The thing that I procrastinated with...

... Was text editing for names of locations. God, it's so horrible. It overflows the text and breaks the game if you use certain characters in certain places or a certain amount of such and such characters a line and it makes it a pain.

I made "Onett" into "Grand Rapids" as you may know, but the difficulty was editing every single line in the game that someone said "Onett" in a text window. And, because of this, I had to stick with calling it "GR" or "Michigan" most of the time unless I wanted to shorten the entire sentence making the grammar thus horrible.

I finally did the same for "Twoson", now "Ontario."

However, keep in mind that this is FAR from region consistent. Remember the trouble I had making the signs in Onett say "Grand Rapids" in a previous post? I had to do that with "Ontario Canada" on every sign but I ended up having to make it "Athens Canada" because "Ontario" wouldn't fit.

And then there's the fact that you go north to go south... Yeah... It's not meant to be taken seriously.

I'm moving on to the more fun part now-- Rescuing Danny!

Here's a video of what I mean.

Totally not region-consistent. But fun to marvel at~!

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New tool!

I don't think I'm going to need to do much map editing... But it's always been a weak spot of mine. As of today, I've found a new tool for map editing that might make things go a tad faster!

Take a look at my old editor above.

Now compare it to my new one. Nice, huh? I haven't looked through it's features yet,

but as far as I can tell it's already a cleaner interface... It even allows zooming, animation, sprite tools, improved organization/customization... Text pointers...  

All that good stuff. Enough of my rambling now. I've got a ton of tools now that are just for Earthbound.

• jHack, also known as PK Hack, the standard and most common. It's really a compilation of MANY tools that can do just about anything, and it works on all platforms of computers using Java.
• A CCS engine that lets me write scripts for the text and it loads it into the game, rather than using control codes... REALLY helpful since a lot of the codes confuse me. But I'm choosing not to use it as of now. However, this form of text hacking tends to break the game I've noticed, rather easily... And it limits how many characters I can use per sentence so it doesn't seem like all that great English. Oh well.
• This?
• Snes9x for testing, of course
• EBMused-- A sort of... Music-editor, still getting the hang of it... 
• And another text editor somewhere. 

That's how it's done.

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Title screen hacking complete

The title says it all! I've performed my first ever title screen hack, and I'd say it's... Okay... Here's a video that I'll also be posting on Facebook about it.

Obviously, this is very glitchy stuff. It's never been perfected, but you can still play the game normally if you follow extra measures.
The game WILL collapse if you press any button before the cutscene starts.
Here's an example of me testing it:

By the way, Josh is Jesus.

OH LORD!

I mean, hi.

 The text hacking will pick up again soon! I believe that doesn't leave a whole lot of misc. stuff to repair.

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Tile edit success

Minor change, but in text hacking I was able to change the "Onett Town" banner to "Grand Rapids".
To my knowledge, it just barely fit, so there was room for 6 tiles across before going to the end of the banner.
O n e t t x                              G r a n d x
T o w n x x                            R a p i d s
Luckily, there were as many alphabetical character tiles as there were used in the game, so if I wanted to do Michigan instead, a letter would be missing. I think I tried it. It was a stroke of luck. I hope I don't have to do this for all towns... Maybe just our hometowns.


I'm going to ATTEMPT to do a title screen hack soon, but no guarantees. I'm making a backup even because of how dangerous this is. I'm using an edited title screen however, and it should be easier to use that as a base than the original title. However, I dunno how exactly THEY made it so certain limitations they were aware of and bypassed may further hinder me.
... CTRL+C, CTRL+V...

I can't leave this page until the video is uploaded so in the meantime, how about some screenshots.

Edited Title I will be working with

The entire party. This is how the chosen four will look.

 He looks as obnoxious as ever.

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Hello down there!

Or is it up?

You may be wondering why I made a blog for this, and if you aren't-- Cool, glad we're on the same page.
Otherwise, I found it more convenient to just but stuff here than to put it on Facebook. Reason being, on Facebook, you have to tag endlessly every photo, messages get buried easily, it's especially a hassle considering how buggy Facebook can get...
Compared to how easy it is to just share a link to here with multiple updates at a time. Much more organized. I can show off a lot of smaller changes with much more ease.

Obviously, even though the project only applies to 6-10 people really, it's still a fun experience, and it'll be definitely worth it for everyone in the end if things go as planned. Now, a lot of people look at videogame hacking as something that if you're not fast and efficient at it... It's not your area and you should find a different hobby. In reality, this game is huge. It's gonna take a LONG time to just personalize it, and then even test it for errors which I know there will be a lot of, and try to fix them and test again.
It's an old game, there's a lot of limitations. Some of which may lead to the eventual death of the project in the event of an unforseen error. But the older something is, chances are there's a lot more known about it. And with that comes more posibillities, and the limitations are pushed aside.

Someone was able to play a nearly complete perfect-quality Rick Roll on a NES game before.

That's pretty much all I need to say. Be patient, and good will come out of this. I might seem to be too committed about this whole thing, it sparked from an idea that randomly came from John, but... It was a great idea and my ideas overflowed to the point that I just had to do it one way or another.

It isn't just about those starring in the hack. It's also because I'm totally insane and hooked on this series and the best way to relieve my need to explore it is to dismantle it and use it to my advantage.
It really is fun. Sure, there's a lot of challenges, but think about it. Without challenges, life would not be worth living. Same way that without hate, we wouldn't know what love really is. This applies to every possible yin-yang out there.

That's... My motivations. That's it. Now that it's over I'll go and work on some changes. Keep a look out!

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