I haven't played with he PC88 emulators in a while. I was wondering if those are in SMBS and being you are gong for as close to a 1:1 port as possible I was wondering if you where intentionally leaving clouds and other background objects with missing titles. If there are cases in SMBS with missing tiles I was suggesting that they might be caused by a bad dump or a corrupted disc. I know other stuff was corrupted and recently fixed. In this case you probably should not duplicate them so closely. It's not an issue that should be worried about right now though. I was just curios is all.

Now to go play with the new patch.

[edit]

Oh I forgot. When you do these patches with warp zones that skip ahead in levels like the world 5 and 6 patch if it's not to much trouble could you add power ups before the warp pipe. It makes testing the map harder if you have to go into an advanced world as small Mario.

I found the 6 1-ups if thats what you are referring to.

just play tested it and everything seems to be working fine except upside down pipe #2.. let me double check the code

edit:  i see whats up.. my optimized code will still work but it's slightly different from what i've got in the worlds 5-6 patch.  I will modify my world 5+ to have the right code so the pipes will be the right length

the room in 4-3 is a trap

upside down pipe issue already mentioned by myself

need to fix 6-3


edit:

updated 5 & 6.  fixed upside down pipes and 6-3's jump

Download 5 & 6

also Karatorian can you change this line in the code:


to


or set all the halfway page nibbles to zero...

Ever play super mario bros 2? That game is piss hard too, even in the super mario all stars version. Imagine how much worst it is in the original version that didn't have game saves. Also note that the timer moves faster in the msx so the wait isn't as bad as it is in this hack.

I do not see how the difficulty level of SMB2j has anything to do with this. SMB2j was designed to be hard but it was also designed to be fair and fun. In that game a player can screw him/her self and have to warp backwards instead of forwards but he/she can not get stuck in a room with nothing to do but let time run out. There is simply no justifiable excuse for trapping the player in a room regardless of how much faster the clock on the PC88 ran. At no point whatsoever in a Mario game should the player be put in a position where the only option is death. Thats something SEGA might do but not Nintendo Cheap does not equal hard.

Hudson simply did some stuff they should not have done. Some of the things they have done where fine on the PC88 but become issues on the NES. Others are just bad no matter what. We are only talking about at most 2% of the game though. The rest is really solid and well designed. All of the games issues are pretty minor and easily correctable without altering the intended design of the level in any serious way.

The invisible block issues I noted in the screen shots (flag pole and passable solid wall) I posted for example are super easy to correct without harming the level design. Just move those blocks one square left. A handful of places exist where the player can get stuck due to poor platform placement but this can be corrected. If you place a background layer title next to an enterable horizontal pipe Mario will get behind that object when entering the pipe. This is easily fixed. The player should also be able to reach 5000 points on all flag poles. A player can VERY easily become stuck in those openings designed only to let small Mario pass but this can not be blamed on Hudson

Anyway I wasn't going to bring up these minor technical issues and only concentrate on severe level bugs but that trap room really annoyed me.

The trap room in 4-3 had a blue background, iirc.  Minor, but I figured I'd point it out.  There's pics of it in that DP thread where I first mentioned it.

-Rob

Since this project started, I've been saving all the patches released, even the buggy ones. Not for any particular reason, perhaps for posterity, perhaps just because I'm a strange cookie. However, frantik fixed the world 6 patch so quickly that I didn't manage to get a copy of the bad one. Does anyone have it?

Going through the wall in some cases in a know glitch in the SMB engine. If SMBS's leve design happens to make it easier to pull off in some places, well so be it. As for traps and such, I've been in favor of an accurate port. Part of what sparked the sudden internet popularity of SMBS was it's reputation as feindishly difficult. If that includes some cheap tactics, I'm fine with it.

While I'm not sure of frantik's position on the matter, I firmly belive that ROM hackers have no basis on which to tell others not to hack thier hacks. Therefore, I'd have no objections to others using my work to create a version more to thier liking, as long as proper credit was given and an effort was made not to generate confusion between the two hacks.

The next task I'm going to be workin' on is cleaning up the Red Piranha Plant code. It jumps around quite a bit to get it to fit in the original ROM. Since I don't need to worry about maintaing the exact size of various functions, etc. I can proably condense it somewhat. It will also be an opportunity to look into how a new enemy can be added to SMB, which will be helpful with future hacks. Once I'm done with that, I'll look into implimenting some new stuff, yay!