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Yup, this is the famous
one. Earthbound is the one prototype ROM on the internet
that has gotten so much exposure from so many different
sources, it may as well be called the superstar of
prototypes. The game was originally found by a man going
by the name of Mariotti from a source in
Nintendo. However, by the time any emulation people got
in contact with him, the cart had been sold off to a
collector. To make a long story short, a deal was struck
with the collector to have the game dumped for the insane
price of $400 since the cart would no longer be "one of a kind"- $200 of
it prepaid and $200 upon return of
the cart. The money was collected through donations by
the emulation community, and the cart was dumped.
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| The ROM was dumped and
the cart returned, however problems began to rear their
ugly heads. The raw dump of the game did not work
correctly - the game would freeze when a text box was
drawn on the screen. This problem was quickly solved
through a hack and another version of the ROM was
released. Once again however, the game still refused to
work correctly. At certain points in the game, the screen
pictured below would appear when you spoke to specific
people in the game. It wasn't clear if this was due to the
hack to get the text boxes working or this was an internal
checksum in the game code that checked the cartrige it was
on, but another hack and release later, we now have a
version of the game that can be played beginning to end.
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This is a game that
really deserved to have a commercial release. If you've
played the SNES Earthbound, this game is more of the
same. It's actually a prequal to the SNES game and plays
in basically the same way. One minor annoyance with this
game however is the insane amounts of random battles that
you encounter while playing. It seems like every third
step, another enemy will appear. Other than that one
minor gripe, this is a great game and quite worthy of a
download. |
View the fullsize
cart scan.
View The
original NFO file from Demiforce |
In an interesting side note,
just a few weeks after this collector extorted $400 out of
the emulation community for the dump of this game, he
turned around and sold it on eBay for even more. This
just goes to prove that dumping a ROM does not devalue the
cart. And for all you collectors that currently have
dollar signs in your eyes thinking that an undumped
prototype normally warrants this kind of a cash offering
for a dump, think again. This was the first and only case
of a dump being paid for in this way. We would appreciate
dumps of anything, but people like this collector are
quite a low grade of scum - aka selling what isn't theirs
to begin with, you own the cart itself, not the data
inside it. Hopefully we'll never have to raise money like
this again...
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