Question about Earthbound Zero (Mother) Prototype

[SoulBlazer]

Having never played Mother, AKA Earthbound Zero for the NES, I decided to go ahead and fire it up tonight.

Before I started playing, I went on to a few websites and read the story behind it. It's really quite interesting. And we should be lucky we have this game to enjoy.

One of the things I learned during my reading was that the first dump of the prototype was not totally correct -- that during a game, gameplay stops with a message from Nintendo saying that you are playing a pirated (illegial) version of the game. (I saw a screenshot of the actuall pic). The site went on to warn that since it happens toward the end of the game, you should look specificaly for a ROM that has been 'fixed' (redumped) to make sure this problem has been fixed.

Well, that got me wondering. I checked the ROM's of the game I had on my computer, and found the following versions:

Earthbound (Prototype)
Earthbound Zero (Neo Demiforce Hack)
Earthbound Zero (Neo Demiforce v.1.01 Hack-1)
Earthbound Zero (Neo Demiforce v.1.01 Hack-2)

Needless to say, I'm a bit confused.

Do I have the 'fixed' ROM? Which one is it? What are the differences between the four versions? Why would the ROM be hacked if it was a English Prototype that was dumped?

I just don't want to start playing the game and get close to the end to find the 'pirate' screen and I don't know why I have four versions of the game.

Thanks in advance.

[Dimitri]

I'd say use the first one. When the game was first dumped it was hacked to run on NESticle (different memory mapper). That hack caused the problems experienced.

Hacking new dumps is just wrong. Make the emulator work with the game, not the other way around.

[GobopopRevisited]

To my knowledge (which was aquired from Starmen.net) The main difference between EarthBound and EarthBound Zero is simply in title... Rom was renamed Zero because EarthBound was already in the states for SNES and Nintendo originally planned on calling the English translation of the original Mother- EarthBound.

[Jorpho]

As I recall, it was Demi himself who put the "zero" in the title screen, although some of the earlier hacks may be missing it.

[SoulBlazer]

So any guess on which one is the 'fixed' and non crashing ROM?

[rbudrick]

My understanding was that if it says ZERO on the title screen, then you have the hacked, fixed version that doesn't crash at those two points. I could be wrong, but that's what my memory is telling me.

-Rob