Super Pitfall NES (improvements)

[Midna]

All right, I took a crack at it, and here's what I came up with. It's an original arrangement and not 100% directly based on the theme in the hack, but it should give you an idea of what "good arps" sound like.

[FCandChill]

All right, I took a crack at it, and here's what I came up with. It's an original arrangement and not 100% directly based on the theme in the hack, but it should give you an idea of what "good arps" sound like.

Hey, that sounds nice. Could you provide the original FTM?

[Midna]

Hey, that sounds nice. Could you provide the original FTM?

Sure, here you go.

[FCandChill]

Sure, here you go.

And here you go.

[Copper]

Since this 30th Anniversary has turned a poorly made game into one of the best on the NES...here are two ideas, if anyone has the ability.

1) make a randomizer version of this hack so each play through is a little different
2) far more interesting - change the layout of the caves

I assume the first suggesting is far easier to do. This game is such a gem. I need more lol

[nesrocks]

What the fuck is this wall of text...?

Yeah I agree, it's a bit spammy. He sent me the same through private message and I responded it. Here is what I sent.

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That seems like an interesting world to play on! Unfortunately I've looked inside the ROM very thoroughly when doing this hack and while I did find many unused rooms I didn't find anything so remarkably different than what's present in playable form in the game as it was released in the 1980s.

A few points of clarification though:
- The game indeed has two playable quests. When you complete the game, if you start again it's going to be on quest 2. The difference is only the position of the items to be found. Layout is the same. This is also what they mean at the ending message "PLEASE TRY ANOTHER WORLD".
- The game's levels are stored in the ROM as "rooms". Each room is simply a single screen, and each screen is placed next to one another to form the entire game. Some rooms, though very few, are even repeated in more than one spot on the map.
- There are alternate unused versions of almost every room in the game stored in the ROM. They seem to be more unpolished versions. I believe the coders meant to have two completely different adventures but in the end due to time constraints used only one and then changed the items positions to make the second adventure.
- There's also an unused single screen debug room with non functioning ladders and gold bars.

Which leaves us with two explanations for your extra world:
   1 - It was programmed to be procedurally generated.
or 2 - It was a glitch.

Given what's known about the development of this game, as in, it was made by inexperienced and underpaid programmers with a super tight schedule, I'm afraid I would believe it was just a glitch. Procedurally generating the world would be a completely different level loading system than the largely uncompressed data scheme they ended up using.

[artsoft]

Hello, yesterday I was playing the Super Pitfall, finding the following:
If you get into the wall on the left side and jump until the end of the map, the wall itself will kill you, but you will spawn in an area with trial levels, no enemies spawn here and it is 4 lines of levels high.
1.- In the first line starting from left to right you will find a test area with the pyramids from the beginning but with a gray wall, going to the right you will find an area of ​​sprite fragments, then with 4 replicas of the corridor where You are chased by the stone head near the balloon, then again another area of ​​sprite fragments and ending with 3 other replicas of the same corridor.
2.- In the second line starting from left to right you will find a test area with the pyramids from the beginning but with a gray wall with some variants with respect to the first line, going to the right you will find an area of ​​sprite fragments, then with 9 replicas of the corridor where the stone head chases you near the globe until you reach the far right of the map.
3.- In the third line starting from left to right there are no more pyramids, you will only find an area of ​​sprite fragments, then with 9 replicas of the corridor where the stone head chases you near the globe until you reach the far right of the map.
4.- In the fourth line you will only find a layer of gray wall that if you get into the wall and jump you will go through it to get out on the ground floor near the balloon with the whole game and normal enemies and continue with the game.
It is clear to me that under the lava is not the secret world as I thought, and that there are only a series of corridors, sprites and test levels with no enemies present, although I no longer know if all that is under the lava or in the highest height, because you get to that area going up too much, but if you keep going up all these levels you reach the lava that is at the bottom of the map.
I will continue looking for the lost world of the stone heads, if it was caused by an error of the NES itself, I am sure that error can be replicated until teleporting to this world, I was there and I know that it exists although no one has found it yet.

[nesrocks]

What you're finding by going out of bounds is rooms being read from the game's code.

This is how the game's world is stored in the ROM:
There are tiles (made of 8x8 pixels graphics).
There are metatiles (made of 2x2 tiles / 16x16 pixels).
There are rooms (made of 16x15 metatiles / 256x240 pixels).
Each room has an ID.
There is a map that is just a sequence of room IDs.
I believe there is a list of objects (enemies and items) that match the list of rooms for the map.

When you go out of bounds by going up you're reading bytes from the ROM that are located directly before the list of rooms that make up the proper map. One way to brute force the testing would be to edit the ROM's pointer to the world map so you start in another place in the ROM, but there are literally thousands of options for you to test.

To manually test new values for the pointer you need to hack the ROM at 0x01FB24 from "E080" (which is little endian for 0x80E0, the correct ROM address it points to) to whatever you like, and then start the game. As you can see, it accepts values ranging from 0x0000 to 0xFFFF, which is exactly 65,535 different values. This is just for the background graphics and collision data, it doesn't change the position of enemies and items on the screen. For that you'd need to do 65 thousand more tests on the items pointer.

This is all of course considering the glitch only changed the map pointer and nothing else in the ROM, which is unlikely but not impossible.

[artsoft]

Thank you very much for your attention nesrocks, I am enthusiastic about everything you explain to me about how a ROM is made and I am learning a lot, as I said at the beginning I think that where I was transported by the failure in the NES is another map different from the ones already acquaintances who are:
1.- The initial and Main map.
2.- The map where you rescue the pet that is in a cage that you teleport when you collide with a crow.
3.- The Dark map where you rescue de la Princesa.
I remember that there is another map that you also collide with a raven and you are teleported to a fourth map, I will play it today and I will confirm later.
There must be a fifth map which is where I was teleported by mistake and that I will never access through the walls of the main map, it must be similar to teleportation portals like you change between maps, collide with a crow, jump in the corner of a corridor, that kind of change of maps, there must be a way to teleport to the map of the stone heads.
Although they have decided not to include the map of the stone heads as playable, it exists and is functional, but that portal is missing to switch to that map, what instructions are used to switch between maps, where they are activated by colliding with a crow or jumping on the corner of a corridor?, I saw a video on YouTube where they found several unused levels in Super Mario Bros 3 and some playable and complete, I don't know what method they used to find them but there they are in the ROM, we can do something with Super Pitfall to find the unpublished map.
There is a code in CHEATS type Raw, I think it is something similar to what you mention to change the starting place, it says "Stage "Area" Select: 0534:??
Stage "Area" Select
RAM Write - Constantly writes 0 to the RAM address 0x534.
Change the "??" to any combination to select a random area. The higher the number, the farther you go into the game. Some combinations may cause you to start inside a wall. Switch f/x off or reset if you get stuck.
I'm going to soak it today and I'll let you know if I find anything, cheers.
April 20, 2022, 03:52:00 PM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
I speak Spanish so there may be errors when translating, but I am very enthusiastic about the subject.

[artsoft]

I have found new interesting things using the raw cheat 0534-?:?, actually the last 2 values ​​?:? represent a coordinate system, the first being the vertical position and the second the horizontal value of the total map, comprising a square with vertical columns and horizontal rows numbered with the values ​​123456789ABCDEF vertical and 123456789ABCDEF horizontal.

0534-1:1 is the top left corner
0534-1:F is the upper right corner
0534-F:1 is the lower left corner
0534-F:F is the lower right corner
The playable area reaches the vertical coordinate A
Vertical Coordinates B and C are closed gray wall of volcanic lava
Vertical Coordinates D, E and F are a series of corridors with stairs, areas of several sprites and some pyramids at the beginning, all without enemies.
I have managed to discover the key of each map, there are 3 playable maps:
053E-0:0 MAP 00 Main where you start
053E-0:1 MAP 01 Dark with skulls where you rescue Rhonda.
053E-0:2 MAP 02 It is where you rescue Quickclaw the Lion, there are 3 AREAS where the 3 vultures teleport you, the 3 AREAS are in the same MAP 02 but at different coordinates:
AREA 1 Located at Coordinate 1:5: Find the medicine and rescue Quickclaw the Lion.
AREA 2 Located at Coordinate 8:5: Gold, bullets and lives with gray block walls
AREA 3 Located at Coordinate A:5: Gold, bullets and lives with gray walls of volcanic lava, this one is smaller.
There are more maps:
053E-0:3 MAP 03 The background is black and there is only gold, items and enemies.
053E-0:5 MAP 05 The background is made up entirely of numbers, letters and sprite boxes, there is also gold, items and enemies.
053E-0:9 MAP 09 It's a replica of the main world 00, but with the enemies and objects in disarray, no balloon, no teleports, no keys, no hidden objects, it looks like an unfinished project.
053E-4:D MAP 4D It's a replica of dark world 01, but with the enemies and objects in disarray, no Rhonda, no teleports, no hidden objects, it looks like another unfinished project.
Try all the possible combinations, but only MAPs 02, 03, 05, 09 and 4D are repeated, the strange thing is that MAP 00 and MAP 01 never repeat again.
Unfortunately I still can't find the MAP of the stone heads, I hope to find it one day.