EarthBound’s almost-Turing-complete text system!
summary
EarthBound (1994) hides an embedded text interpreter with a three-register interpreter (4‑byte working, 2‑byte counter, active/storage sets), an instruction set with a call stack and variable‑length ops, and weird builtins like a bicycle summon and camera‑guy trigger; the engine supports up to 255 jump pointers, runs in an ~8‑megabyte ROM, and the mod community documents it in a control code lexicon and builds tools like ccscript and coilsnake used by pkhack patches—people study it since the early 2000s.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:52About EarthBound
- 2:07EarthBounds text system
- 2:54Registers
- 3:41Instructions
- 4:21Control text
- 4:40Example
- 5:02Event flags
- 6:15Battle
- 6:58Cutscenes
- 7:58Miscellaneous Operations
- 9:01Control Code Lexicon
- 9:27PK Hack
- 10:03CC Script
- 10:23CoilSnake
- 10:37Outro
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