The story I've heard was: it crashed because of a Nesticle bug, but since Nesticle was the popular emulator at the time, the ROM was hacked to make it playable in Nesticle. But that hack set off a copy-protection flag. So then the ROM was hacked again to disable the copy-protection screen.

Yeah that sounds about right atleast in my memory, King Mike
I am going to go off topic here and ask about another game if thats okay with you all. 
I have came across another game that seems to have an similar problem as earth bound Had with nesticle except with this one its not just With nesticle any emulator has the same problem although it may have been meant to be played this way in the japan version. its the Japan version of the nes game the Magic of Scheherazade, Arabian Dream Sherazaado japan it seems to be missing a trainer or something. As you can not access the start menu like in the American version thus making it very much harder then the u. s. version. i think it needs to Be redumped or hacked  or something like that. you can get an full English font hack for my website. but that doesn't help much.

Please excuse my language today I had a few if you know what I mean sorry, not.