Starmen.Net

Mother: 25th Anniversary Edition aims to make Mother much more enjoyable for both Earthbound fans and those playing it for the first time.

All enemy graphics, NPC sprites and tiles are be redrawn from scratch to be more faithful to the clay models. The goofy enemies are goofier and the creepy enemies are creepier. A shiny new font and title screen was added, too!

The overworld has been tweaked to be much less bleak and repetitive, so it’s harder to get lost. There is more scenery, areas are more colorful and confusing areas like Duncan’s factory have been simplified. On the other hand, tiny areas like the graveyard and Crystal Cavern have been lengthened.

There are also a lot of changes under the hood. Enemies will yield slightly more exp and the encounter rate has been readjusted. The “Dangerous Foe” battle theme is used less often and party members will be met at a higher level. DragonDePlatino’s goal in creating this hack was to create a game easier than the original but still very challenging.

And last but not least, this hack uses Tomato’s official Mother 1 + 2 translation, adapted for the NES. Over 1400 lines of text have been altered to create connections with the rest of the series, improve clarity and shorten reading time. This hack will also feature much quicker battle text courtesy of vince94. Battles progress almost twice as quickly!

Comparison Screenshots

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It looks very cool! Can’t wait to play this!

Thanks for all the support, everyone! I was a bit hesitant to release an Earthbound Zero hack on these forums, but I’m glad it’s been pretty well received. So now’s your chance, people! If you had any complaints about the original Mother, go ahead and tell me and I’ll see if it’s in my hacking abilities to fix. I know a lot of people had complaints about the bland text, high encounter rates and confusing areas (like Duncan’s Factory) so I’m already fixing those.
Is there anything YOU would fix about Mother?
And keep it simple! Something like changing a certain enemy’s stats or the appearance of an NPC. I want to keep the same experience the original Mother had, so I won’t do anything like change the battle system or rewrite large parts of the story.

Ninten.Zero:

Do you plan to release a demo?

With the finicky nature of NES ROMs and how the text is laid out, it would be hard to release a complete game up to a certain point. But most likely, I’ll polish everything up to the first Magicant visit and allow a few beta testers to give me feedback on that.

The NES version already has a run button.

I think you should try to make more shortcuts in the overworld , and…

With the finicky nature of NES ROMs and how the text is laid out, it would be hard to release a complete game up to a certain point. But most likely, I’ll polish everything up to the first Magicant visit and allow a few beta testers to give me feedback on that.

I offer myself as a beta tester.

Ninten.Zero:

I offer myself as a beta tester.

Hey, thanks! Once I finish polishing the text and all the enemies up to Magicant, I’ll start beta testing since there’s a lot of broken text and graphics right now. I’ll PM you when I’m ready.

LurkerShep:

Lurk Lurk...

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I have a few questions.
1. Will Ninten in your version have the neckerchief that he has in fanart and such to add a bit more differences to Ness?
2. Is it possible to add more items in the game since, from what I read of the MOTHER remake thread, there weren’t many to choose from really?
3. With the tiles, is this taking a leaf from the Remake’s book and as you go towards certain areas (like Snowman) it changes colors, or is there only limited amounts you can do with the colors for things like the swamp?

1. I’m afraid not. As tempting as it would be to do things like add more detail to Giegue, change some enemy designs or alter Ninten, I’d like to keep the experience as authentic as possible so that first-timers could rest assured that they’re playing an authentic game (or about as authentic as a ROM hack can get). On the other hand, I did just realize that my Ninten sprite doesn’t have a sideways cap or black button (unlike Ness), so I’ve edited it to reflect that.

2. …Possibly. There are some items removed in the US version like the time Time Machine that I’d like to hack back in. There were also some unused items from the Japanese version I could add in.

3. I’d love to change area palettes! At one point the graveyard, Spookane, caves and building tops all had their own palettes! …But changing them corrupted the ROM and forced me to undo a few days of work, so I’m going to say no on this one.

DragonRaiderX9:

I personally found it annoying that the Gigaborg and Omegaborg give less exp. than the Megaborg. Why? I mean, I guess most people aren’t still level grinding by that point, but still…

Anyway, this looks really neat. Truth be told, I’m more interested in the Remake that’s being made, but I may give this a try sometime down the line. I applaud the dedication necessary for this, in any case.

Ah, of course! That’s understandable, considering for the Mother Remake everything’s being built from the ground-up. Here, I’m just aiming to deliver a more polished version of the original.

As for those enemy’s exp, I’ll go ahead and fix them. The base exp drops (before multiplier) for the Megaborg, Giga Borg and Omega Borg will be 98, 180 and 197, instead of 197, 98, 180. I’ll also bring the Omega Borg’s stats closer to the Giga Borg’s for balance.

I could be beta tester, if you need some. I got in Mother 1 to beating up Starman Jr., and getting to Canary Island.

OK then, I think it’s decided. I’m not that great at collaborating with people so I’ll limit my beta testers to 3. Once the ROM is halfway finished, Ninten.Zero, PSIRobot and agrastiOs shall be my beta testers (sorry LurkerStep, they asked first.)

Until then, I want to keep everything very hush-hush asides from answering questions. But just today, I experimented with palettes some more and I found out a way to alter them without corrupting the ROM. I can’t resist sharing these, so I’ll go ahead and post them and add them to the OP:

As you can see, things are quite different now! I always thought Earthbound Zero’s colors were very washed-out, so I darkened everything up and added more detail. With careful experimentation, I was able to add brown trunks to the trees at the sacrifice of pink flowers on the overworld (they’re now blue). And speaking of foliage, every area now has it’s own unique tree and grass, to contrast them more. Finally, Ninten’s dog isn’t some weird furry abomination anymore. It looks like it should.

vince94:

If you want, I can put new text in for you.

Ah-HA! How incredibly useful! I’ve been dying to know how to alter pointers and at this point I know enough about hex editors to be able to decipher all this nonsense. But really, I’d like to keep things simple and manipulate text without changing any pointers whenever possible. It’s been working well so far. But if I run into any trouble, I’ll make sure to ask you for help! Thanks for sharing.

Ohhh and an ASM hack to speed up the levelling text? I’ll definitely be interested in that later, if you’d like to share it. And a quick question…Have you figured out how the game renders messages? Normally, it generates one character per frame but I’d like to to generate 2 characters per frame. Is that possible?

Can I just say I really like your sprite artwork?

I just sent you an IPS patch with everything I’ve done so far on my hack.
I remember having to repoint the original “YOU WIN” to a different location and type in whatever hex values correspond to the new graphic. It was lucky that whatever graphics used to be there were unused! (I seem to remember it just being blank space, but I forget.)

EDIT: Here’s a video where you can see this in action! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPJJteJX_rk

Man, it feels good to be messing with this game again. I got kind of burned out last fall from working on it too much, and then real life got in the way. (Heck, I should be studying for my summer class right now…LOL)

Those screenshots look awesome!

Oh my sweet lord Poseidon this looks awesome! I love it! And uhm. If I could perhaps have the permission I’d love to do an LP on the hack once it’s finished.! Good job.

Even though you started. I am working on a EBzero module for coilsnake. Better than EB0 PK hack or N42’s text editor.

Holy crap, an EB0 extention for CoilSnake would be like a godsend for what I’ve been up to as well! Would it dump and reinsert/repoint text like CCScript?

The trees are actually background objects, which typically have four colors (usually three plus black for outlines and such). In the first post he mentions that he changed the pink color in the overworld palette to brown to let the tree trunks look more natural, although that means the pink flowers are blue now.

Now that I look at it, it looks like there’s more than one type of generic tree now… interesting.

To be honest with you, hearing that so much can be done raised my expectations and didn’t lower them a bit. Hearing that all this great work was only one of of 32 things just makes me eager to see what else you can do with everything else, the other 31 and the unused palettes. The character sprites are looking great as well.

Great explanation! Complicated, but still great.

Just wondering, would it be possible to add diagonal sprites like in Earthbound and Mother 3? That would make the game so much more beautiful.

PSIRobot:

Great explanation! Complicated, but still great.

Just wondering, would it be possible to add diagonal sprites like in Earthbound and Mother 3? That would make the game so much more beautiful.

Agreed! But…very likely impossible because of the NES’s data limitations. Notice how when I made a very small change (brown trunks) and had to down-grade something else (flowers). If I wanted to give the main characters 8-directional walking, I’d likely have to remove all the walking animations of the regular NPCs to make room for the new frames.

Ninten.Zero:

Great, Amazing, Fantastic!!!

P.S: Thank for letting me a Beta tester my friend, also, do you mind if I livestream it?

I’m still thinking about that. This won’t be like other betas where everything’s finished up to a certain point. Because of how EB0 organizes it’s text, only 3/5 of the lines you’ll run into will be changed, making things pretty unprofessional. On the other hand, all the graphics up to that point will be finished and I’ll really need some live feedback on enemy balancing, so we’ll see…

Thank you very much for letting me be beta tester!

TO ADMINS:
DO NOT REMOVE THESE ROMS.
THEY ARE NOT GAMES.

Hello, forumites! Another update!

Not a lot of progress today was made on the graphics or script. But I WAS able to do a lot of experimenting! By playing with Earthbound Zero’s samples, I was able to create some of my own rearranged music in Famitracker. My goal here was to use the NES’s restrictions to create music which would work in an actual ROM. And as proof, here are two NES ROMs (openable in emulators), each containing a rearrangement of “Department Store” and “Snowman”.

Department Store Original – Department Store Rearranged

Snowman Original – Snowman Rearranged

So, what do you guys think? Are these an improvement over the originals? Would you prefer to have the original soundtrack or a rearranged one? But unfortunately, even if people do end up liking these, there is a slim chance they’ll make it into the ROM unless I can find a proper hacker who can insert them for me. I can compose the music, but hacking it into the game is beyond me.

PSIRobot:

How do you listen do those? I only know how to play .mp3 or .wav files.

I’m sure it’s awesome though.

Just download them and open them in an NES emulator. They’re very good.

Ummm there’s a way to implement expansion chips to the game and edit its music? It would be great to make some imrpovements to the music since some themes sound off, for example the portamento on the Hippie Battle theme or on the Paradise Line theme
Also about the trees, can you use another pallete for the tree trunks so you can still keep the original flowers collor?

Mrpinci19:

Ummm there’s a way to implement expansion chips to the game and edit its music?

Yeah! It’d be awesome if a better chip like VRC6 could be put into the ROM, but as far as I know that’s never been done before. For now, I think I’ll just rearrange it in 2A03. A lot of the originals songs didn’t use all of the channels, so improving on them is as simple as using all the channels for each…if I could insert the music into the ROM.

As for the trunks, sorry. There’s no way I could add the pink flowers back unless I blackened the trunks, as I just explained. I think the blue-and-white flowers look more patriotic, anyways.

LurkerShep:

Will your sprites be forced to follow the above method due to limitations, or will they be their own sprites with their own poses and things?

Good question! Because of the limitations of MOTHER’s engine and my inability to use ASM, I’m afraid everything will have be drawn similarly. There will also still be that same effect when enemies appear. But don’t worry! Even with the same limitations, I can still make a big improvements on the sprites! Just take a look at my redone gorilla: