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!