematic titles.  These codes are specific to each game, and often to a given version, and therefore a centralized storehouse to archive and index these codes for easy retrieval is essential for text-hooking fans.

I wrote previously about the demise of the AGTH code database, which was an advanced tool for archiving and finding H-codes.  Many H-codes stored only in that database were lost that day, but fortunately the majority of codes were mirrored on the much-older AGTH wiki.

At the end of August 2017 the AGTH wiki on Wikia disappeared, potentially leading to a new Dark Age in text-hooking.  It's still not clear why it was it taken down, as it was hosted for free by Wikia, and was almost surely generating a steady flow of traffic.

Fortunately, the text-hooking community was able to retrieve online backups and reconstruct the code list, which forms the core of the new Visual Novel Text Hooking Wiki.  The new wiki also includes a short list of text-hooking tools.

I'm somewhat skeptical that the same issue that brought down the old Wikia page won't kill the new one, but at least the data is safely archived.  Losing a decade's worth of painstakingly-compiled custom H-codes would've been a crippling blow to the text-hooking community.  Since new H-codes need to be constantly added, a wiki is one of the few good options available for maintaining the ever-expanding list.

For users looking for a cheap English shop to buy text-hookable games, I recommend DLsite English.


Besides having English descriptions for a wide selection of Japanese-language titles, DLsite English also carries titles that other English retailers would never even touch.

Readers should also take a look at these unique resources:

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