A look at EarthBound's text system and scripting language (2011) | Hacker News Reader

A look at EarthBound's text system and scripting language (2011)

earthboundcentral.com

83 pointsamyjess10 comments

Some context: The CEO and President of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, passed away recently. He is credited with saving EarthBound from cancellation by joining the programming team.

He didn't just join the programming team: he wrote nearly all the game's code by himself from scratch. He was the programming team.

You might be conflating this with the Super Smash Brothers Melee story, where Iwata left his Nintendo HQ corporate strategy role to join HAL Laboratories for QA & Bug Fixing so that the game wouldn't miss its ship date (this was 3 months before the launch date).

Whether Earthbound was to be cancelled or not I don't know, but it's a similar story in that he was the president (in the Earthbound case, of HAL laboratories) but he joined the programming team. Unlike Smash, though, he rewrote Earthbound entirely in a few months: http://kamedani.tumblr.com/post/45700864819/mother-2-re-rele...

It would be a neat little project to write a tool that renders all those control codes as something more easily read. I wouldn't be surprised if this were in fact the output generated by such a program.

On the one hand I think Iwata could easily have whipped up a little tool, on the other hand I like to think he didn't need it :)

Possibly also something that cross-references all the different GOSUB commands and the FLAG commands to the places they're checked. Then someone could go through and give them friendlier names. Also, you'd want to cross-reference all the text pointers to the text they point to. After that, it shouldn't be too hard to write a tool to do the reverse and pack it back in the original format.

Back in the early/mid 2000s I was involved with the PK Hack community, which was/is a group of people who focus on reverse engineering the EarthBound ROM (documenting and building editors for it, etc). I remember a guy named Flynman was actually putting together a sort of EarthBound scripting language that compiled down into the text engine's control codes. I'm not sure if that ever led anywhere, but it sounded pretty cool at the time. I might dig around to see if I can find it somewhere on the Starmen.net forums

edit: the original was called CCBasic, but I guess someone took the concept and reworked it here: https://forum.starmen.net/forum/Community/PKHack/CCScript-A-...

and the language docs: http://starmen.net/pkhack/ccscript/Tutorial.html

  [1F F0] (Activate Bicycle)

Well you don't get much more CISC than that.

Interesting stuff.

In a modern system an MVC (or similar) type architecture would work well for dialog. Of course writing that kind of thing on the NES where every byte counts would be a lot more challenging.

what made this game so fun and great for those that love it? I've played it on an emulator 15 years ago and I thought it was okay but nothing really stood out in my memory. Perhaps it would've been better if it had been played on an actual SNES console in the 90s.

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