Welcome to the PK Hack section of starmen.net! Since the early 2000s, programming enthusiasts in the community have gathered together to play around with EarthBound's game engine, creating custom music and dialogue, making translations for languages like Spanish and Brazillian Portugese, and in extreme cases, whole new stories and cutscenes! With CoilSnake, the hacking tool the community uses and works on together, anyone can experiment with the game like this, the only limiting factors being free time and imagination.
Click here to go to the forum - http://forum.starmen.net/forum/Community/PKHack
If you're ready to hop into the world of PK Hacking, then you'll want to download the latest version of CoilSnake, and check out this collection of helpful tutorials on the wiki!
You can also check out the CCScript documentation here and here, as well as New Hack Blues, a collection of frequently-asked questions. If you're still stuck, please ask for help in the help thread!
You can make a thread on the forum to post updates about what you've been working on, but please keep in mind you need to have more than just ideas for the story you want to tell, or cool character designs! New threads should only be made when a project is being worked on, and with proof of it being worked on.
If you're just learning, it's a good idea to make a short hack to get used to how the tools work. Learning as you go while trying to make an epic dream hack with loads of custom maps and bosses may seem doable at first, but it's actually pretty hard and you might get frustrated, and that's no fun!
If you aren't a hacker and just want to check out what the community's been cooking up for the past two decades, you can check out the community showcase here!
To play them, you'll need the EB Patcher, a custom tool the community made to apply patches. Hackers like to distribute their hacks in patches, which only contain the changes they made. This means they can share their creations with the world without the copyrighted code of the original game!
(Please don't ask us where to find the ROM. The most we can do is direct you to Google, and ask that you support the official releases of EarthBound and EarthBound Beginnings on the Wii U Virtual Console, as well as official merch.)