Snyderman’s been doing some great work doing the music for the MOTHER/EarthBound Zero remake hack! Here are two recent conversions:

A Ghastly Site:
Download audio file (A_Ghastly_Site.mp3)
(download)

The Paradise Line:
Download audio file (The_Paradise_Line.mp3)
(download)

Music hacking in EarthBound is insane, so I’m always amazed when I hear these. What’s more, it sounds like this might just be the base songs and they might be polished up/embellished later. Even without that, though, these sound great!

If you want to keep tabs on the remake hack project, keep an eye on this forum thread.

H.S recently posted a video showcasing a lot of stuff from the MOTHER/EB0 remake hack in the works – mostly walking around all the new maps and such:

The description is:

Now that I’ve moved all of the maps over to a CoilSnake project, I thought it would be fun to do a (long) walkabout of the currently empty world, to show off the various areas. The cutscenes were just added to make this video more entertaining, they won’t actually be in the final game.

Some of the music for this game isn’t done yet, so a few of the areas have placeholder music instead (everything from Easter to the end of the video). Several maps, mostly indoor areas, are not yet complete, and are simply skipped over in this video.

Even though the maps and (non-placeholder) music featured in this video are complete, they are not final, and might still undergo changes at a later date.

Until now we’ve seen lots of little pieces of this hack get made, it’s great seeing the pieces coming together!

A few months ago Bregalad released a utility called GBAMusRiper that rips the music from many GBA games into MIDI format with accompanying sound font files.

Apparently it even works with MOTHER 1+2, but only the MOTHER 2 side. And it works with MOTHER 3 too – apparently to the point that a hacker by the name of LuigiBlood was able to do some basic music insertion. Here’s a sample:

And here is another sample video.

I’ve never used this utility and I don’t know how one would go about ripping and inserting music, but if you’re interested, there you go!

Actually, I wonder if it’s possible to restore the quality of the GBA MOTHER 2 music using this utility as a reference…

A few days ago, uyuyuy99 released the first-ever EarthBound Zero map editing program, titled “BBHack”. It’s written in Java, so it should theoretically work on any platform that supports Java.

It’s not too hard to use either, here’s something I threw together pretty quickly:

It sounds like many more features are planned, including:

• 16×16 Tile Editor
• 8×8 Graphics Editor
• Sprite Editor
• Sprite/NPC Placement Editor (part of the map editor)
• Item Editor
• Enemy Editor
• Enemy Groups Editor
• Title Screen Editor
• Giegue’s Ship Editor
• Town Map Editor
• 8 Melodies Trippy BG Editor
• Text Editor
• Script Editor (sorta like CCScript)
• Palette Editor
• Starting/Levelup Stats Editor
• Ending Graphics Editor
• …and probably more stuff too

You can download the current version of BBHack here! Hopefully as time goes on we’ll start to see some cool EarthBound Zero hacks

A while back H.S posted a new map for the MOTHER/EarthBound Zero remake hack that’s underway. This time it’s the big desert area!

For reference, here’s what it looks like in the original game:

I think the new map is still incomplete and subject to change, but I’m really impressed at how well it’s turned out! I could never have done anything of this quality myself!

If you want to keep tabs on the remake hack project, follow this forum thread!

A common complaint among EarthBound players (particularly newer ones) is that it takes too long to walk places in the game. Basically, people wish there was a way to dash like in MOTHER 3. The Skip Sandwich items are there, but they’re a pain to use and only work for a few seconds.

Well, a while back Flynman made a small patch for EarthBound that addresses this very problem! With this patch, you can now run anytime you want just by holding the Y button Here’s HyperBound talking about it:

And here’s the actual IPS file and the Easy EarthBound Patcher program for Windows:

• EarthBound Run Patch

(Note that if you don’t use the Easy Patcher for whatever reason, you NEED to expand the EarthBound ROM. Just trying to use the IPS patch by itself will probably cause the game to not start up at all. If you use the Easy Patcher, it’ll take care of that stuff for you.)

Personally, I’ve never had a problem with the walking speed in EarthBound. Everyone’s always in a rush these days in games Although in MOTHER 1′s case I can sort of sympathize a little…

As mentioned before, I’m prepping to move so I’ve been clearing things out and throwing away stuff that I don’t need anymore. Yesterday I stumbled upon some old notebooks and thought I’d share some pics.

Here’s some stuff from my MOTHER 3 translation hacking notes. I literally have a notebook or two filled with stuff like this. I don’t need it anymore so I decided I’d take some pics and then throw the notebooks out.

I’m not 100% sure what this is, I’m guessing it had to do with the battle text routine though.

In general I write down all my thoughts/ideas/plans on any nearby notebooks and notecards. As a result I always have hundreds of notecards on my desk at any one time. Here are a bunch that were in one of my MOTHER 3 notebooks. Luckily I now use a simple daily planner so that’s cut down on the note card count a little

Here’s me working out the details of sprite welding. Man, it seems like that was a lifetime ago but also just yesterday.

I guess this is me trying to figure out how sprite OAM works so we could get more text on menu screens in MOTHER 3 than would normally have been allowed.

Dunno what this is, it looked cool so I took a pic. I think it might be related to the game’s sprite text queue and control code routines.

Working on something related to item name lengths. I guess this is where we expanded stuff in memory to allow for longer item names. I didn’t want to have to skimp on item names, because I loved how EarthBound had much longer item names than other RPGs back then.

Working out the details of Hard Mode! Contrary to popular belief, it does more than just increase enemy HP, it also alters some other stats, it looks like it at least changes speed too. I do vaguely remember testing enemies with super-high speed and thinking that it seemed to make them meaner, but it was so long ago I don’t remember anymore.

Working on a checklist of video clips to get for the translation patch video!

After I got the clips, Plo put the actual thing together. I’m still mad at myself for accidentally recording clips with Kumatora named simply “Kuma”, giving people the wrong impression that we had to cut her name down.

Some early planning/development on EarthBound Central!

Some early ideas for content/updates for EarthBound Central before I even made the site. Looks like I’ve done most of those things now.

Every month, the site design here changes slightly to have a different theme. This is me trying to think up different ideas for each month. I’m pretty sure the pattern doesn’t follow these notes anymore though. Speaking of which, for years I’ve been wanting to redesign the site. Will I ever get to? I dunno, we’ll have to just wait and see. TO BE CONTINUED

Early planning for the MOTHER 1′s 20th Anniversary page.

Some planning on Game Swag, a site I started a while back. It’s been hit hard by spammers and hackers lately, and it turned out to be a lot more time-consuming than I thought, so I’m considering closing it down or putting it in stasis. I’d like to simplify it and streamline it at some point, I think I aimed too high and tried to do too much with it. Again, like the EB Central redesign, I dunno when/if I’ll get around to doing anything though

Aaand that’s all the pics I took. I got some other notebooks around here still, but unless they’re especially interesting I’ll probably just toss ‘em without posting anything here. But stay tuned for more updates of stuff I’ve re-discovered!

NorthofOnett recently sent this question in:

So I just started playing Mother again, and I realized that the lamp and doll both have sprites before you enter the battle. Now I know they’re essential to the story, but there is another lamp in one of the rooms that isn’t necessarily mandatory to fight. However, there’s still an overworld sprite for it.

So my question is: Is Mother capable of having overworld sprites throughout the game, just like Mother 2? It’d make things a lot easier for newcomers to the series if they didn’t have to deal with random encounters. Or would doing this require too much memory for the game, making it impossible?

Honestly, I think it would be very possible – there are plenty of NES/Famicom games that have expansive maps with lots of enemies to encounter on them. Games like Zelda, Crystalis, Blaster Master come to mind. I think it was just the norm back then to have random encounters – it’s a lot easier to program and everyone else was doing it.

So I think it’d definitely be possible for MOTHER/EarthBound Zero to have overworld enemy sprites. Implementing it might be tough, and making sprites for all the enemies and finding spare ROM space for said graphics might make it even tougher/more expensive. This was actually one of the big reasons I started my EarthBound Zero remake hack project so long ago – being able to see enemies on-screen.

Anyway, I’d actually be interested in seeing this sort of thing added to either the MOTHER 1+2 port or the original games themselves. It’d definitely be a lot easier to add this functionality to the MOTHER 1+2 port, but you’d also need lots of GBA assembly programming knowledge. If I were a millionaire with free time on my hands it sounds like a fun challenge I’d love to try.

…Anyone got a million dollars?

H.S recently posted an updated map for the MOTHER remake ROM hack that’s in progress. Many attempts have been made at remaking Mother’s Day/Podunk, but this is by far THE best one so far:

For reference, here’s what it looks like in the original game:

Man, H.S’s map work never ceases to amaze me. I wish I had a map pic to share from when I was working on the remake hack, it was pretty bad. All I have is this bare-bones map from when I was just setting things up. But in all honesty, my map skills didn’t improve much beyond that

As always, if you want to keep tabs on the remake hack project, check out this forum thread!

Two of the most insanely skilled EarthBound hackers have teamed up to create a short holiday-themed hack, released just yesterday! It’s called Holiday Hex and features all-new content, including new music by Reg!

On the PK Hack forums, the hack is described as so:

Which one is better, Christmas or Easter? Are Christmas trees disgusting? Why is it Christmas Eve today, I thought that was yesterday? Holiday Hex answers all these questions in an action-packed knock-your-socks-off I-need-to-sit-down kind of way.

You take the roles of Tina and Kyle, two best friends who love Christmas. And now it’s up to them to save Christmas. I wonder what will happen next.

What we have here is an EarthBound ROM hack, meaning it’s an entirely new game being played in EarthBound’s original engine! Brought to you by H.S and Mr. Tenda, two of the self-proclaimed greatest names in PK Hack, this hack delivers all-new characters, all-new text, all-new maps, and even some all-new music by Reg! Cool, huh?

For instructions on how to play the game, be sure to read the readme.txt inside the zip. If you can’t figure it out, ask me or H.S for help and we will help you!

Here is the relevant link:

• Holiday Hex forum thread (download the latest version of the hack from here)

I haven’t had time yet to play this hack myself, but these guys have serious skills and are responsible for some of the amazing new EarthBound hacking tools/hacks released in the last few years. It’s almost like a dream time of EarthBound hacking, I guess you could say!

Having played so much EarthBound I’m perfectly fine with its control scheme, but I do remember at the time that things felt a little odd. I guess I wasn’t the only one, because master EarthBound hacker Penguin has released a small patch that changes EarthBound’s menu controls and such a bit!

Here’s how the patch is described:

Say goodbye to navigating through dozens of menus just to talk to your mom!

Changes:

• A button is now the Magical Interaction Button. It will interact with whatever you’re facing.
• X button is now the menu button. You’ll see the same menu displayed above.
• Y Button is now the map button.
• Interacting with something you cannot interact with will no longer produce a “No problem here.” dialog.
• Text references to the map button have been changed to be more accurate.

To use, simply apply the appropriate patch to your rom.

• If your rom is 3,145,728 bytes (unheadered), apply eb-newcontrols.ips.
• If your rom is 3,146,240 bytes (headered), apply eb-newcontrols-headered.ips.

For any other size… you’re on your own.

You can get the latest patch here!

Recently someone asked if there’s a code to keep Buzz Buzz in your party. This is really simple to do if you know EarthBound hacking, so I made a Game Genie code for it:

After you leave Pokey’s house after Buzz Buzz’s death… you’ll still have Buzz Buzz with you!

Note: This code will work with most EarthBound ROMs out there, but for some headerless ROMs it won’t work. This probably won’t work on an actual cartridge either, but since I don’t have a Super NES Game Genie I can’t test it out.

I actually spent upwards of an hour trying to figure out how to make a code work for headerless ROMs/the actual cartridge, but with no luck. If any skilled hackers out there have free time, can you try and convert this to work with a headerless ROM? Basically the code changes the sequence [05 14 00 05 12 00] to [05 14 00 05 14 00]. I thought it’d be a snap to convert the code, but no luck…

The other day Lyrositor released a tool called CCScriptWriter, which extracts all the text from an EarthBound ROM and converts it to CCScript-formatted code.

If none of that makes any sense to you, here’s a quick explanation:

• EarthBound’s script is really complicated and very hard to dump
• Until now, the only way to edit EarthBound’s existing text was with PK Hack, but it was very complicated and sometimes buggy
• A tool called CCScript was created to make it easier to manipulate EarthBound’s text
• But EarthBound’s script was so complicated that it was never fully dumped or made available to edit with CCScript
• Lyrositor was like, “Man, someone needs to do this” and then made CCScriptWriter, which dumps the script out of the EarthBound ROM and makes it compatible with CCScript

This tool is a big deal and will mean several big things:

• It’ll be easier to make more complicated EarthBound hacks, like adding new stuff to the game, for example
• This makes it infinitely easier to translate EarthBound into other languages. The only real remaining step would be to expand EarthBound’s font to include new letters, which I tried many years ago but it’s better to redo it from scratch now and make it work with CoilSnake. Hopefully someone will do this sometime

Anyway, check out CCScriptWriter here!

If you’ve ever wanted to mess around with EarthBound hacking but it always intimidated you, these are some good times to be a fan. The tools that exist now are so, so much nicer than in the old days. And even if you’re not interesting in hacking the game, I’m sure we’ll see more and more interesting hacks in the future!

The folks working on the MOTHER remake hack have finished all the map work for the outdoors areas! Here’s a look at the map of maps:

All of the locations and rooms in EarthBound are actually stored as one giant map, which is why you see all of these MOTHER 1/EarthBound Zero maps arranged this way. Later, a lot of the blank areas will be filled with indoor maps, like the insides of houses, buildings, dungeons, and the like.

This is actually a huge step in the project – maps were like THE biggest hurdle when I attempted an EarthBound Zero remake hack years ago. I wound up shelving the project when the buggy map editors kept corrupting everything:

There’s still a ton of work left to be done, so I wouldn’t expect this remake hack to get done for another year or two at least (that’s just my prediction, I’m not involved with the project). But man, oh, man, I can’t wait to see all the pieces coming together quicker and quicker now

If you want to keep up with more detailed progress of the project, keep an eye on this forum thread!

Over the past months/years I’ve posted a lot of the maps people were making for the MOTHER 1 remake hack, but there wasn’t much else to show besides those.

Well, H.S recently posted some screenshots of the game in action!

From my own experience trying to make a remake hack, adding the NPCs was pretty simple and one of the more fun parts. It also looks like they’re using my script from my MOTHER 1+2 translation! It looks cool to see it living in a different form.

Anyway, if you want more details and updates as they happen, check out the forum thread here!

Master EarthBound hacker H.S posted this today:

Finally, after a year in the making, the first part of EarthBound 2: The Re-Boundening is complete! The patch is available at the bottom of this post.

This hack takes place 6 years after the end of EarthBound, and follows Ness as he returns to Onett, only to find that things are much different than when he left. It seems new trouble is afoot.

I currently only have Onett complete, so I’ve made a demo of that part. As usual, use Lunar IPS to patch the .ips file onto a clean EarthBound rom.

And here are some screenshots!

I’ve only played a few minutes of it myself but it’s already pretty interesting. You can download it here:

• EarthBound 2: The Re-Boundening IPS patch (includes a patching program if you don’t have one)

A few years ago, while working on the MOTHER 1+2 translation, I made a hack that turned my custom Easy Ring into a Hard Ring. Reid then played the game live for everyone to see here. It was a lot of fun to see in action!

I realized that I never released a patch with the Hard Ring enabled, so here’s the latest build of the MOTHER 1+2 translation with the Hard Ring stuff activated. To use it, you just equip the Easy Ring like normal, except it makes the game much much harder:

You can download the IPS patch here!

If you’re interested, all the programming code and tools I used for my MOTHER 1+2 translation are available here. Even the programming for the Easy Ring/Hard Ring stuff is in there if you’re interested at seeing how it works or if you want to mess around with it yourself!

A fan by the name of broomweed has started on a hack of MOTHER 1+2 to make MOTHER 1 very Mr. Saturn-like, as inspired by comments years ago on EB Central! Here’s a description of the project:

Hey, you! Do any of the following apply to you:

• Haven’t played Mother 1 because of the lack of Mr. Saturns in it
• Always wondered what the Mr. Saturns would be like in Mother 1
• Love trying to decipher what the Mr. Saturns are trying to say

If you answered “yes” to any of the above, then, um, that’s pretty weird. But your prayers have been answered! SaturnBound Zero is a text/cosmetic hack that adds ONE HUNDRED PERCENT more Mr. Saturns to MOTHER 1+2!

And here are the features:

• A surprisingly handsome recreation of the Mr. Saturns and their font in 16×16 and 8×8, respectively
• Changes human NPCs are into Mr. Saturns, with various features to differentiate them (sometimes)
• Changes dialogue (so far, in only Mother’s Day and some of Magicant) into a Mr. Saturn-sounding style.
• Accounts for weird shifting of the bottom half in some — but not all — NPC sprites, so they don’t look weird and off-kilter
• Accounts for up-and-down motion in player sprites (this is why their feet look so weird, sorry)
• Changes a couple of item names and descriptions
• Changes some of the battle text
• Changes the ATM to look like the Mr. Saturn ATM (kind of)
• Changes PSI into “science” (because, you know, the Mr. Saturns are good at that…)

There’s still a good amount of work that needs to be done, but you can check out the current version and keep up with progress here!

Work on the MOTHER remake hack continues, and one of the most recent developments is the game’s ending music! lucas_raphael has been working hard on recreating the song in EarthBound’s special music format, and here’s the latest version of it:

Download audio file (The_End.mp3)
(download)

Keep in mind it’s not finalized yet (or at least I don’t think so), but even so, I’m really impressed and can’t wait for this hack to get released eventually

If you want to keep up with all the little details and progress of the project, keep an eye out here!

In MOTHER 3, each playable character can do music combos in battle. Each character has a handful of different-sounding combos… all except Duster. For some reason every combo of his sounds the same. I never really noticed it because I’m terrible at the music combo system.

Some intrepid fans figured out that Duster DOES have other combo sounds though, and ever since then a common question Jeffman and I have gotten is, “Can you fix Duster’s sound combo glitch?”

Well, out of nowhere, Jeffman recently tracked down the problem and fixed it! You can download it and read more info about it here.

This bug was present in the original Japanese version of the game too, so this marks another bug that Jeffman went and fixed! So if you ever meet Jeffman someday, give him your thanks and/or a bucket of candy!