Anyone Interested in Doing "SMB Special" for NES?

[CaseCrash]

Next gen cowboy: why are you even a moderator?   

Karatorian & frantik: Great job, I hope you can finish and polish this off someday 

[frantik]

Also, climbed a vine in 4-3 and could not escape the area. I don't know if there's something I'm missing, but the pipe does not function. All I could do was wait for the time to run out.

thats *not* a bug, though I suspect everyone will think it is :\

[Bitch In The Red Dress]

thats *not* a bug, though I suspect everyone will think it is :\

Really? Wow, then Hudson sure are assholes.

[Karatorian]

Really? Wow, then Hudson sure are assholes.

It's like that in the original. I'd argue that is a a bug, but it's one we've decided to be bug-for-bug compatable with. Theres some discussion of that a while back in the thread. We decided to leave it like that even though it's obnoxious and against the spirit of SMB, because it's the what the project is about.

At first it was suspected to be disk corruption (we've had to work around some in the only dump of SMBS we've been able to find), but after investigation, it appears not to have been. (I wonder if the Sharp X1 version is like that too. I never checked.)

I should probably mention it in the readme.

As for the music glitches, I'm not sure what's up with that. I don't think it's vine related. If anything, it may have to do with going to the coin heaven, but I don't think the means of entry would effect that. (Honestly, I do most of my testing with sound disabled to speed up the emulation. I guess I'll have to stop doing that.)

I'll go check out the level 7-4 thing. It's probably a matter of poorly placed scroll stops or something.

[rbudrick]

Wow, what a strange coincidence.  I haven't checked this thread in months, since I used to check it at work and got laid off in November.  I go to check it today and there's a post from Karatorian only hours old.  Great job, dude!  I hope we get to see a 2.0 version someday. :-)

-Rob

[frantik]

edit: Two of 7-4's pipes lead you to a small area that you only barely have enough room to escape from. If you head slightly to the right as you get out of the pipe, the screen will scroll to that direction and leave you unable to do anything but wait for death. Yes, I know you have to be dumb to do this.

did u try going back in the pipe?

btw people, please post screen shots if possible when reporting bugs.. it makes it WAAAY easier to identify the problem areas

[Kasürva]

About that 4-3 vine...I got there on my last life and couldn't get out, so I got the coins in the room and ran the timer down, on my last life...

with 99 coins.

Argh.

I did beat the hack later though.

[Bitch In The Red Dress]

edit: Two of 7-4's pipes lead you to a small area that you only barely have enough room to escape from. If you head slightly to the right as you get out of the pipe, the screen will scroll to that direction and leave you unable to do anything but wait for death. Yes, I know you have to be dumb to do this.

did u try going back in the pipe?

I'm well aware that's the proper thing to do, I have beaten the hack after all.

Anyway, you have to be pretty dumb to accomplish it, but you can go to the right, then go to the left, and have no way back in because of the invisible block. That was my point, that you can trap yourself by being foolish.

[frantik]

oh I see.. u can trap yourself outside of the pipe room

hmm.. that little part is my creation in an attempt to stay with the spirit of the game since in the original map the pipe is up higher (but you can't do that in the NES version) 

i'll mod it so you can't walk to the left i suppose

[Wario Bros.]

Darn!  I want to play this game, but I don't have a tool that can open TAR files.  Does anybody know a good program that allows me to open one?

[Karatorian]

I think 7zip or WinZip should. Perhaps I should do the release as a zip file instead. Athough it seems like pretty much any archiver will handle tar files. On the other tentacle, newer versions of windows have zip support bult in. Hmm.

Edit

Ok, I've made the third beta release. This one incorporates a level data bugfix by frantic. There are both tar and zip releases here

Re: Bitch In The Red Dress

I looked into the music bug in 2-1, but I wasn't able to reproduce it.  What emulator are you using?

[Bitch In The Red Dress]

I was running the game in FCE Ultra GX 2.09 on the Wii. I haven't been able to reproduce the bug either though. I don't really know what was going on there the first time.

[coinheaven]

Hi, i tried this on the power pak and it worked fine, but when i put it on a cart i got scrambled graphics.  any idea why?  btw, the chr file was expanded to 64 kb, but this usually doesnt affect the graphics.

[frantik]

what kind of kart did you try?  we expanded the game so you have to use a kart with the right kind of mapper.. karatorian mentioned which one a few posts ago i think

[Karatorian]

I was running the game in FCE Ultra GX 2.09 on the Wii. I haven't been able to reproduce the bug either though. I don't really know what was going on there the first time.

Hmm, cosmic rays? Well, unless anyone can reproduce the bug, I'm gonna ignore it. I can't debug it otherwise.

Hi, i tried this on the power pak and it worked fine, but when i put it on a cart i got scrambled graphics.  any idea why?  btw, the chr file was expanded to 64 kb, but this usually doesnt affect the graphics.

Thanks a bunch for testing it. It appears to be a bug in my mapper code. During my experients (since put on hold) with adding new enemies, I expaned the CHR rom to four (4K) banks, the first three where the sprites and the last one was the objects. So my mapper initalization routine loaded banks 0 and 3. When I backed out the new enemies changes, I forgot to change this, so it's still trying to load bank 3, even though there are only banks 0 and 1 now. Apparently, emulators don't care and simply load the last bank when given too high a bank number or something.

Apply this patch to the already patched ROM and let me know if it fixes it. If it does, I'll make a new release. Thanks again.

[Disch]

So my mapper initalization routine loaded banks 0 and 3. When I backed out the new enemies changes, I forgot to change this, so it's still trying to load bank 3, even though there are only banks 0 and 1 now. Apparently, emulators don't care and simply load the last bank when given too high a bank number or something.

Typically they'll mask the selected bank with (number_of_banks-1) since that represents the number of "valid" bits.  This is the behavior seen on hardware too, provided you have the right chip size.

I'm wagering the problem was caused by his chip being too big, and him not mirroring the CHR data like he probably should've.  If you put 8K of CHR on a 16K chip, the second 8K will be garbage... but if you put 8K of CHR on an 8K chip, the 'virtual' 2nd 8K will be a mirror of the first 8K.

[coinheaven]

update, i applied the patch and tried it again, still the same result:

[frantik]

the graphics look fine, it's the way the level header info is interpreted that looks messed up to me.  i modified the header and got the same results.. though mario is at the top of the screen on your copy

[Karatorian]

Frantik, what change to the header did you make to get that result? Just out of curiosity. When I fixed the bug with the mapper, I made sure to review my header and everything looks right to me. I'm just wondering what sort of error choinheaven is running into. AFAIK, he's the only one testing on actuall hardware, so it'd be nice to help him straighten this out.

[frantik]

i edited the world 1 level header, not the NES header.  i can send you the rom if you want, but i dont think thats what you mean

it could be any number of reasons why it's loading like that though probably :\ it seems like SMB is tolerant towards stuff being slightly modified and the game still working, just certain things look messed up

coinheaven are you able to play the game?