Quick Mother/Earthbound Zero Question

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Quick Mother/Earthbound Zero Question

Post by Clements »

I'm interested in playing this game, but there are a lot of different versions around, and I don't know which one is the most current. In GoodNES at least, there are a few of them.

I'm assuming Earthbound Zero (Demiforce v1.01 Hack-2) (U) is the most up to date, but I'm only going by the names.
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Post by xamenus »

I think you want "Earthbound (U) (Prototype)".
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Post by SquareHead »

xamenus wrote:I think you want "Earthbound (U) (Prototype)".
That one is not playable is it? IIRC NeoDemiforce had to hack it to get past protection?
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Post by adventure_of_link »

It's not playable on real consoles.

Or am I thinking of something else...
<Nach> so why don't the two of you get your own room and leave us alone with this stupidity of yours?
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Post by SquareHead »

adventure_of_link wrote:It's not playable on real consoles.

Or am I thinking of something else...
Not sure, I cant seem to dig up Neo Demiforces faq that came with the patch anymore. It used to say something about the cart, and why it wouldnt work, and why the had to hack it.

Edit found it, but its wordy.
unofficial answer wrote: After the game had been backed up, the initial clean copy of the data would not run properly on Nesticle, the most widespread NES emulator available at the time. The game froze whenever a text box was drawn on the screen. EarthBound obviously could not be played in this state, so the programmer "TrelaneQ" went to work on developing a solution to the problem.

It was discovered that modifying a single byte in the game data would fix the issue. With the game ready to be played, Demiforce modified the original title screen to display EarthBound Zero so that players could easily distinguish the difference between this game and the Super Nintendo translation of Mother 2 that was also titled EarthBound. Both the original backup and the modified copy of the data were released to the public on April 27, 1998.

Almost immediately after the prototype's release, players who were eager to experience everything it had to offer discovered a fatal flaw with the modified version of the game. In several different places during gameplay, the screen would abruptly fade to black and inform the player that they were playing an illegal copy.

So what actually triggered the appearance of this copy protection screen in the game? After careful consideration, it was determined that the initial one-byte modification of the game data triggered a checksum protection routine somewhere else in the code. What this means is that the emulated game determined that the game data had been tampered with, causing the game session to be terminated and the copy protection screen to be launched.

This development was important for more than just the novelty of the copy protection screen. One of the gameplay events that triggered this screen is required to progress further in the game, thus making the game not able to be completed. TrelaneQ teamed up with another programmer, nicknamed "Barubary", to resolve this new issue. The two quickly found a way to disable the copy protection, and the newly modified game data was released to the public.
Edit Mark III: Being that they modified it for use with "nesticle", then there is a possibility the untouched clean copy of the rom may work without trouble in newer emulators?
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Post by Agozer »

SquareHead wrote:
xamenus wrote:I think you want "Earthbound (U) (Prototype)".
That one is not playable is it? IIRC NeoDemiforce had to hack it to get past protection?
Eh, I got it to work in Nestopia just fine...
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Post by Clements »

Earthbound (U) (Prototype) seems to work fine for me. The difference between this version and the others seems to be that 'zero' was not hacked in.
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Post by adventure_of_link »

I've got the translated ROM working so far in Jnes...
<Nach> so why don't the two of you get your own room and leave us alone with this stupidity of yours?
NSRT here.
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Post by xamenus »

I don't see any point in using a translation patch for Mother. The prototype ROM is the official English version that was supposed to be released in the US, but never was for some reason.

See http://starmen.net/mother1/
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Post by powerspike »

Just use the original prototype. All those other ones are just so it would run correctly in nesticle. Even if you do have problems with the game you can always use a battery save file with another version of the rom. I doubt they messed with the way the game saves data.
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