Bound to the Dark World
A downloadable mod
An Earthbound romhack that recreates Deltarune Chapter 1 in its entirety!
Experience Deltarune as if it were made in the 90’s!
After two years in the making, it’s finally complete!
Included with the download are patching instructions, so anyone can play the hack, even if you’ve never patched a ROM before!
Of course, you’ll have to provide your own ROM of Earthbound.
CREDITS
Chromadeline
Isaiah_Mark
CoolMikeHaha
Nes_Cade
felix.rodent
Atlantixa
NOLI_KISSES
…and the rest of the PK Hack community!
Thumbnail art by: https://x.com/Refresh_RM
Download
Install instructions
Install instructions included in the ZIP file you download here!
Comments
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i love you, make me a baby
Such a cozy looking game idk why
is it only chapter one?
Yeah, understandably the rest of the chapters are far more complex, chapter 2 with the weird route and the queen fight the third with game inside a game chapter 4 with so many dark worlds and oh God chapter 5 and the jumping sections, not to mention chapters 3-5 are paid so like some roadblock that is
At this rate they'd be better off trying to make an entirely new SNES game instead of basing it off Earthbound.
Very cool! Never knew that deltarune chatper 1 with the earthbound style would look so cool!
also can you release the sprites on like the spriters resource or something they look so cool
got softlocked inside a hathy after the 3 glasses of milk fight. 1.6 when
very cool romhack! i felt there was a LOT to be desired within the sound department among a few other visuals. still a fantastic effort from everyone involved and it really shows
This comment is coming from playing the 1.4 version to complete achievements on RetroAchievements, keep that in mind! 1.5 is probably different
This is my first romhack I've played and I loved it! Absolutely fantastic recreations of the sprites and it was fun to explore Chapter 1 in a brand new way! I'm such a sucker for Earthbound's combat so I enjoyed my time with it all the way through. My favorite part of this by far was the soundtrack, it's recreated magnificently with a new sound! Plus the remixes with the original songs from Earthbound were an awesome surprise!
The difficulty spikes up a lot in Card Castle, even after grinding levels all the way to the max. K. Round's second fight felt like the most difficult encounter in the whole thing, I only got a winning strategy after checking comments here before nearly giving up. All I wish is that there was some added dialogue that hinted at using some of the specific ACT attacks that work best against those bosses. But with numerous save points throughout the game, it is actually very forgiving to experimentation and I'm glad they're there!
Great work overall! I enjoyed this all the way from beginning to end!
This hack was incredible! My one criticism towards it that the difficulty scaling jumps wildly towards the end of the hack in the Card Castle. The Head Hathy's Kiss of Death is brutal to deal with having no ways to cure poison besides trying to make it to a save point, and I found the rematch with K. Round to be the most difficult fight in the game. Susie says she gets an idea and suggests Throwing, and I thought the fight was just scripted survival until throwing enough would remove the crown. I didn't know that K. Round is susceptible to the Ralsei's lullaby and that you still have to fight it "normally" until I looked up an old version of the fight on youtube. I think that could have been communicated better to the player. Afterward I expected Jevil and Chaos King to be absolutely brutal but they ended up being pushovers.
Besides that nitpick about difficulty, I absolutely adored this hack and how faithful it was to both Earthbound and Deltarune as well as the various additional easter eggs thrown in such as the description for the spin cake and the easter eggs at the Librarby and the lake. I even started tearing up a bit at the personal "thank you" at the end of the game. Thank you so much for all your hard work to make this incredible tribute!
When i fall into the dark world the game is stuck in a black screen
if Kris dead when recruiting Susie game breaks and susie is not in the team and game freezes with awesome soundtrack
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but has anyone gotten this to work on an SNES classic?
i tried playing it on my snes flashcart, and it keeps giving me the earthbound anti piracy screen with no way for me to proceed, what do I do? the normal earthbound seems to boot up and play just fine
Hi, I don't know if it's too much to ask, but I wanted to ask if there's a possibility that the source files can be available for download (like a CoilSnake decompile)
we might be able to do that, but there's a lot of original earthbound source code in there that we wont be able to give out, so if we get to it it might be a while...
You could maybe make a delta patch between the base Earthbound decompile and the mod's?
Well, thanks for replying me anyway.
This looks phenomenal and I can't wait to go through the whole thing! Unfortunately, I tried this on a Super EverDrive V2 but all I get is a black screen. I tried changing settings on the menu but nothing seems to do anything. The ROM works just fine on the emulators I've tried (Mesen, BSNES and BizHawk) so I don't think it's an issue of my source ROM being corrupted (EarthBound itself works perfectly fine on the flash cart too) or the patching process failing or anything. Unless the ROMhack requires an expansion chip that my flash cart doesn't support?
Yusssssssssssss
I'm making a youtube video on this hack
Hello! This project looks really awesome, but I have a strangely specific question, so if anyone could help me, that'd be amazing. I'm trying to play this on my Nintendo DS via R4 card, and I patched the rom, but when I load it, it just shows a white screen. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? Thanks in advance!
Which version are you using? If you’re using 1.1 or 1.2 it’s because those don’t work on older Emulators. This was fixed in Versions 1.3 and beyond.
I THINK it's snes9x, but not 100% sure. I downloaded the lastest version of the patch.
I'm sure you'll need another emulator, SNES9X can't run roms like this one which isn't an sfc file which SNES9X recognizes believe me, I tried to make a floating IPS file run on SNES9X
nvm I just patched with flips it and it works
Getting the same error on SNEmulDS on my flash cart, what did you do to make it work? I used some kind of patcher I found but still a white screen.
Such a cool project! Will chapter 2 be made?
they said to not ask about that, so probably not
Any help? I was playing on version 1.1 of the game. I just combined the three broken key pieces with my inventory completely filled up preparing for Jevil, but when I got to Jevil's door, I realized that I didn't have the fixed key in my inventory. The door to Jevil won't respond to any input, and I saved over my file before realizing. Is there a way I can fix up my save file or do I have to start again? Amazing work so far by the way, I very much love everything except for this bug.
Edit: Seam was also using some of Rouxls's dialogue if you back out of selling an item, not sure if this was fixed or not.
Yeaaa, that's a v1.1 bug, we fixed that already... and the only way to recover this would be to use a save editor and give yourself item 182, or to just restart... apologies! but it is of course recommended that you play on the latest version
Thanks for letting me know the item ID! Glad this is fixed as well. I'll see if I can get a save editor working (the one I used didn't quite work), or I'll just use speedup on the latest version.
To anyone that wants to play this on Wii U, both baseroms that are usually used for Earthbound on UWUVCI (Earthbound and Donkey Kong Country if anyone's wondering) don't work due to the rom being 6MB, you either have to get retroarch working (If your on aroma do NOT download it from their website as the cores do not work) or run SNES 9x GX on the V-Wii
This helped me to get it running on the OG wii. I used FriishProduce to make the wad and used the snes9x gx injection method. I'm able to launch it right from the wiis homescreen.
For any OG wii users, if that sounds too hard or you can't figure out FriishProduce, you can just use snes9x gx from the homebrew channel to play the rom.
Thanks for making this! I was waiting for some sort of Deltarune port I could play on my 3ds!
this is absolutely amazing, i'm going to play it rn
Hey! I'm really enjoying the hack so far but I seem to have run into some problem. The second Rouxls Kaard encounter + puzzle won't trigger for me for some reason, I've walked all over the room with the button but nothing happens. I talked to Jevil and collected the first two key pieces before progressing through the castle so I'm wondering if maybe that broke something... I can't remember but I also think I might have talked to Rouxls first and then went to Jevil.
Again, enjoying the hack aside from that. Excellent work here!
Okay so after I beat the game I learned this game had a jevil fight so I booted it back up but I was too far in to actually go back and fight him, is there anything I could do because I really don't wanna start another save file :(
Well, did you use any Save States? Also the Egg is in this too.
Sadly no. I was kind of hoping somebody had some save available or something, just wishful thinking.
Efectivamente, es cine.
This is genuinely the coolest and most impressive romhack I've ever seen created by the community, PHENOMENAL work!!
Can't find a way to drop/remove unused weapons after getting upgrades
that's intentional, even if it is a bit annoying... i wanted to make sure people had at least SOME kind of weapon, because lancer's tutorial battle is pretty much the only one that's manageable without a weapon. apologies, but i hope you understand!
Just finished the game. One of the best romhacks and the most faithful recreations of Ch.1 I have ever seen.
I wish you luck as well, Chromadeline....
After passing through the Maze of Death, there's the event where you fight the three Hathys. After the fight, Kris's body overlaps with Hathy's, creating a body block that prevents him from escaping. Returning to the last save point and playing it again allowed me to continue. I'm just mentioning this in case anyone else has had the same problem. ;b
sorry for my late reply! yea, this happened to a few people, but try as i might i cannot figure out why it happens... the fact it's inconsistent makes it EXTREMELY hard to test for, and there's not really anything in the code that would cause it to happen... it sucks, but my best advice is to just reset sadly. apologies!
I don't know if this is patched but I noticed that the moment you get a game over screen, you get booted back in the title screen instead of spawning back at your save point
that's normal! it was a work around for some funny flag business
Funny flag business? What does that mean?
when you die in earthbound, it doesnt reset any of the event flags. nearly everything that happens in bound to the dark world is EXTREMELY flag-dependent, and unless we made a new script changing every needed flag at every single save point, it would break something every time you died. however, if the game resets, all flags go back to how they should be
I see. In that case, I understand now. This'll make for a challenging romhack then lol
Thanks for replying btw
If you press “Finish” on the Thrash Machine builder without selecting all three parts, it breaks the cutscene and gives you your controls back. The dialogue works, but I think someone used the wrong control code or something when programming it.
oh hm,that's strange... well i dont wanna just start putting out a bunch of hotfixes, so if there's a handful more bugs reported from anyone, this'll be fixed in that
thanks for your feedback again!
Hey, so I've been testing this hack on numerous emulators for the past hour, and concluded that it only seems to work on the recommended Mesan emulator. I understand that's the recommended, but I'm leaving this here to inform others that other emulators either don't work completely or display numerous visual errors, also so that there'd hopefully be a patch that fixes the issues I've sent in the attached images below.
A lot of the errors I'm seeing have to do with the Checksum and ROM size? I don't know much about SNES ROMs, but these emulators are definitely indicating that there are issues with the data.
SNESticle [Works almost perfectly, but the inside of buildings (House & School) displays jumbled and scrambled tiles]:
SNES9X Rom Info:
SNES9X Error:
I've also taken the time to attempt to fix these issues manually by means of Hex Editing and IpsAndSum to fix the checksum error that shows in SNES9x, but neither solution seems to have fixed the "Header ROM Size: Corrupt" and "[bad checksum]" lines in the rom info.
Even Mesen displays this when you first load the romhack? Again, I have no clue; it probably just does that.
unfortunately, this kind of thing is out of our control... the hack is a 6mb rom which is unusal for super nintendo games, and a lot of issues come from people using roms that aren't able to have the patch applied to them properly, usually resulting in the graphical issues you showed. not every emulator is built to handle 6mb roms either, which is why a lot of people have problems with snes9x
People have gotten it working in snes9x (1.61+; the latest version is 1.63 released in 2024), ares (which means that the related emulators bsnes and higan probably work too), and Mesen. You should have several options available.
The problem is well understood. This hack is an "Ex-HiROM" SNES game (not HiROM as your IpsAndSum program says), meaning its header data is stored at ROM file address 40FFB0. All the emulators that the hack works on are able to guess/recognize that, due to the ROM being massive (>4 MB) and having valid header data at that address.
EarthBound is originally a HiROM SNES game, though, not Ex-HiROM, meaning its header was originally at ROM file address 00FFB0. The hacking tool used to make the ROM bigger and change its format to Ex-HiROM doesn't clear out the old header data at that address. And for some reason, a few SNES emulators/tools/flashcarts seem to be getting very confused by that, for reasons I don't fully understand. (Apparently there have been many historical "interleaved" ROM formats that people have used over the years, though most emulators that are still being maintained today make no attempt to support them.) I've sent a few people developing Ex-HiROM EarthBound hacks an extra patch to test things out that removes the old copy of the header, including the developers of this hack, in the hopes that it'll improve the emulators'/etc ability to guess the ROM format correctly. I guess I didn't get it to them soon enough for it to be tested for 1.2 though.
The error in your last screenshot means you have the patched ROM and patch in the same folder. Mesen has a feature where it tries to apply a patch automatically to a ROM when they're named the same, so that you don't need to manually use a patching tool. That automatic patching is what's failing (it would be bad if you were able to apply the patch to the ROM twice). You can get rid of the message by moving the ROM or patch to a different folder, or renaming either one, or disabling soft patching support in Mesen.
I'm not aware of any emulator actually caring about the checksum in the ROM header being correct, or using it for the ROM format heuristics. Snes9x doesn't seem to use it, at least. I'm not sure I've even heard of snesticle before seeing this post; the only old emulator I've heard of people still trying to use occasionally is zsnes.
Oh, thanks. I'm working with older emulators cuz my original goal was to get this hack working on SNESticle for PS2 (which displays the same corrupt tiles as on PC). Do you suggest any ways to get it to work without issue in SNESticle? Like what could be causing the tile corruption?
If you have a copy of the Super Famicom game "Tales of Phantasia," you should see if it's possible for the emulator to play that game without issues. This hack should be mostly identical in how the ROM is laid out to that game, albeit I learned today that save data is accidentally handled a bit differently in EarthBound hacks (in ways that old emulators don't care about anyway). If it can't play Tales, then it won't play this hack either.
I was able to get the hack working in snes9x 1.60 by zeroing out all the data in the ROM at file addresses 00FFB0-00FFFF, but evidently the emulator you're using doesn't behave like snes9x did, and it's unclear how exactly it is behaving.
1. Tragically, ToP does not work in SNESticle so I guess I'll have to abandon getting it to work there... BUT!
2. I still have SNES9x, also on PS2, and if I can get this working in S9x, then it's *mostly guaranteed to boot on ps2.
But first, when you say zeroing out all the data in the ROM at file addresses 00FFB0-00FFFF, do you mean just replacing both 00FFB0 and 00FFFF with all zeros or something different? Cuz it's not showing any new results for me when I tried what I initially thought you meant.
Not just at the ends, but all the data in that range. FFB0 should be 00, FFB1 should be 00, etc all the way up to FFFF
Is it supposed to be limited to Level 28 only? Also, when a party member reaches that limit, the stats menu glitches out and the game completely flips out. Dunno if this was patched in 1.2 tho
Yup! this was fixed in v1.2. And yes, the level cap is 28. We're working on v1.3 at the moment which fixes a few more minor things
Loving it! Noticed a bug where the second checker board light puzzle (the one that is 2 lanes) is switching and displaying at an irregular pace, making it nearly impossible to tell where you actually are supposed to step
its also affects the light puzzle after it
hmmm, this is odd... i had to mess around with a lot of the great board code, but i'll take another look at it to see if i can find the cause for this... thanks for your feedback!!
It worked normal the first time, but the bug started after going back through i
Hey, I just found out that Clover has a chance of dropping the Magic Fry Pan from base EarthBound, which is WAY better than Ralsei’s other weapons. I think she uses the same slot as the Chompsaur and that whoever programmed her didn’t remove it from her drop pool.
Okay, another bug thread. This one’s MUCH smaller than my last one:
As of the update, Lancer now moves to the wrong position before the Trash Machine scene. He moves to where he’s supposed to go after the fight from the very start
If you don’t save for a while, you can still get the base EarthBound phone call from Ness’ father telling you to save
The Jigsawry fight still seems to break the battle background after winning
When leaving Card Castle, there’s a single missing tile of collision to the immediate left of the entryway
Lancer cookies are still free
There are multiple holes in the hearts floor of Card Castle, including a missing 2x2 square of missing collision in the top left and the ability to cross the diagonal gap near the staircase upwards
Clover’s room also has a hole next to the door
You can pause on the final screen and open your menu. Any textbox will softlock the game, although it doesn’t really matter since nothing comes after this
Okay, so I was grinding Rabbicks, but I am now softlocked between the two bushes because I *think* the little holes they burst out of are never unloaded, which causes object slots to keep being loaded until the game eventually freezes from filling up the sprite buffer or some other similar limitation.
Also in the same area, Clover came back? Her heads are in the holes again, but because the 4-panel puzzle for getting Jevil’s key is still loaded, I can’t re-solve her puzzle and move past her. I can only go back to the door and warp away.
well, looks like we're getting a v1.3 LOL
thank you so much for your feedback!! ill get to fixing all of this asap!
This is amazing! I think that this is by far the best rom hack I've seen so great work! I can't imagine the effort that went into this game and I'd love to see what you come up with next!
Very good Romack !! i loved the music i hope it is made available. I was a little sad I could not FIGHT but it is ok and the game was very cool I liekd the joke in the librarby
hey! im loving it so far but i hit a bit of a bug while playing on my SD2SNES:
after the three support enemies hathy fight, the game just sort of totally locked up and i couldnt move at all!
might have been just a one time thing but i figured id report on it anyway!
we're really not sure why this happens... i'll keep looking into it, but this is a bug we fixed almost a year ago at this point, im not sure how it came back :(
the good news is that it only happened once !! i got past it just by doing the fight again!
the bad news is that i found more bugs going back and finding the broken key pieces lol
susie and lancer still being in their chairs and being fanned even with susie in the party and the clover puzzle resetting and not being solvable
still, i really have loved playing through this whole game so far, its a damn marvel!
fixed a lot of this stuff in v1.2!! some of it is coming in v1.3. i keep saying "we" but im really the only one fixing all of these bugs on top of also being a college student, so im doing the best i can haha
i appreciate all the feedback though!
hell yes!!!
game runs fine but freezes at the part where you meet susie and lancer at the switch puzzle with their blueprint, i'm using mesen btw, oh and it just doesn't load the game on snes9x at all [bad checksum]
ahhh what the heck!! this is something i thought i fixed... i'll keep looking into this, sorry about that! should be fine if you reload your save and try again