Mother

Disassembly of Mother/Earthbound Zero/Earthbound Beginnings for the Famicom/NES

Supports the English localization of Mother (Zero or Beginnings should work), and has compatability with the original release (Mother).

For WSL2 Ubuntu. Probably also works on actual Linux.

Also works natively on Windows.

Supported Hashes

Game Version	MD5
MOTHER (JP) (NES 2.0)	218503a880999363ac83945096040492
MOTHER (JP) (iNES)	bf1e0bc9c390fdbb2b3ca22d784db7d2
Earthbound Beginnings (Proto) (US) (NES 2.0)	54387b6e68142d69083a38b437196450
Earthbound Beginnings (Proto) (US) (iNES)	5bacf7ba94c539a1caf623dbe12059a3

Headers may be different, making hashes fail. Check your header in a hex viewer against src/global/header.asm to see if your ROM is good or not.

Automatically outputs ROM as NES 2.0.

Instructions

Note that if you are running on Windows, when it asks you to run a script, run the .ps1 script of the same name instead.

1. Install python

• Chances are you already have it installed if you are bothering with this repo.
• On Linux, ./install will add python for you.
• On Windows, install python and make sure it is added to your system PATH under Environment Variables.

2. Obtain cc65

• If running on a supported Linux distribution, run ./install to download and set up cc65.
• If running on another platform (ex. Windows), it can be obtained from https://cc65.github.io/, or by running your relative install script.
• If cc65 was not built from source, add the cc65/bin folder to your system PATH under Environment Variables. (like python)
• Windows does not like external powershell scripts. To run .ps1 files, open a powershell terminal and enter powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File <filename>.ps1. Administrator permissions may also be required. (Needs testing)

2. Drop MOTHER (J) and/or Earthbound Beginnings (U) ROMs into this directory.
3. Run ./configure to split banks from supported roms

• Each rom will be scanned for in the root of this repository, and will split their own unique assets.

4. Run ./build to make a new Earthbound Beginnings (U) ROM from assembly

• Note that the output path will be mother_rebuilt.nes

5. Run ./build -j to make a new MOTHER (J) rom

The newly built rom will be compared to the destination version's checksum, to see if it is byte matching. Make sure both US and JP are byte matching before opening a PR!

If you wish to make your own ROM Hack, simply remove all calls to tools/checksum.py as well as the file itself. Fork and enjoy!

About

Still incredibly wip, i do not have enough knowledge to know why parts do and dont work

I've started work on getting text building, though apart from that I have next to no idea of what I'm doing.

... yeah right!

That was back when all that was disassembled was src/us/prg/bank19.asm.... YEESH.

Let's try this again!

About (for real this time)

This disassembly aims to expose multiple parts of this game to the public:

Data types

• Items
• PSI
• Save Ram
• Battles
• Enemies
• Choicers
• Exp Growth Tables
• Music
• Objects
• Text
• UI bytecode
• Credits bytecode
• Overworld & Battle Actions
• ...and more that don't have their own files yet!

Code

• Vectors (NMI, Reset, IRQ)
• Main Backend
• Music (again)
• Object Scripting
• Credits (US)
• ...and others I either forgot or don't know about!

All in one place!

There is still WAY more work to be done, mostly in terms of JP. ... and also naming a bunch of stuff, but that's what every disassembly's goal is anyways.

If you would like to contribute, please open a PR! I have put everything together myself so far. It gets kinda mindnumbing!

Of course, I definitely didn't FIGURE OUT everything myself. Many thanks to those in the PKHack Discord and various other resources online for letting this come about in any form. They are the glue holding this together!!! I am merely the catalyst.

P.S.

Data Crystal helped a ton in the early stages... but my GOD is it terribly under-researched... lol... Someone please update this !!!