A few years ago some skilled hackers dug into the ROM and found out a bunch of technical stuff, including how Lucky Sandwiches work. So here’s the deal with them:

When you buy a Lucky Sandwich (more precisely, immediately before the text “Lucky sandwich? Who is going to carry this?”), the game chooses from one of six Lucky Sandwich item entries to use. The recovery effect of a Lucky Sandwich is set in stone once bought, so it’s possible to stockpile certain types.

Determination Process:
Generate a random number 0-15. If less than 7, 60 HP sandwich.
Else generate a random number 0-8. If less than 4, 240 HP sandwich.
Else generate a random number 0-4. If less than 3, full HP sandwich.
Else generate a random number 0-1. If 0, 5 PP sandwich.
Else generate a random number 0-2. If nonzero, 20 PP sandwich.
Else full HP+PP sandwich.

Probabilities:

• 60 HP: 44% (21/48)
• 240 HP: 25% (12/48)
• full HP: 19% (9/48)
• 5 PP: 6% (3/48)
• 20 PP: 4% (2/48)
• full HP+PP: 2% (1/48)

So there you go! It looks like over 50% of the time it gives a “meh” result, so I guess that’s why I never buy them. I feel like I’m in the minority though – does anyone actually buy them often?

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If you’ve never played the original game or if you don’t remember it clearly, the original swamp area is here for reference:

This is one of those most grueling parts of the game, and it looks like it’ll still be pretty tough in the remake too. What’s even more impressive is that completely new map elements had to be hacked in for this – although the Deep Darkness stuff is swampy, it doesn’t have all the stuff the EarthBound Zero swamp had. So good job there, H.S!

For details and such about design decisions for this map, see here.

It’s still going to be a long, long time until this remake ever nears completion, but I love seeing it slowly coming together like this

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EarthBound Zero Remake (17) Read More >>>

Thanksgiving / Merrysville:

Halloween / Spookane:

Holy Loly Mountain / Mt. Itoi:

As I’ve said many a time, hacking EarthBound is really tough – and hacking maps is one of THE toughest things to do. In fact, it’s the reason I stopped working on the remake hack some years ago. So seeing such top-notch map-hacking work is always awe-inspiring. It makes me wish I had more free time to get back into the hack – with the maps being taken care of most of the rest is stuff I could handle relatively easily.

In any case, there’s still a TON of work left, but this gives me hope for the future These maps in particular also make me wish Nintendo would actually create an official version of the first game in this style.

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Snowman in EarthBound Form (19) Read More >>>

All the graphics, text, music, background stuff, etc. is all temporary, so don’t mind that. The big thing here is that the scripting works properly, the “Sing” command becomes available, and things progress little by little with each round of singing.

As an EarthBound hacker myself, I gotta say that this is some really impressive stuff. Here’s hoping all the other special event scripting in the game goes as smoothly!

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EarthBound Zero Remake Update (58) Read More >>>

Many years ago, the PK Hack regulars wanted to dig into the delivery system to see how it worked and how robust it was. So they devised a test:

Part 1: Stick Ness in a cordoned-off area and see what happens

Part 2: Open up a few areas and try again

Impressively, the game finds a route, despite being a rather complicated trip. We also get to see which paths he chose – the bottom one both times. As I think Blue Antoid once put it:

The conclusion:

This subroutine was obviously programmed by hyper-intelligent space ants. We have not choice but to submit to the whims of our new insect overlords. Obey! Obey!

All in all, very cool, especially considering how absolutely insane EarthBound’s map system is – which happened to another (and probably THE biggest) reason for the game’s development woes.

Most other games developers probably wouldn’t have cared if a simple delivery guy walked over obstacles and walls, so I think this shows how devoted the developers were to not cutting corners. Not that that was really ever in doubt, of course

EDIT: Coming from a computer science background myself, I realize that pathfinding is not that difficult. But for whatever reason, this is cited by programmers (one of whom was Satoru Iwata) as being one of the toughest things to get working right in the game (see Sep. 9, 1994 here). Of course, the game was written in assembly twenty years ago, I’m sure it’s a lot easier nowadays.

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We’ve already seen work on the new Snowman map here, now here’s a shot of Youngtown / Easter in action:

You can see the whole map here:

And you can compare it to the original here: EarthBound Zero Youngtown map

Editing maps in EarthBound is the devil, and keeping the data from corrupting over time is even worse. So seeing these maps coming together is like a miracle!

You can follow progress on the project here.

More EB Zero Remake Maps (16) Read More >>>	Snowman in EarthBound Form (19) Read More >>>
Misc. Project Round-up (3) Read More >>>

The question’s come up a lot since I released my MOTHER 1+2 translation the other day, so I should try to explain why it would be a lot of work to fully translate the MOTHER 2 side of the game too.

EarthBound’s Text System

What I hear a lot is, “Can’t you just copy and paste EarthBound’s script into the game?” For many other games, it WOULD be that easy – in fact, RPGOne did that with the MOTHER 1 side of MOTHER 1+2 shortly after the game was released in 2003. It was pretty much a copy-paste job from the EarthBound Zero script. It was possible with MOTHER 1 because the game’s text format is extremely simple.

EarthBound’s text format, on the other hand, is the absolute, 100% opposite. It’s a huge mess. It’s not even appropriate to call it a “text format” – everything in EarthBound is pretty much one gigantic scripting language. I don’t know how to explain that well to non-programmers, so here’s a random snippet from Threed, with some of the control codes parsed for your understanding:

[GOSUB C69082][FLAGON 00B][1F 41 05][1F EB 03 06][1F 15 03 00 0E 01 01][1F 61][1F E7 03 00][1F F3 03 00 03][DELAY 3C][1F F4 03][LINE][OPENWIN 01]@Ah![DELAY 14] Here’s the problem, and it’s not too tough to fix.[PAUSE][LINE]@Hang on for a second or two…[PAUSE][CLOSEALLWIN][DELAY 1E][1F EA 03 00][1F 61][1F 00 00 B3][1F F1 E2 01 10 01][1F 61][1F E6 E2 01][1F 07 02][DELAY 3C][1F 03][OPENWIN 01]@There![PAUSE][LINE]@That should do it![PAUSE][LINE]@Now, if [GOSUB C91FBA] board,[DELAY 0F] the Sky Runner will take [GOSUB C91FDB][PAUSE][LINE]@back to Winters.[PAUSE][LINE]@With Dr. Andonuts’ help,[DELAY 0F] I can modify the machine to fly to Summers.[PAUSE][LINE]@…If Dad, I mean Dr. Andonuts,[PAUSE][LINE]@is not available, I’ll have to figure it out by myself.[PAUSE][LINE]@Anyway, let’s go back to the lab in Winters.[PAUSE][LINE]@…That’s it…[DELAY 14][LINE] Go, machine,[DELAY 0F] go![PAUSE][CLOSEALLWIN][1F 15 6A 00 0F 01 01][DELAY 01][1F EF 6A 00][1F E8 FF][1F 61][1F EB FF 06][FLAGON 28F][GOSUB C7DD7D][1F ED][1F E5 FF][1F E9 E2 01][1F 61][DELAY 0F][1F 1E E0 01 06][DELAY 5A][1F 15 D1 00 A2 00 FF][1F 15 E6 00 A5 00 FF][1F 21 C2][1F EF E6 00][1F E8 FF][DELAY 01][1F 61][1F ED][1F 15 D1 00 96 00 FF][1F 21 BB][1F EF D1 00][1F 61][1F ED][1F 15 D1 00 9E 00 FF][1F 15 E6 00 A0 00 FF][1F 21 C0][1F EF E6 00][1F 61][1F ED][1F 15 D1 00 97 00 FF][1F 21 BB][1F EF D1 00][1F 61][1F ED][1F 15 D1 00 9A 00 FF][1F 15 E6 00 9C 00 FF][1F 21 BE][1F EF E6 00][1F 61][1F ED][1F 15 D1 00 98 00 FF][1F 21 BB][1F EF D1 00][1F 61][1F ED][1F 15 D1 00 A6 00 FF][1F 21 BA][1F EF D1 00][1F 61][1F ED][FLAGON 26D][1F 21 DA][1F 17 6F 02 A7 00 01][DELAY 64][1F 17 6D 02 A8 00 01][1F 61][FLAGOFF 28F][GOSUB C7DD7D][1F 15 6A 00 A9 00 01][DELAY 01][1F EF 6A 00][1F EC FF 01][1F 61][1F ED][1F E5 FF][1F F1 69 02 8D 00][1F 61][1F E6 67 02][1F E6 69 02][1F E6 6A 02][GOSUB C6CB97][1F F1 6A 02 8E 00][1F 61][1F E6 6A 02][GOSUB C6CC31][1F F1 6A 02 90 00][1F 61][1F F1 69 02 8F 00][1F 61][19 26 06][FLAGOFF 26D][FLAGOFF 2EC][FLAGOFF 030][FLAGOFF 305][FLAGON 276][FLAGOFF 00B][1F 41 06][1F E8 FF][END]

Keep in mind that’s just ONE line in the game.

Everything in the game from text, to events, to cut scenes, to music, to sound effects, to windows, to user input – it’s all just one giant scripting language, and even after all these years we don’t have it fully mapped out. Here’s an older file that lists some of the control codes in the game: control code lexicon. This is mostly why there aren’t many translations of EarthBound into other languages, some 16 years after the game’s release – it’s a huge mess. Seriously, try to edit the game’s text using PK Hack sometime to see for yourself.

The scripting language is advanced – it does all the normal stuff you might expect from a game’s text system, but it also implements its own stack, various registers, a huge number of flags/memory addresses, conditional branching, can handle subroutines many levels deep, it’s very impressive. Fellow computer science nerds are probably thinking, “Whoa, almost sounds like a CPU!” In fact, using a simple hack Rufus made a while back to allow the scripting system to access any memory address, it would theoretically be possible to write an emulator just using EarthBound’s text system. If you were crazy enough, you could get EarthBound to emulate the EarthBound Zero ROM, or even EarthBound itself! It’d be slow as hell, but still

Anyway, because the game’s text uses pointers all over the place – and because we don’t have EarthBound’s script codes fully mapped out – a simple copy-and-paste job into the MOTHER 1+2 ROM is not possible.

Still, even if Giygas himself came down and somehow solved those problems… guess what? MOTHER 2′s text and script codes are in a completely different format! (head explodes)

Now, I’m not saying it’s impossible, in fact a few years back I had started to write a utility that dumped EarthBound’s text to the best of my ability and tried to turn the nonsense control codes into something sensible. I did this for my old EarthBound Zero remake hack and later on to make a utility for people to translate EarthBound into other languages. I got it to a pretty advanced state, yet there were still many issues, so I dropped it.

Hacking MOTHER 2

I think if I were to take a bunch of time off and hole myself up in a room with buckets of coffee, I could probably get EarthBound’s text converted into MOTHER 1+2′s text format after a while. That’s all it takes to translate the game, right?

Nope! Think back to the MOTHER 3 fan translation – remember how much work it was to get the game to look and act properly, even after we had the game’s script in English and inserted into the game? It would be pretty much the same here. It’d be a year-long (probably longer, actually) nightmare. I’m not even necessarily talking about the variable-width font specifically – just the sheer amount of hacking work it overall would take would be immense.

I can see how it’d be nice to have the MOTHER 2 side fully translated – I’d love to have all three GBA games in the series fan-translated, but the MOTHER 2 GBA port isn’t that great to begin with – the sound effects and music take a serious hit, a number of glitches and bugs were added, while some beloved things like the Rock Candy trick were taken out (if I remember right).

Also, I should briefly mention that not all the text in the game is in the same format. The file select screen itself uses three different text formats, entirely different from the main text format. One of them isn’t even really a “format” – it’s actually just tilemap data bundled with surrounding window tilemap data, all LZZ compressed for no understandable reason.

Basically, I have to ask myself if it’s worth a couple years of my life so people can play an inferior version of EarthBound. I don’t think it is. If I had no worries and had lots of free time and extra money, I’d love to work on it, I love the series and especially like to translate ROMs. If I were a zillionaire with no worries at all, I could probably even get it done in a few months.

Anyway, that’s why the MOTHER 2 part of the patch isn’t a full translation. I do think (and hope) that someone with a lot more energy and free time will show up and be able to pull off a full conversion of the MOTHER 2 part, even down to the little new control codes added just for EarthBound that tell the game when to use “The” or when to use “him” or “her”. It’ll be a tough job, but knowing EarthBound fans, someone will do it

tl;dr

EarthBound text is very complicated, the MOTHER 2 text format is equally complicated AND in a different format. Would take me years to fully accomplish for very little gain. MOTHER 2 GBA port isn’t very good to begin with. Haven’t given up the idea of working on it, but would rather work on other, more productive stuff.

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• Choosing the fastest text speed in battle will make it say it’s the second-fastest speed on the file-loading menu. For now, if you want the battle text speed to be as fast as possible, select the speed from the battle menu and ignore what it says on the file select screen.
• If your items are full when you try to retrieve an item from your sister (who acts like Tracy in EarthBound), the text will break out of the window and do a weird wrap-around thing like so. I thought I had fixed all of these lines before releasing the patch – so if you come across any more, definitely let me know!
• People are reporting that sometimes you have to press the A Button twice to advance text – I know this happens in the original ROM sometimes, but if I could see this in action with the English version it’d help me a lot. I’m not 100% sure this is an issue with my patch yet.

If you run across any bugs, glitches, or obvious typos, let me know! (Preferably with screenshots, if possible )

Update: I’ve fixed most of the stuff you guys have found and posted a 1.01 patch. Get it here.

MOTHER 1 Translation To-Do (69) Read More >>>	MOTHER 3 Translation 1.1 Released (70) Read More >>>
MOTHER 1+2 Translation Soon (154) Read More >>>

It’s taken quite a while, but at last my MOTHER 1+2 translation patch is done and ready for downloading! Check out the page for it here:

You can download the patch there of course, and you can also download all the tools, files, and source code I used to create the patch. With these, you can create translations into other languages or create text-based hacks of your own!

Before you play the patch, though, I HIGHLY recommend reading this list of tips/suggestions that I wrote up – it will help you enjoy MOTHER 1 a lot more, especially if you could never get into the game before!

When you’re finished playing through the MOTHER 1 side of things, stop by and let us know what you think of the game in the comments, whether it’s good or bad or whatever. I made this patch mainly for fans who could never really get into EarthBound Zero before, so hopefully this will make the game more enjoyable now!

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My retranslation of the MOTHER 1 side of MOTHER 1+2 is nearing completion, and when I do release the patch I want the MOTHER 2 side to at least have basic menu translations. So after a bit of work I think I’ve gotten that taken care of. If you have time, it’d help a lot if people could play through the MOTHER 2 part of the game with this beta patch. Mostly I want to see if anything breaks or messes up, but if you come across any menu-ish text that isn’t translated then let me know about that too. You can download the patch here:

• MOTHER 2 menu patch beta

Important! Be sure to read the text file included with the IPS patch, it explains stuff, including how to apply the patch if you don’t know how.

Double important! A lot of text on the file select and character naming screens is still untranslated – this is because of stupendously barfy programming by whoever did the port code for that part of the game. (The text here is stored in three wildly different formats, one is actually just raw tilemap data rather than text, which is insane enough, but then they went and compressed that data for some insane reason)

Also, here’s a list of the names and items the patch uses, let me know if you can think of any better names. Note that since this is just a simple menu translation, I’ve kept all the names as close to the EarthBound names as possible in order to keep things as clear as possible for players.

• Enemy names (10 letters max per name)
• Item names (9 letters max for equippable items, 10 letters max for all else)

So if you have any free time, give the patch a whirl and let me know if you come across anything!

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