Why isn't there a MOTHER/Earthbound reverse engineering team?

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Pokun
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Re: Why isn't there a MOTHER/Earthbound reverse engineering team?

Post by Pokun »

Sounds like you are talking about the second game. Holy Roly Mountain is the final area in the first game as I said earlier (not a place you reach in 5 hours unless you are speedrunning or something).

It doesn't really play that much different from other RPGs though, and I don't think there are a particularly large number of tedious fetch quests either compare to about any other RPG. It's quite linear but not too linear. The first game is really in need of the Teleport ESP skill, and you get it very late. But the second game has a lot of things that makes traveling easier, like buses, an earlier Teleport skill (and a better version of it later) and the lack of random encounters.

Also I think the dialogue is a big part of what makes it so good, that's Itoi's forte after all. Itoi of course didn't make anything bad on purpose, I think you got that all wrong. He copied the usual RPG formula but took it to a modern setting with psychokinesis instead of magic, baseball bats and frying pans instead of swords and maces and uh hamburgers instead of potions. It has Itoi's goofy humor and some really weird things like the psychedelic Magicant, hippies and Master Belch, but it never really gets tasteless or cringy and the dialogue is always very witty and smartly written.

I guess you played it expecting something very different and then got all the wrong impressions of the game. You might want to give the series a new try some day.


The one thing I think is the only real problem in all 3 games is item management. You are showered in new items all the time while having a very small inventory, so you have to keep eating things or throwing things away. Then when you really need them they are not nearly enough even if your inventory is full of them. This is not really any different from DQ games and most other RPGs though, and the two later Mother games really modernizes the menu interface, making the game feel very smooth. This was 16-bit RPGs when they were at their best.
Last edited by Pokun on Sun Feb 27, 2022 3:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Ben Boldt
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Re: Why isn't there a MOTHER/Earthbound reverse engineering team?

Post by Ben Boldt »

Just in life in general, I think you have to understand that you won’t like everything. There will be things that are extremely off-putting to you that may well be very appealing to other people. Even if you don’t see how it’s possible for it to ever be appealing. Some really common incarnations of this are politics, foods, sexuality, jobs, old vs new video games, etc. Just because you don’t understand how someone could ever like or even tolerate something, doesn’t mean that it is universally unlikable or wrong. The more solipsistic you are, the harder it is to see and accept, or even believe this. Which in itself is something I don’t agree with but must accept about some of you guys.

Earthbound series is loved and cherished by many. That is not debatable.
Pokun
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Re: Why isn't there a MOTHER/Earthbound reverse engineering team?

Post by Pokun »

I think everyone here understands that how good the Mother games are is a subjective matter and that people have different opinions of things. Trying to understand each other's point of view is what these kinds of discussions are all about. That's why I ask what others see and why I do my best in explaining what I see.
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2fadfe
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Re: Why isn't there a MOTHER/Earthbound reverse engineering team?

Post by 2fadfe »

I remember when I first played Mother 3. I livestreamed the first quarter of chapter one, all done on an Apple device. I remember getting stuck at Flint's imprisonment inTazmily.

It would be another few years until I came back to it again. It was fun.

As I mentioned earlier, I tried the other two, through improvement hacks, and even though I enjoyed them- they weren't the same as Mother 3.

I would love to start an EB/M RET myself, but I may not have the expertise to go through and do it. I believe we need as many ways to play and preserve these games. Having decompiled source code for all three would greatly help the existing community in their own efforts to translate, improve, and create new experiences from this game.

I know it's technically possible, at least.
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calima
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Re: Why isn't there a MOTHER/Earthbound reverse engineering team?

Post by calima »

There is nothing to decompile for the first two, since they likely weren't compiled in the first place. Meaning, what you want is a reimplementation, which probably is in your grasp, since you could do it even in gamemaker.
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Re: Why isn't there a MOTHER/Earthbound reverse engineering team?

Post by calima »

@Ben Boldt
That's a very curious interpretation of my post, and well, wrong. You're reading something into it that never was there. I think writing style is a part of it - I remember lidnariq having much the same trouble with my writing. It's a more modern style, and it's assumed everyone knows everything written on the net is someone's opinion, and superfluous circling is dropped for everyone's benefit. It's both tiring and a waste of everyone's time to always write like a politician.

In practice: "is" is so much faster to read and write than "it's my current opinion that the state of the matter seems to be", yet it means the same thing, and you should not read it as "is universal truth".
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2fadfe
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Re: Why isn't there a MOTHER/Earthbound reverse engineering team?

Post by 2fadfe »

calima wrote: Mon Feb 28, 2022 12:03 am There is nothing to decompile for the first two, since they likely weren't compiled in the first place. Meaning, what you want is a reimplementation, which probably is in your grasp, since you could do it even in gamemaker.
I think it would be better to do it in either assembly or C, if one was to re-implement them instead. Maybe a name for the group could be "Onett Construction and Repair, LCC"? But why are games like Metroid, Super Metroid, SMB3, & SMW already have been disassembled?

How difficult would a disassembly of Mother 3 be, if a noob such as myself could implement the other two in Gamemaker?
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Nikku4211
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Re: Why isn't there a MOTHER/Earthbound reverse engineering team?

Post by Nikku4211 »

It is my current opinion that the state of the matter seems to be liquid.
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calima
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Re: Why isn't there a MOTHER/Earthbound reverse engineering team?

Post by calima »

2fadfe wrote: Mon Feb 28, 2022 5:42 pm I think it would be better to do it in either assembly or C, if one was to re-implement them instead. Maybe a name for the group could be "Onett Construction and Repair, LCC"? But why are games like Metroid, Super Metroid, SMB3, & SMW already have been disassembled?

How difficult would a disassembly of Mother 3 be, if a noob such as myself could implement the other two in Gamemaker?
A decompilation is quite different to a disassembly, both technically and legally. A clean-room decomp can be argued to be legal, while a disassembly is just a mechanical transformation that ships copyrighted code. Nintendo may not have taken action against such, but they have reasons including PR not to do so.

A disassembly is not very difficult work, it's just tedious/slow.
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Re: Why isn't there a MOTHER/Earthbound reverse engineering team?

Post by 3gengames »

I'm working on it.

I'm deep enough to say, even when the code is completely done, tooling to reverse the data will be the hard part. It's very files and pointers heavy. Most of the code so far is just moving virtual data around and checking things the data says to. Someone who looked at Kirby on IRC mentioned it's style as a "VM" and it's very apt considering it's the same company. Code to run the system is minimal, scripted function routines run the logic through the piles of data it goes through. It's definitely not going to be impossible or anything, but it's gonna take time to really understand their formats.

Stay tuned. It's not my main thing I'm working on but it's happening.
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2fadfe
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Re: Why isn't there a MOTHER/Earthbound reverse engineering team?

Post by 2fadfe »

3gengames wrote: Tue Mar 01, 2022 12:00 pm I'm working on it.

I'm deep enough to say, even when the code is completely done, tooling to reverse the data will be the hard part. It's very files and pointers heavy. Most of the code so far is just moving virtual data around and checking things the data says to. Someone who looked at Kirby on IRC mentioned it's style as a "VM" and it's very apt considering it's the same company. Code to run the system is minimal, scripted function routines run the logic through the piles of data it goes through. It's definitely not going to be impossible or anything, but it's gonna take time to really understand their formats.

Stay tuned. It's not my main thing I'm working on but it's happening.
Would it be possible for people like me to help? I at least know some assembly, some basics on programming- i wouldn't mind starting a github account just to help out.
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strat
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Re: Why isn't there a MOTHER/Earthbound reverse engineering team?

Post by strat »

calima wrote: Tue Mar 01, 2022 3:33 am A decompilation is quite different to a disassembly, both technically and legally. A clean-room decomp can be argued to be legal, while a disassembly is just a mechanical transformation that ships copyrighted code. Nintendo may not have taken action against such, but they have reasons including PR not to do so.

A disassembly is not very difficult work, it's just tedious/slow.
Not trying to be contrarian, I'm genuinely curious: I went through some of the Mario 64 src from Giga Leak (which is mostly pre-compiled binary files; the only original src deals with in-game text) and while the Mario 64 RE Project didn't come up with the exact same file layouts, the actual C syntax appears to be identical. And of course the RE Project made sure their codebase would build a ROM with the same checksum as the retail releases. So wouldn't this be copyrighted code just the same?
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Re: Why isn't there a MOTHER/Earthbound reverse engineering team?

Post by calima »

Devil's in the details. If they achieved it via "independent invention" as opposed to stealing, there's a chance it's legal. Kinda like tasting Coke and making up a recipe, even if your recipe matches the secret one, you invented it independently.

The location of the workers and the method of working also matters. If your locale allows RE, then using the asm as a direct target is legal, as is using a decompiler like Ghidra. If it does not, they would have needed to clean-room it - instead of writing functions until the asm matches, they would have had to target a hash and a description of the function, written by someone else.

It is my understanding that US does not allow RE, EU allows it for interop purposes. It's also my understanding that the SM64 project did not clean-room it, they both used the asm and Ghidra, and the workers were from the US, so that specific project's methods combined with the workers' locales are probably illegal.
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Re: Why isn't there a MOTHER/Earthbound reverse engineering team?

Post by 3gengames »

I think it could also be argued, the game might be copyright. However the ASM representation of the game in any combination of disasm/reverse engineering would not be the original format of the entertainment, and because of such, the representation of the ROM wouldn't be under the same protection of the gameplay ROM. Just because something becomes something else, as is a source remake of something, means it's more akin to the Blu-Rays secret numbers key for decrypting than the original gameplay ROM. But clean-room reverse engineering also does lend much credibility to this thought.
2fadfe wrote: Tue Mar 01, 2022 12:46 pm i wouldn't mind starting a github account just to help out.
I PM'd you to add you to the git of the current RE status.
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Re: Why isn't there a MOTHER/Earthbound reverse engineering team?

Post by 3gengames »

Link to the git for my Earthbound Disassembly.

Just got done through all the code once, needs cleaned and another go through and labeling of stuff better with what is now known, but you can see the game's code here in its first revision.

This game will be hard to nail down because the engine is generally a program actually running "building block" routines specified by files that also hold the states to check to run each thing inside, also. So all the code script is generally generic for a lot of things but is stuck together by the script files. It'll take a long time to go through the formats 100% but they also don't ever really get _too_ deep into them, but it still will be not fun actually piecing each piece of generic functionality together for each of the 2-3 layers there is in the game's code (Overworld, Menus, and Battles all being mostly together with their own routines.)

They also use pointer and file indexes to access nearly all data everywhere because another reason all this code was generically written was because the files scripting the system basically makes it more efficient for all functionality. There's tons of things this script can tell it to do with just a few bytes. The system is actually really, really efficiently done with these files. To call a routine in their script it might be a flag byte and a ptr. And the script handles saving everything it needs to restore or do whatever else. It's pretty involved, and also some of the best code I've seen from taking apart a bunch of other games. It's really impressive, and was pretty fun to go through to see this first go. :)
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