ZorkBound Text Adventure Hack

Well, I love me some text-based adventures, this looks really good, possibly even better than radical Dreamers. but no save states? then how do you save in a text game?

This hack looks great. But no saves?

Mr. Accident explains that it’s a short enough demo that you shouldn’t need to save. I assume that at some point save states will be supported again and/or normal saves should work.

I wonder why it is that save states don’t work. Save states are handled by the emulator, not the game. It’s hard to imagine what might have been changed by this hack that would prevent the emulator from “remembering” the state just as it does for any other game.

Save states don’t work because EB++ (which is used to make this hack) messes with memory to add more flags, Control Codes, etc. No EB++ game will be compatible with Save States.

In fact, Save States won’t work in Hack either. Go try it :3

LOL at save states not working.

It’s too bad about the save states, but that’s not going to stop me from trying it.

Can people not get through games anymore without savestating?

Lazy.

I patch it with lunar ips, it glitches. i patch it with the EB patcher, it still doesnt work!

Yeah, the save state thing is because Rufus’s EB++ expands the SRAM space available and uses some of that as temporary memory. SRAM is not restored on loading a savestate in an emulator, though, so you get a situation where a lot of the data used by the game is hopelessly out of sync, and the next thing it does is crash horribly.

I’m hoping we’ll be able to find some unused space in main memory to store EB++ data, so that way savestates will work normally again. There’s a very sizable chunk (almost 8KB) starting around $7F:6000 that doesn’t seem to be used for much of anything, so that’s one promising direction of inquiry.

In any case, future releases of the ZorkBound framework will include a save feature, so even if savestates don’t work you’ll be able to record your progress.

Anyway, as regards patching: I’ve noticed that if you patch a 3MB ROM using Lunar IPS, Snes9x will refuse to load it. This is because Lunar IPS only expands the file as far as it needs to to write all of the differences, and in this case that’s 3 bytes short of a full 32 megabits. For some bizarre reason, Snes9x will not load any ROM file that has a filesize that is not a multiple of 64K. It’s really stupid, IMHO; ZSNES will load slightly off-size ROMs just fine.

So, definitely use the EB Easy Patcher if you’re going to play the game using Snes9x. If you’re using ZSNES, it doesn’t matter.

(Also, the patch is designed to work with a _headered_ ROM. If your ROM does not have the 512-byte copier header, it will explode. So if the patch isn’t working for you even if you used the EB Easy Patcher, download a new ROM and try that.)

EB meets Thy Dungeonman

Mr. Accident: One thing byuu (bsnes guy) is working on is something that well help hackers detect unused areas of memory that they can use. I don’t know if he’s implemented it yet, it’s possible that he has already, but he mentioned it here several months ago. I know he’s been working on his debugger for a while now at least.

I dont mean to seem rude but, who honestly likes these text adventure games? And why would you want an EB related one? One of the coolest things about EB is the colors and characters so why would you bother playing a black and white text box?

Mato: Yeah, I’m definitely looking forward to byuu’s debugger. Geiger’s Snes9x debugger is useful, but so frustratingly limited sometimes.

I’m thinking that if we do get savestates working again, I might still make use of the SRAM desynchronization to detect savestate users and make the game slightly harder for them. >:D

ScottKO: Who likes text adventure games? Smart, attractive, successful people, of course!

Seriously, maybe you don’t like text adventures all that much, but lots of people do; and the neat thing about one based on the EB engine is that you get immediate access to all the music, sound effects, and so on that are used in the game. You could also include monster fights using the normal battle system, or use the map engine to display pictures of things, and so on. So you certainly could include EarthBoundy colors and images while still making a primarily text-based game.

@ScottKO

If it weren’t for text adventure games (the core of the classic RPG), Earthbound would have never been made.

It’s kind of like reading a book instead of watching a movie based on the book. A lot of people prefer the book because there are much less limits to your imagination. A lot of people prefer the movie because they have little to no imagination or simply don’t like to read.

i used the patcher but it doesn’t play

ATTENTION INTERNET: They weren’t joking when they said not to break the mirror.