EARTHBOUND: The Rat Race

This game, which you might think of as EarthBound for girls, is a project that took several years and a lot of work with JHack and Hex Workshop to complete. Most of what I’ve changed is character names and the text, although I’ve also thrown in a few changes in the graphics I hope you’ll find to your liking. There is no “adult” content in this game unless you count a few items I’ve de-censored from Mother 2 that might get a mention on an Internet Movie Data Base parental guide but wouldn’t earn any movie so much as a PG rating (i.e. references to dating, death, and drugs).

This was originally a birthday gift for a young relative of mine who is about the same age as the protagonist and even looks a bit like her. While the game story will likely seem rather familiar from EarthBound, I’ve added several twists and put my own spin on things as you’ll see when you play it. While Shigesato Itoi’s affectionate parody of America ca. 1995 has aged remarkably well in the past 16 years, there’s always been room to augment and improve upon some of the story’s themes.

One recurrent problem I’ve seen in a lot of other hacks based on EarthBound is that altering the maps in any way that requires them to be moved into an expansion area of the ROM will invariably screw up the bus rides and sometimes the teleportation system. As such, I’ve done everything I could to keep those maps from moving in this hack. The slight increase in the hacked ROM’s size comes from one of the new opening splash screens which simply could not be compressed enough to fit where it originally belonged and therefore had to be moved into the dead space at the end.

Since several valid versions of EarthBound are floating around online, I’ve included several different patches and instructions on how to use them in this file. Since I have played this hack of the game all the way through twice to check for errors, no game-breakingly major bugs should remain. As this project was done entirely solo, however, a few minor glitches I simply failed to spot may remain.

While not substantially different from each other, several working versions of EarthBound are available online. Some have an additional half-kilobyte header and others do not. If you are not sure whether your version is headered or not, check the file's properties for its exact size. An unheadered version will have 3,145,728 bytes, and a headered version will have 3,146,240 bytes. Due to certain ROM-hacking protocols and a lack of certain controls in IPS patch creating programs, adding or removing a ROM's header must be done manually. Included in this archive is the header from EarthBound to compare against your own copy of the ROM in a hex editor.

To prevent certain emulators from complaining about failed CRC-32 checks, I have also made further patches available for padding out the file. (The Checksum-16 on any patched ROM, however, should always be correct unless the original ROM is corrupt or you applied the wrong patch.) Once you have applied the appropriate patch, what you will have is a compact version of The Rat Race. To this, if you wish to have the correct CRC-32, you may then apply the further patches which will pad out the file.

The following IPS files in this archive will convert EarthBound to The Rat Race in its various forms as indicated:

Conversion
The Rat Race (U-C).ips = from EarthBound Unheadered to The Rat Race Unheadered & Compact (3,166,416 bytes)
The Rat Race (H-C).ips = from EarthBound Headered to The Rat Race Headered & Compact (3,166,928 bytes)

Padding:
The Rat Race (U-P).ips = from The Rat Race Unheadered & Compact to The Rat Race Unheadered & Padded (4,194,304 bytes)
The Rat Race (H-P).ips = from The Rat Race Headered & Compact to The Rat Race Headered & Padded (4,194,816 bytes)

?The Author

Earthbound (U) [!].smc - GOODSNES 2.04
CRC32: B0FF3B35
MD5: 644617EACDFC9E4FD5C39F39A206671E
SHA-1: 697764088DF9BC0264A5F61E4BBB0BA7BD46E0ED
SHA-256: E6B1B92D578F9A7587E38E39CA010DAFADC7647648BF8DF29A16958A65408608