A few months ago the incredibly talented Mr. Accident came up with a brand new way to hack apart the text within the EarthBound ROM: CCScript. This simple programming language allows you to edit the text within EB without having to muck around with control codes, and without the worry of overwriting other text or critical ROM information. This was a much-needed upgrade to the old text editor (pictured below), which was a pain to use and had a habit of breaking EVERYTHING.
If you are a programmer, you’ll recognize the basic structure of CCScript from a variety of other programming languages. Here is a simple bit of script that checks a flag, then asks a question with two possible answers. As you can see the basic structure is far easier to sort through than the old text editor.
if flag 42 {
“@Hey, flag 42 is set!”
}
else {
“@Looks like flag 42 is not set.” next
“@We need some brave adventurer to go forth and turn on that event flag!” next
“@Are you up to the challenge?!” next
menu {
“Yes” : goto(accept_challenge)
“No” : “Wow, you’re a real sissy, aren’t you?”
}
}
A huge advantage with CCScript is that you can define most of the text and events for your hack in a set of script files, and then compile them together into your ROM. Within each script file, you define text blocks, events, menus, control flow, and so forth, all in a very simple, natural-looking language. Since you are really only editing the EB ROM once, there is far less room for error!
Mr. Accident was also kind enough to post a tutorial on how to use CCScript right here. Check it out for more details on this invaluable hacking tool.
