(Japanese version on left, North American version on right) Bootleg carts and cartridge copiers tend to have more (so that it’ll be easy to slap any game onto them), so if it notices that there’s more than 8 KB, the game will give you the following screen: It checks to make sure the cart only has 8 KB of SRAM, which is the part of memory that holds save games. The first REAL line of defense against pirates happens when the system is turned on. If you are, it gives you this screen and freezes: The first layer in EarthBound’s protection is simple – it just makes sure you’re not running on a European/PAL system. That’s how we fans discovered the existence of these copy protection schemes. In 2007, Goplat, an especially skilled hacker, looked into those differences and saw that those bytes were different because software pirates (presumably in the mid 90s) had gone in and undone a bunch of anti-piracy mechanisms. The only difference between them was a couple changed bytes. How This Was Discoveredįor years and years, EarthBound ROM hackers were confused as to why there were apparently two types of EarthBound ROMs out there. ROMs are NOT affected, unless you’re using a crappy emulator or playing a ROM someone hacked as a prank. This copy protection targets bootleg cartridges and cartridge copiers. The really important thing to mention first is this: In the case of MOTHER 2 (Japanese version of EarthBound), the programmers went the extra mile by including several layers of copy protection. Many Nintendo Super Famicom/Super NES games had some sort of copy protection in them – just from personal memory I know Super Metroid and Super Punch-out had copy protection that would go off on accident sometimes. So I want to try to make things clearer here. Since then, they’ve really made the rounds, but not without a lot of people misinterpreting (or just not paying attention) to the info given. May 14th, 2011 EarthBound, Uncommon KnowledgeĪ few years back I posted a page on Starmen.Net about EarthBound’s copy protection and posted a video about it on YouTube.
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