| smbhax [sys=NES; cat=Platformer; reg=UC] |
| | | | Wanted a "(World)" cart of SMB1 so I could try out some of the 604 romhacks on romhacking.net--as well as play the base game. As far as I can tell, there was never a ROM revision of the game put out on the NES--just revised carts, for instance going from the original 5-screw case to the later 3-screw case. 5-screw is "said" to be the "rare" version that should go for more on eBay, but I seemed to see way more of them there than the 3-screw ones. Anyway, I just got a beat-up 3-screw for $15. |
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Remembered more than I thought I would after 40 years (okay there was the GBC "Deluxe" version in 2004 too =P)!
604 SMB1 romhacks on romhacking.net should keep me busy for a bit ^ D^
I might have said at some point in my horrible ramblings here that the Japanese Super Mario Bros. "Lost Levels" was a Famicom game--actually it was for the Famicom Disk System! Also I forgot Lost Levels isn't available from the start in Super Mario Bros. Deluxe (GBC)--you have to unlock it somehow first. |
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| | | Randomizer: https://github.com/Coolcord/Level-Headed
Found in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UymksEaX_8E (Kosmic) |
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Starting from where I left off, 3-3, trying to do a more or less legit playthrough, failing that several times, and quickly giving up and embracing save state scumming to whiz through SMB1, in the emulator Mesen in Windows!
2:30 - 3-4 Bowser is a Buzzy Beetle
4:08 - 4-1 got under that coin block
6:59 - 5-1 man I love this palette
14:44 - trying again...
33:11 - okay let's just save state ^D^
49:05 - 3-1 inf lives trick
1:02:00 - 5-4 Bowser is Lakitu
1:08:28 - 6-4 Bowser is Bloober
1:28:24 - bit of Hard Mode
1:38:18 - Stage Select
1:38:31 - Continue
1:40:16 - wrap!
Kept losing all my lives falling down holes in World 6. ; D Sooo thank goodness for save states. ^ )^
Forgot you have to keep pressing Jump for the 1Ups. ^ _^
Continue: Hold A while pressing start to start game and you'll continue at stage 1 of the world in which your last game ended
Level Select: Clear the game, then press the B button on the title screen to cycle the starting world number at the top of the screen
Hard Mode: When you start a new game after having cleared the game, Koopa Troopas are replaced--oh, I was wrong, I guess it's Goombas that are replaced by Buzzy Beetles (the black-domed fireproof enemies) "and the levels are more difficult" (GameFAQs)--well, it also sure seemed like the enemies were all moving faster, too (oh yeah, enemies ARE faster https://themushroomkingdom.net/smb_breakdown.shtml ).
I kind of wanted to make a highlights reel of all the cool jump sequences I lucked into here--but it would have been, like, a lot! ; D The game's physics are just so smooth and cool that cool stuff happens ALL THE TIME in this game. ^ D^ Especially when you embrace save scummery and just go full tilt. ; ) I know I said I want to beat the game straight some day and I sorta do but I also REALLY like save state scummery so um yeah well maybe once I can do the game backwards and forwards in my sleep then I'll just do a straight playthrough in this fictitious fantastic future where I've actually gotten good at a game. ; D Meanwhile, let the silly hacks rrrollllllll~~~
Oh wait fireworks is just if you touch the flagpole with 1, 3, or 6 on the last digit of the timer--you get that number of fireworks? Each of which is worth some points. And yes points are pretty much just for numbers, no 1UP or anything. (GameFAQs) Silly! ; D
(Hm so apparently it is possible to jump over the flagpole, and the level just scrolls infinitely. ; D https://themushroomkingdom.net/codes/smb . And it says "Killing Bowser in 3-4 with fireballs reveals that he was really a Buzzy Beetle"--so when I killed 5-4 Bowser w/ fireballs and he died as Lakitu (the cloud-rider), that means that was actually Lakitu in disguise? And as Bloober in 6-4? 'p')
My frame rate does feel pretty weird in those couple of later stages where you're whizzing along with flying fish and so forth. I've got Mesen set to full integer frame rates (60 fps instead of 60.1 fps, is what it says in the menu) and Vsync off, so probably those types of settings have something to do with it. Guess I won't worry about it, just embrace the weird joys of emulation. ; D |
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0:00 - settings
8:14 - playing random color palettes
16:27 - Sonic Mario, silhouette graphics
19:08 - Sonic w/ lazy fireballs
40:02 - Hammer Suit
59:51 - mushroom devolves me 'p'
1:08:26 - enemy swaps
1:20:33 - Mesen FPS settings to fix juddering
1:32:42 - vanilla SMB1
1:41:40 - advanced difficulty settings, Purist
1:51:17 - cheat to world 8
1:59:55 - Hard mode
2:03:37 - extreme palette settings
Get Level-Headed: https://github.com/Coolcord/Level-Headed
I found out about it from this video by ace SMB1 player @Kosmic : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UymksEaX_8E
The art selection/randomization is fun but a lot of the tile sets seem to have swiped designs from other games or IPs, so I'm not gonna mess with that--except Sonic maybe, since Sega have said they're cool with fan games.
Prior to recording, I didn't seem to hear any added music I liked, although I was mostly running it with tone randomization which probably wouldn't have helped. ; D But also I'm not sure how much of it might be swiped tunes.
(I THINK maybe a lot of the graphics and music come from other romhacks.)
The sound FX randomization is fun for a minute, then usually sounds like nails on chalkboards. ; D
The stage generation/randomization is fun for a minute, then you realize it's quite bland and repetitive, ah well.
But the color palette randomization is HOT AS HECK. This is gonna be how I play regular SMB1 now, 'cause why would you play it in the vanilla old colors when it can be NUCLEAR COLORS. = DDDD (Found I like it most at the highest settings, Excessive / Extreme / No Limits; +Extreme might be the sweet spot but those other two can make great palettes too.)
In theory if you generate a ROM with randomized colors you like, you could load it into just about any SMB1 editor, note/copy the colors, and edit them into other SMB1 ROMs you might want to glow up.
Took me a while to figure out how to get Level-Headed to generate these cool colors in a ROM with standard SMB1 gameplay--trickiest bit was finding I had to set "Difficulty - Level Difficulty" to "Purist," otherwise it was inserting funky settings like having you revert to Super Mario if you took a hit as Fire Mario, which was confusing me for quite some time. With non-"Purist" settings, you can dig into weird monster settings and all kinds of stuff--basically combining tons of Game Genie codes or whatever into a hardcoded ROM.
It's also kind of fun to play the regular stages with "redistributed" powerups and enemies, and setting funky powerups to replace the standard Fire Flower--although the only one of those I've really liked so far as been the Hammer Bros. hammers, which are great fun and actually feel like they fit the game (oh right Nintendo used that in SMB3, didn't they? ^ D^).
It only just occurred to me that SMB1 is about 1/3rd dungeon crawler. ^-^
Disabling "integer FPS mode" and enabling vsync in Mesen's "Video - General" panel fixed the irregular framerate I was feeling when racing along in "bridge" stages.
Oops nope the squids are "Bloopers," not "Bloobers" like I'd somehow read it. ; D |
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Normally you play through 8 worlds in Super Mario Bros., but with a little light romhacking you can access 248 glitch worlds.
1:31 - S.M.B. Remodeler
4:41 - 9-1 magenta underwater world
10:27 - B-1 goomba princess!
17:42 - G-1 warp to Minus World
35:51 - I- worlds just keep going!
39:00 - K-1 koopa princess!
51:23 - T-1 hard clouds
52:49 - W-1 stuck in blue-green ceiling
1:00:29 - X-1 Princess Peach?
1:02:50 - "Minus World" after World Z
1:05:59 - "Blue Block"-1 warp to regular 5-1
1:09:25 - "Minus Minus" World
1:10:02 - x-1 bonus aquarium ^-^
1:22:18 - Bowser in daylight underwater mushrooms!
1:23:42 - pipe brick room
1:26:26 - daylight underwater world
1:27:34 - invisible death hit in night swimming trees
1:29:57 - daylight dungeon
1:38:46 - offset dungeon
1:57:17 - "Propeller"-1 orange pipes & bricks
1:59:19 - levitating turtle
2:09:09 - forced scroll blue world
2:03:21 - daylight dungeon maze
I found out about the glitch worlds from this video by ace SMB1 player @Kosmicd12 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6qRbk5Cscw
I used an SMB1 romhack utility to open up access to the glitch worlds:
S.M.B. Remodeler: https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1319/
In The S.M.B. Remodeler utility, I loaded my dumped SMB1 rom, clicked "General 1," and under the "Stages" tab, set "Max Stage Select World - World" to 256, checked the "Stage Select Setting - Enable Stage Select at Start" checkbox; then I saved out the rom--a copy, not my original dumped file, of course!
Running that ROM, pressing button A--not the usual button B for the standard World Select you get after beating the game!--cycles the World number at the top of the title screen, and pressing Run will start that world; the numbers go from 1 (or actually, 0, but you have to loop them for that to come up) through 9, then A through Z, then some symbols and mostly tiles from the ROM. 'p'
(There's a romhack that starts the game with a world select menu that shows the worlds in regular numbers, but it doesn't work with my dump of the game; Kosmic demonstrates it in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyQjQ8DiBDI and it can be downloaded from author Threecreepio's github page here: https://github.com/threecreepio/smb-glitchedworlds )
I ran them in the emulator Mesen in Windows, and was using the infinite lives and infinite time cheats from Mesen's built-in cheat library. I didn't use other cheats like walking through walls or whatever, so I didn't completely explore the few glitch worlds that aren't fully accessible by normal movement.
The vast majority of the glitch worlds are just standard SMB1 worlds--or sometimes, underwater variants of them--but the pipes restart the stage instead of going to a bonus area. Some of them have missing--or extra--enemies. In most of the stages, if you can get to the end, it will either loop back to the start again, or return to the title screen; some of the glitch worlds do have more than one level, but sometimes these repeat--World "I" in particular seems to keep going and going with repeating levels; I quit at level 7 but in theory it could go to level 256? (World "L" seemed similar, I quit at 3 there.)
The usual warp zones in these glitched versions of the worlds mostly still work--and will warp you to a STANDARD, non-glitch stage, so from that point you're just playing the regular game, as far as I can tell.
EXCEPT, the right-hand pipe in G-1's warp zone took me to minus world ("[blank]-1")!
This @RGMechEx video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ysdUajrhL8 summarizes the 6 actually unique, highly dysfunctional glitch worlds, and explains how the glitch worlds are generated.
This @Skelux video neatly summarizes the playable glitch worlds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riaf2vwMzMo |
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"Quest for the Missing Hat," the oldest Super Mario Bros. romhack on romhacking dot net of the 600-plus SMB1 romhacks there; QftMH dates in their system from "12 June 1997":
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/7/
The stages are the regular SMB1 levels, but the graphic and text changes switch the story around rather ingeniously, and I found I just had to play all the way through to see how it ended. And loved the ending. ^ D^
(Note to self: no you can't use patched ROMs in the Level-Headed color randomizer utility. : P) |
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| | | | ^ Oh huh judging by that URL, Quest for the Missing Hat may have been just the 7th hack ever on romhacking dot net! ... Or maybe the 2nd? (2-6 don't exist.) ... Hm well on their search form, it's the 6th-oldest--but it looks like a date reading there can get updated, 'cause for instance the "1" hack by URL is currently dated 2003--or maybe the URL numbers don't really mean much, I dunno. |
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Playing through the classic graphics version of "Luigi and the New Quest," a 1999 romhack for Super Mario Bros. (NES):
0:16 - 1-1
3:17 - thin brown vines
21:40 - hey mr. trampoline man
44:35 - stuck in 4-3?
53:34 - onward (played back from 4-1)
1:23:20 - 8-1 marathon stage
1:35:51 - bit of hard mode (2nd loop)
1:38:49 - wrap!
All new stages for SMB1! A _bit_ on the masochistically difficult side and I quickly reverted to scumming save states--and even so I got stuck at a spot in 4-3 (had to continue back at 4-1 and make sure I stuck to the upper route) where it seemed like there was no way out of the lower route; even dying would just move back slightly--and spawn in midair over a huge pit! You could escape that by jumping at just the right time, somehow, but then you were just back in the lower area with no apparent way out.
Looking back, it's quite possible there was an invisible block there that I was missing...because I soon started ramming my head into invisible blocks set to knock you down into pits as you tried to jump over them. ; DD ;_;
There are definitely a few dead-ends you can run into and have no way out. : P And 8-1 seems to be a marathon-length stage designed to run out the clock on you!
The thin brown vines the hack introduces have horribly touchy, sorta Donkey Kong Jr.-style mechanics/controls (and horrible sounds, too ; D), and the stages also make all-too-frequent use of the springboards, whose way-too-fiddly jump trigger control I never liked in SMB1. ; PPP Well, this did force me to get a little better at those, at any rate--but I dunno if I liked it! ; D
Anyway I did force my way all the way through eventually--thanks to about a billion save states ; D--and it IS nice to have so many new levels, even if some of them are a bit anxiety inducing! = oo
And there are bouncing versions of the usual enemies! And the shells of the bouncing koopas keep bouncing after they're knocked over, handily preventing the ol' SMB1 shell-hopping 1UP exploit. ; D
There's a version of the hack that has altered graphics, with like a Luigi sprite that looks ripped from SMW or something. |
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| | | | ^ https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/2020/ |
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