Super Mario World NES: The Complete Improvement Project

[real retro kid knuckles]

hey somari

can you tell me how you fixed the graphic banks for the chucks?

[sics]

Great advances, I think the last screenshot looks much better than the previous ones, on the other hand if this engine shares similarities with Somari's, I would recommend remapping Mario's palette so that he only uses one as in most of his official NES games

On the other hand, I am very interested in knowing the tool you are talking about, is it CADEditor?

[Somari the Adventurer]

Thanks, I'm glad you like how things are shaping up, also well done on your Sonic NES improvement, very impressive stuff Sics.

The tool I'm using is called 'The Chinese Super Mario World Editor', if you want a link to it I'll send you one, this editor is like a less refined and more limited Lunar Magic for the NES version of SMW. I have used the CADeditor a couple times during this project, however it seems to corrupt the colours in game if you do anything other than just placing 2x2 tile blocks and it doesn't support sprite modification for the game making CSMWE a much more suitable tool for the job.

As for Mario's palette, I like it how it is, over composite video the slight colour changing from white to skin tone on the hands and from blue to black for a row of Mario's shoulders will be pretty negligible and even on emulator I think it looks quite good. Although I might think about changing the colour of Yoshi's arms to avoid half of his hands being red and half being green, I'll have to see how it looks on my CRT when I eventually manage to get Yoshi's new sprites implemented.

[sics]

If that always happens with CadEditor, if you ever need to use it again for some reason, that can be solved in two ways;

The first is to go to the palette sector of that level and restore the previous color settings manually and update them by hand.

The second is to copy the entire paddle block to a notepad and replace the four wrong bits with the correct ones.

On the other hand, I would be very grateful to obtain a copy from the CSMW editor, as I think it would help me to continue sharing the operation of the Hummer Team games

Keep up the good work, one day we will make everyone see these games as we did as children

[sebastianangel]

 :)Hello I am very happy to see the progress of this project, because it is one of the games that I have a lot of affection for, I was surprised by Yoshi's house, the fireplace and many more details, because a while ago I started to improve the colors and graphics of this game but I did not get to so much detail !!! here I leave some screenshots of my unfinished hack as a guide for they like the color combination I use

[cartridge_rom]

that project looks great sebastianangel  , I hope you can help Somari the Adventurer / Somari Team advance their Super Mario World NES improvement project

we will be attentive to the news, greetings 

[sebastianangel]

Thank you very much friend, I'm glad you like the colors! I hope my colors and tiles will serve you

[Somari the Adventurer]

The Enemies Update Preview and The Disassembly Announcement:
Hello to all, it's been a while since the last update but that just means we've made more progress since the last post.
A good amount behind the scenes progress has been made, from a more comprehensive understanding of the game to the start of the disassembly project and many new sprites have also been added.
So, onto the preview:

Almost every enemy currently in the game has new sprites with only a few still awaiting graphics, but as well as this, many currently unimplemented enemy sprites have been worked into the new memory banks.
As you can see, the new enemy sprites are looking much better than the Hummer originals and some enemies such as the Urchin and Pitchin' Chuck now have added animation to add that little bit of extra accuracy and polish to them.
The only enemies in the game still needing new graphics are Diggin' Chuck, Fuzzy, the Super Koopas and the Mecha Koopas, however there are still many sprites to add to the enemy banks for missing enemies.

The Disassembly Announcement:
Yes it's actually happening, my new team member palaceswitcher is working on disassembling Super Mario World NES, while it's still very early days, we hope that this will allow us to expand the game in ways otherwise impossible.
The disassembly can be found here: https://github.com/palaceswitcher/SMW-NES-Disassembly
If the disassembly is successful, we hope to port SMW over to the MMC5 mapper, thus removing the tight memory restrictions and making it possible to add much more to the game than just prettier graphics
If anyone would like to contribute to the disassembly project or lend a technical hand, feel free to, any help we can get is much appreciated and it would really aid our project

I'd also like to note that palaceswitcher is working on his own graphical hack of SMW which differs from mine, opting for a more traditional NES look with simpler palettes/sprites, so we are working together as a team but also working on our own unique versions to some extent. (palaceswitcher has not created a thread or made any posts about his hack anywhere as of yet otherwise I'd link to it)
We are both also starting to look at new music for the game here and there, but the new soundtrack will likely only happen if the disassembly goes to plan so it's just for testing out ideas of how it could sound at the moment.
Also, nice work sebastianangel, I quite like the background palette in that forest level and your Yoshi's House looks nice as well, good job.

Anyway, as always, thank you for checking out our project and any feedback or suggestions are welcome

[PalaceSwitcher]

I'm looking for somebody to assist with the disassembly too.

[DiamondHi]

I am interested in changing some graphics and colors to make it even more accurate to the SNES version. There is quite a lot to work with here.

[cartridge_rom]

very good progress

[sebastianangel]

The Enemies Update Preview and The Disassembly Announcement:
Hello to all, it's been a while since the last update but that just means we've made more progress since the last post.
A good amount behind the scenes progress has been made, from a more comprehensive understanding of the game to the start of the disassembly project and many new sprites have also been added.
So, onto the preview:

Almost every enemy currently in the game has new sprites with only a few still awaiting graphics, but as well as this, many currently unimplemented enemy sprites have been worked into the new memory banks.
As you can see, the new enemy sprites are looking much better than the Hummer originals and some enemies such as the Urchin and Pitchin' Chuck now have added animation to add that little bit of extra accuracy and polish to them.
The only enemies in the game still needing new graphics are Diggin' Chuck, Fuzzy, the Super Koopas and the Mecha Koopas, however there are still many sprites to add to the enemy banks for missing enemies.

The Disassembly Announcement:
Yes it's actually happening, my new team member palaceswitcher is working on disassembling Super Mario World NES, while it's still very early days, we hope that this will allow us to expand the game in ways otherwise impossible.
The disassembly can be found here: https://github.com/palaceswitcher/SMW-NES-Disassembly
If the disassembly is successful, we hope to port SMW over to the MMC5 mapper, thus removing the tight memory restrictions and making it possible to add much more to the game than just prettier graphics
If anyone would like to contribute to the disassembly project or lend a technical hand, feel free to, any help we can get is much appreciated and it would really aid our project

I'd also like to note that palaceswitcher is working on his own graphical hack of SMW which differs from mine, opting for a more traditional NES look with simpler palettes/sprites, so we are working together as a team but also working on our own unique versions to some extent. (palaceswitcher has not created a thread or made any posts about his hack anywhere as of yet otherwise I'd link to it)
We are both also starting to look at new music for the game here and there, but the new soundtrack will likely only happen if the disassembly goes to plan so it's just for testing out ideas of how it could sound at the moment.
Also, nice work sebastianangel, I quite like the background palette in that forest level and your Yoshi's House looks nice as well, good job.

Anyway, as always, thank you for checking out our project and any feedback or suggestions are welcome

Thank you very much I am glad you like the palettes used in those stages! I really like the work you are doing!

[cartridge_rom]

Any news or progress for the SMW NES project ? 

[Cyneprepou4uk]

I'm looking for somebody to assist with the disassembly too.

What exactly do you need help with?

[PalaceSwitcher]

What exactly do you need help with?

Documentation and reverse engineering banks. There's a Discord if you're interested.

[MadZiontist]

Amazing work so far, Somari the Adventurer. I'm excited for this project's release! This is a game that really deserves a deluxe visual makeover.

sebastianangel, your work looks really impressive too.

I found this title screen update on Deviant Art, which I think looks awesome. If the Super Mario World NES Complete Improvement Project's title screen turned out as good, or better, I'd be thrilled.



https://www.deviantart.com/supastarfox/art/Super-Mario-World-NES-SNES-Style-778122746

[Somari the Adventurer]

Hello again to all, sorry for the long silence here, I've been a little busy with other things and haven't had the motivation to do much to my graphics project for a few weeks now. I intend to resume my graphical work in January if not a little sooner, I'm finally getting back into a creative mood, it's just Christmas and a broken screen pushing that back at the minute.

Anyway, PalaceSwitcher has been working hard on the disassembly and is making good progress, the IRQ and sound engine banks have been fully disassembled and my original hacking partner, QuickCurly, has lent a hand here and there as well giving us some technical insight. Also, thanks to Cyneprepou4uk for his disassembly tool, it seems very useful so far and will hopefully make the technical part of the project a little easier for us.

A few more minor gameplay tweaks have also been made, such as the removal of the pause when you find a Yoshi egg and when a vine spawns from a block, although the latter is still a bit buggy. Some more unused content has also been found within the game such as there being specific code for carrying items underwater which works as it would in the original, but there aren't any objects to carry in underwater stages thus it goes unused here.

I intend to do the graphics for the Bowser fight when I start work on my sprites again, so I hope to have something more to share relatively soon.

As ever, thanks for reading, take care everyone and have a good Christmas!

[Somari the Adventurer]

Hello again to all, I'm back at it again and this time things look quite different, some aspects of the project are being reworked and how I'm working on this has also changed a bit. So, onto the new SMW NES Improvement update:

On the technical side, progress on the disassembly is good, 6 banks have been fully disassembled so far and PalaceSwitcher has been working hard to understand this game's inner workings, finding many useful RAM addresses that the game uses for various things. The disassembly can be found here: https://github.com/palaceswitcher/SMW-NES-Disassembly and there is also a Discord server (https://discord.gg/3rJSuzqzmE) for those who would like to help out with the project. We would much appreciate any technical assistance you could lend to us if you would like to do so as it would speed up the disassembly process if there were more people working on it as it is currently only PalaceSwitcher working on this task.

Now onto the graphical side of things, there are 3 main changes to how this is being designed now, 1; completely new and more flexible palette sets, 2; Graphics are now being organised in ROMs ready for later insertion, and 3; I'm aiming for a far more legitimate looking game than before.
Here are Some sprites in the new art style:

As promised, Bowser has also been worked on:

And here are all the stage objects I have drawn so far:

As you can see, things are looking a little prettier now, we have a more diverse colour set and, like some of you asked for, Mario now uses only one palette just as he did in the real NES games. This new set of palettes will not only allow for the graphics to appear more accurate to the SNES originals as a whole, but also prevent any palette clash issues when playing as the Luigi or when riding a non-green Yoshi.
Following this new art direction, PalaceSwitcher and I have officially merged projects, so I am now the lead artist of the project as a whole.
The reason that graphics are now being organised and arranged into graphics ROMs is because we realised that all of the work done to the Mapper 90 version of the game will later have to be transferred over to the MMC5 version (as that will be a conversion of the base game) and also, with the MMC5 version we should be able to achieve a far greater level of accuracy with more frames and more memory, so continuing to graphically improve the mapper 90 version seems pointless. Instead all graphics used in the game will be drawn in colourised and ready to insert form, including banking design for said graphics, meaning that when the MMC5 version is ready, we will be able to insert everything as needed.

Anyway, that's it for this update, I hope you like the changes we've made and I look forward to hearing your thoughts,
Thanks for reading and take care everybody!

[DavidtheIdeaMan]

Those sprites look damn amazing! Keep up the great work.

[Cyneprepou4uk]

At this rate it will take PalaceSwitcher half a year in order to manually label everything, since he refused to use my Notepad++ scripts. It takes several days max when I'm doing it, depending on how big and complicated the game is.