Whoa, wait, flying and clock power ups?  I knew about the hammer and the bee, but where did these come from?!  Wow. 

When this is finished, it would also be great to have a list of what could and could not be implemented from the original (NES limitations and such).

-Rob

The wings power-up is in level 4-1.

I was able to fix the graphical glitches introduced by my reworked Red Piranha Plant code pretty easily. However, while testing that, I noticed two other things about the Red Piranha Plants that needed fixing. Firstly, I renabled the code that I thought would make the Red Plants stay in their pipes when Mario is nearby, but it was working totally backwards. Rather than not come out, they'd not go in instead. This was as a result of the fact that they where moving in the opposite cycle as the Green Plants.

This also lead to the other issue I noticed. The plants where not syncronized properly. When a Green Plant and a Red Plant are near each other, they ought to move out of the pipe and and go back in at the same time. (Provided, of course, their cycle hasn't been disrupted by "hiding".) Instead one moves out while the other moves in.

To fix all of this, I've basically rewritten the Piranha Plant intialization code. Based on code from the original game, frantik's rewritten Green Piranha Plant code, and the Red Piranha Plant code from an unknown Japanese hacker, I've created a cleaned up implimentation of both plants types. However, I had to go to sleep last night before it was completely finished.

I should have the modifications complete sometime tonight. Once I get that done, I'll release a new expansion patch that incorportates the new plant code, worlds 1-7, and the bug fixes in levels in 1-4.

Once I'm done with that, I plan to look at fixing the graphics on the bottoms of the inverted pipes. While the fact that they're upside down is easy to ignore while playing the game, they stick out like a sore thumb in a sreenshot. Additionally, all this Piranha Plant hacking has given me a pretty good idea how to impliment new enemies in the SMB engine, so I'll look into that as well.

It's too late to hold off, I finished the latest patch before reading your message. You can get the patch at the usual place. While I have extensively tested the new Piranha Plant code, there may still be issues, so please report any bugs that still remain. Thanks once again for all the feedback so far.

With the addition of world seven, space has gotten very tight in banks zero and three. I was only able to get it all in due to the reduced size of my refactored Red Piranha Plant code. In order to fit in world 8, I'll have to relocate more of the ROM to another bank. I've yet to investiage options for such relocation. Hopefully I'll be able to find some code that can be reloacted as easily as the sound engine was.

In light of this, my focus will instead be investigating how the ROM can be further rearranged. Only once I've found a solution to this will I have time (or space) to impliment additional gameplay related hacks.

Anybody else down with the world 8? I know I am!

Found another flaw: at the bonus room in World 6-3, when you leave it you come right back to it.

~Ben

Well, the changes you've made have definetly optomized things pretty well. The size of worlds 1 - 7 went from 8025k to 7500k. However, with world 8, it goes to 8319k, so it won't fit. I'm about to look into relocation options now. I'll let you know what I find out soon.

Thought about relocating to WRAM ($6000-$7FFF) by copying to it at init, simulating it like a hardwired bank?
Out of interest, could you give a technical summary what's been done?