Ersanio's Blog of Wonders and Other Miracles!

[SMW] [Sprite] SMB1 Flagpole v1.1

2012-01-03T18:05:00.002+01:00

This is a minor update of my flagpole sprite. This version can support secret exits as well (through the extra bit).

Download

Fanfiction

2011-12-20T22:57:00.005+01:00

So after I saw this thread and noticing that almost all posts contained an image as the posts' content, I decided to do things a little different and write a fanfiction about some flame instead. In this case, I decided to use the Hopping Flame from SMW, and Mario of course. After an half hour of writing, the result was rather interesting.

It is Christmas Eve. Everything is covered in a blanket of snow. Mario found it a fine day to take a stroll through the snow. However, Bowser's minions are still wandering around, one of them being Hopping Flame.

Hopping Flame is a proud hopping flame. In fact, he is the mightiest among his brothers. Every day he would hop around mindlessly, and whenever he saw Mario, his flames would burn brighter and stronger, leaving behind smaller, hazardous flames. No hopping flame could match his might, and nothing is able to extinguish him. However, nobody knew that Hopping Flame secretly wanted to be friends with Mario.

Hopping Flame saw Mario walking around. He prepared to approach Mario as he headed his way. He knew that it was finally the moment to talk to Mario. However, Hopping Flame didn't know what to do besides jumping towards Mario and leaving behind more flames. He started jumping towards Mario with a big smile on his face, while leaving behind smaller smiling flames. The area shortly became a spreading sea of smiling, seemingly inextinguishable flames. All the snow around the area started to melt. Mario noticed the rather intimidating scenery instantly.

"What... what are you doing to the beautiful snow?!" Mario said. He hit a [?] box above his head. A cape feather appeared. He devoured the feather in a blink of an eye, just like a muncher devouring Mario. Smoke started to surround Mario. Once the smoke cleared up, Mario re-appeared with a cape on his back. "I have to extinguish your flames!" he said.

Hopping Flame mindlessly jumped towards Mario, as he thought he wouldn't get another chance to ever meet Mario again. As he approached Mario, his fiery body became bigger and his flames lit more fierce. He eventually came face to face with Mario.

In one swift spin, Mario sent a sharp shockwave with his cape, and cut Hopping Flame through the middle effortlessly. The shockwave continued, cutting through the leftover flames and the trees ahead. A thundering roar could be heard seconds later, and the ground shook like it was the end of the world.

With a sad look on his face, Hopping Flame barely uttered "I just wanted to be friends...", he then expired on the ground and disappeared completely.

Hopping Flame was never seen again.

The end.

Also, years ago (like around when I joined SMWCentral), I found a thread where the main topic was a fanfic generator. It's this generator. Too bad it has limit presets, but the output is always interesting. Today I messed around with it, and I got some hilarious results when I put me as the protagonist, and S.N.N. as my love interest, for example:

"On the eighth night, S.N.N. climbed into bed with Ersanio. He burrowed under the covers and passionately slapped Ersanio's buttocks. It made Ersanio giggle and he cuddled close to S.N.N., stroking his penis and singing seductively to him."

Where SNN is actually a muncher in this case but still. I couldn't stop laughing for a few minutes straight.

This fanfiction stuff kind of got me interested in writing more fanfics. I just hope I won't get lazy. :D

Also, yes. The blog is semi-dead. Nothing interesting has been happening recently.

[SMW] [Sprite] SMB3 Statue Laser

2011-11-06T12:41:00.004+01:00

This sprite is the one from SMB3's final castle - those Bowser statues which shoots the laser. I've made this for lightvayne, because he requested it for his SMWCP2 level. Seeing I wanted to make this sprite for a long time now, I thought this was a chance I shouldn't miss.

What would've happened if I missed the chance? I would've been too lazy forever to even begin on the sprite to begin with! Hurrah for Supamariowarudosentorarupurodakushon-ni motivating me.

By the way, the laser does NOT work with other cluster sprites present in the same level. For example, the ghost ceiling + laser does not go well together.

You can find the download here.

College so far - Part 3

2011-11-03T19:25:00.003+01:00

So after the summer holidays, we started on some big project which would last 8 to 9 weeks. I think this will be a huge wall of text as usual, and I'm really lazy at the moment so this time I'm keeping it as short as possible.

The project was more-or-less a 'simulation' about how programmers would function in a company, and it involved things like customers, project managers, and all. I was in a 5-man group and it started off very slowly; I think we barely knew each other anyway.

Anyway we had to build this gigantic site which was set up in such a way that it was impossible to finish within 8 weeks with our current skills, so we were tested on how we would deal with this situation. We also had to build a database behind it, along with a 'database management application'; basically a GUI Interface ~~to track someone's IP address~~ to manage the database more easily. Of course, this was in MS Access. "Fuuuuuuuuuuck" was my thought. "This project is going to be a tough one".

Anyway, so we had to write some boring document first. It was supposed to be done in the 1st week but it was eventually done 3 weeks later. Oh well, seeing we were a group a bunch of people worked on the document, and the rest worked on what needed to be done.

After what it felt like decades, we finally started working on the site itself. I was the only decent programmer in the group, so guess who did the most work. Anyway, in the end the instructors were impressed and that's all what matters.

Luckily I was the PHP guy and not the MS Access guy. I would've shot myself if I forcefully ever had to touch MS Access and VB once again.

Eventually, the site's source code became an unreadable mess. But hey, it worked!

With this project I've also learned how to (properly) hold a meeting. First meeting was horrible because I was assigned to be a chairman on-the-spot and I literally had no idea what to do. It was a very very awkward moment.

Our group was having lots of trouble though, for example we made a bad overview of the situation, planned things badly, didn't report things to the project manager in time, forgot essential emails, etc, etc.

Aaaaaaaand on the seventh week, I realized I have underestimated the final document I had to write. I ended up with... I dunno, 30 pages? I forgot, but it was a shitload. I was proud of my work though. My family purchased a printer during this time, because my sis had to write a document as well, and we thought having a printer always available was a good thing.

Finally, during the assessment I've been told that I underwent a gigantic growth and learned a lot of things, so I got an 8 out of 10 for this project. Awesomesauce.

MEANWHILE I asked my personal mentor a question about one of the classes I failed (Product Quality, it never went well) through email. He invited me to discuss this matter, and as I walked into his room he mentioned that my Dutch grammar isn't smooth and great. Nice welcome! I decided to take a Dutch course on writing, because if I try to survive writing reports with this grammar in college, I'll have a problem. Apparently they refuse to read documents once 3 errors occur within a page. I could abuse a loophole and put 2 words per page, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea. Anyway, about product quality, I'll start re-doing it from next week on. So not looking forward to it. But hey, shogafuckinai! Since 2011! No softies!

Finally, I got to know my class a whole lot more now. I respect those who respect me, and I'm neutral towards the rest. When I told them that my assessment went well, they became glad, which in turn made me glad as well. They actually cared, heh.

Now I will have the next classes: Create a game + "ICT-Infrastructuur". Looking forward to the latter the most, because I don't want to imagine me creating a full-fledged game within eight weeks. Oh, and Product Quality.

100% RAM map!

2011-11-01T18:43:00.004+01:00

That's right. The RAM map is finally 100% complete! Many thanks goes to Roy, p4plus2, Alcaro, and other people who have contributed to the RAM map ever since its... very existence. I consider this a great breakthrough in SMW hacking :D

Now there's the ROM map. I'm pretty sure that it will never be 100% complete because documenting every single byte would be a pain. Once the ROM map is quite large as well, it'd make life easier for the non-ASM people who want to modify SMW's engine anyway.

One thing which worries me about RAM addresses is multipurpose RAM addresses though. Oh well, we'll find these as time passes by.

Now, I'm looking forward to an SRAM map, VRAM map, ARAM map (and OAM map too I guess).

[SMW] [Sprite] SMB2 Starman

2011-10-14T15:56:00.002+02:00

This starman is from SMB2 - It appears from the bottom of the screen and slowly ascends after collecting five cherries. Included is the cherry custom block for BTSD.

Here's a demonstration:

Download

What I consider special about this sprite is that it moves up and zig-zags exactly like in SMB2.

Surprisingly enough, it took me less than 3 hours to completely create this.

Twitter

2011-10-09T23:46:00.005+02:00

I have replaced the "Most popular blog entry" with a Twitter plugin, because the former never really updated, and if it did, it would point to boring pages.

Yeah, this means that I have Twitter. Feel free to stalk me, and with that, I mean follow. Keep in mind that I'm not one of those guys who post every single detail happening within their day.

The next area is Princess Toadstool

2011-09-26T12:16:00.004+02:00

Oh boredom.

What this PHP script does is randomly generate a castle beaten message. This means that the generated message will never make sense! :D

Link

[SMW] [Sprite] Thermal Key

2011-09-22T22:26:00.003+02:00

This key can actually change its own temperature, enabling (and restricting) access to temperature-sensitive doors. There are 3 states of the key: normal, frozen, and blazing. Included are the 3 temperature-sensitive doors (BTSD blocks). Here's a demonstration:

This sprite is inspired by a part of Metal Gear Solid, where you had to use this kind of key to 'stop' the Metal Gear.

Even though I quit SMW hacking, I just couldn't rest until I made this thing :D And now I'm slowly wanting to make more sprites...

Download.

[SMW] [Patch] Sparkling P-Switches

2011-09-07T10:58:00.003+02:00

This patch gives the P-Switches a sparkling effect, much like the Goal Point Question Sphere has. You can edit how often the sparkles appear in the ASM file.

There really isn't anything else to say about this.

Download

24hosmw

2011-09-06T19:50:00.006+02:00

I'm kind of late posting this but oh well, it's better than never (or ridiculously late).

24hosmw - 24 hours of Super Mario World. This contest idea was brought up by Kieran after seeing a similar contest (NOT Ludum Dare). You have to make an entry within 24 hours. Seems pretty short, but seeing it's only one level (or rather, sublevel) it's actually plenty of time.

The theme of this contest was like... "Imagine a 9th door in Bowser's Castle. What would it be like?". The most important thing in this contest was planning the entry. If you spent too much time for ASM, you'd have little time for the level. If you spent too much time on the level, you'd have little time for ASM, etc.

I actually participated in it with my entry named "9Munchers" (inspired by the 9 of Room 9, and the MMORPG called "9Dragons" together).

Apparently we needed to stick to the SMW feel. That... wasn't really obvious to me. Maybe I should read harder next time (I think I missed that SMW feel statement) because I kind of went overboard with my entry. All I had in my mind was things like "Room 9's gonna be awesome and unique!".

I ranked 46/86. x_x

The thing is, I'm still proud of my entry. It might be another generic Muncher Run level, but I decided to make my entry a little bit unique compared to my previous levels.

It involves running over munchers with a starman (again), but at the end you have to beat 9 munchers (actually 2 pokeys, 3 bouncing footballs). Once you beat them, you will have access to a silver P-switch. Using the P-switch, you will run back to the beginning of the level (and a few more silver P-switches fall from sky you have to press). If you ran all the way back, you'd see a blue P-switch. Press it. If you didn't touch the 9 at the beginning of the level, you're in for a surprise.

There really wasn't any ASM involved except for the 'fiery dust' effect those bouncing munchers left, along with the sparkling of the P-switches (like the goal sphere).

I wonder what the score of my level would be if the "SMW feel" thing wasn't involved.

Anyway, you can download my contest entry here.

I'd love to see this kind of contest again. Even though I quit SMW hacking, I still had fun designing my entry.

By the way, I shall release the patch for the P-Switch sparkle here, once it gets moderated at SMWCentral.

Holidays are over!

2011-08-30T08:57:00.003+02:00

My summer holidays are over and now I'm back to college.

We're going to start working on some site. Unfortunately, the main focus of this project is teamwork and not the site itself. Then again, it's not that unfortunate because I've never been good in teamwork to begin with, and this is a good chance to learn everything about it. It's like we're pretending to be a company who builds large websites and all. We still have to come up with a company name.

So, do you have school today?

Starfox 64 pixelfont

2011-08-21T19:34:00.002+02:00

I've ripped the pixelfont quite a while ago, but I was too lazy to release it (until now). Read the readme before doing stuff, though.

Download.

I'm still on Einstein's side

2011-08-21T19:06:00.005+02:00

Remember this? Now it is updated!

Kieran told me to make this thing use Starfox 64's real font and all, so I decided to rip them from the Starfox 64 ROM. I used texture dumping for that. Meanwhile I came across this Starfox 64 hacking thread. Pretty interesting actually, I suggest you to check it out.

Andross' quotes automatically have a red textbox. The textbox is also slightly transparent in general (but the text isn't).

Like the previous version, this version also supports custom quotes. However, it is far more customizable and user-friendly now. It also has a couple of new parameters. Here's a list:

name: The name of the character
text: The quote itself. Line breaks automatically happen, unlike the previous version
image: URL to the mugshot image. Can't be over 300kB and it automatically resizes to 44x44. If nothing is supplied, or the image is broken/invalid/takes too long to download/etc, a purple-ish static image will appear
color1: Color #1 of the textbox gradient
color2: Color #2 of the textbox gradient
fontcol: Font color of the normal, quote font
boldcol: Font color of the bold, name font

Here's an example usage:

I'll release the pixelfont used for this later.

Headered and unheadered ROMs

2011-08-18T15:41:00.004+02:00

Headered and unheadered ROMs, you can pretty much ignore them when emulating them (unless you use bsnes, then you'll have to purify it first). Emulation of them isn't a problem at all, really.

Ever since bsnes stopped supporting headered ROMs, some ASM hackers have become more... let's say... "header-aware". ROMs aren't supposed to have headers. These headers are like, copier headers. Useless. Waste of 512 bytes pretty much. My "dirty" (I think) SMRPG ROM has a copier header too, and it has useless text in it: "SUPER MARIO RPG ;NSRT" or something like that. Might as well change the file name to "SUPER MARIO RPG.smc" (or rather, sfc) instead of putting it in the header. Anyway, as I said before, emulating headered ROMs isn't really a problem, however, hacking them is. Let us take a look at Super Mario World hacking.

Super Mario World has a level editor called Lunar Magic. It supports headered and unheadered ROMs. However, it supports unheadered ROMs by adding a header to it, in the end making it a headered ROM.

Why would you force ROMs to be headered in the first place in such a famous tool?

Now, bsnes, a very accurate SNES emulator, doesn't support headered ROMs anymore. When we want to playtest our hacks in bsnes, we'd have to snespurify our ROMs each time.

How difficult is it to make Lunar Magic support unheadered ROMs?

Not to mention that all of our patches and most of our tools are also headered-only. If we ever wanted to change everything to non-headered, our only obstacle would be probably Lunar Magic itself, because it's famous and the tool which is used the most, pretty much. If one edits a ROM with Lunar Magic, then applies an xkas patch without the line HEADER, the ROM will probably break.

Byuu kind of got rid of this problem. He made this tool named Header Magic. Header Magic enables Lunar Magic to open and edit and save unheadered ROMs. He did a great job at that, that's for sure. However, I'm not sure if new people will be able to easily figure out what's going on with Lunar Magic and Header Magic, headers, and whatnot. Keeping everything idiot-proof can be difficult.

Once Lunar Magic natively supports headerless ROMs (not using external tools such as Header Magic), then it's the time to switch to patches, tools, etc. which don't add/require headers. Everything would become idiot-proof and we wouldn't have any problem with headers. Then it'll become much easier to actually playtest our hacks on bsnes more easily. Of course, if most of the SMWC staff approves of this idea.

Switching to a non-headered hacking standard sounds pretty easy. Just remove the line "HEADER" from ASM patches, and bug tool authors to add a non-headered ROM support, and there we go. We'd also probably have to rip out the "header-patch" of the existing hacks' IPS patches.

And then there are people who'd still prefer using and submitting ROMs which are headered, and an outdated version of Lunar Magic. Eh.

On a side note, it's also annoying to code a tool which supports both headered and headerless ROMs in my opinion, so I'll probably make my SMAS hacking tools support headerless ROMs only.

Also, blog post 100. :D

Hey Einstein, I'm on your side!

2011-07-30T11:22:00.005+02:00

I was bored, and boredom can lead to great results:

Furthermore, there's also a custom quote feature (although it doesn't support a custom mugshot image):

Starfox 64 quotes are so much win, that I just HAD to create this little PHP script.

I'll probably stick this thing somewhere on the blog later.

[SMW] [Sprite] Torpedo Ted (Above)

2011-07-23T14:43:00.004+02:00

This custom launcher launches Torpedo teds from above the "deathskull-block" instead of below. Included in this zip are:
TorpedoTed.asm/cfg (sprite)
upwards_launcher.asm/cfg (shooter)

Modify the upwards_launcher.asm's "CUST_SPRITE_TO_GEN" definition to the sprite number of TorpedoTed.asm. You don't have to touch TorpedoTed.asm/cfg. After this, insert them both. Insert the launcher in the level, NOT the torpedo ted itself.

The TorpedoTed ASM is kind of special (and horribly sloppy coded). In the original SMW, the launcher arm was an extended sprite. The sprite was hardcoded to always appear going downwards, so I put the launcher arm code inside the torpedo ted ASM (and modified it so it would appear from above. If the extra bit is set, the arm will spawn. If the extra bit is clear, the torpedo will spawn. This is the first time I've ever made 2-sprites-in-1. Bad thing about this is that the Torpedo eats up 2 sprite slots at the same time (until the arm vanishes, then it's 1 slot). I kind of regret cancelling my extended sprite tool now.

I coded this sprite by the request of Teyla. It's for A Supamariowarudosentorarupurodakushon-ni, so I thought: "why not"?

Edit: There's a graphical bug where the hand does not show up when there's too many sprites on the screen (the hand also uses a sprite slot). This does not affect the launching of the torpedo however - it's a purely graphical glitch, and it doesn't look all that bad, really.

Writing tutorials

2011-07-07T00:44:00.004+02:00

As you guys may know, I've been working on an ASM tutorial the past few months (accumulated amount of time spent on tutorial is probably 2 whole weeks or so). I've never actually studied on HOW to write tutorials. I just 'followed' my instincts pretty much. Of course, I also keep running into obstacles. I thought I should share my method of writing tutorials, along with the obstacles.

From my point of view, there are two kinds of tutorial: one which teaches you to use something (e.g. how to insert blocks tutorial), and how to do something (e.g. ASM tutorial). The former remains the same (the overworld editor is not dynamic), as for the latter, you'll have to puzzle the pieces together (you can do a shitload of things with ASM - it's probably like cooking). I'm mainly focusing on the latter type of tutorials.

My main point of view when writing such tutorials is to NOT make people mimic you, but rather explain to them what exactly is going on, and how you can 'reproduce' the effects pretty much. If you tell people that "LDA #$01 STA $19" will store "01" into "7E0019", how will they know that the accumulator will be loaded with 1 in the process?

I actually learned ASM that way thanks to tutorials - "LDA and STA will magically store numbers into a RAM address!". I never knew about the accumulator. Then I found a routine - the block shatter effect which could either be plain brown or rainbow-colored. It said "load 1 into the accumulator to make the shatter rainbow-ish". I didn't know how to do that, and I asked smkdan for help. It was a very embarrassing moment once I realized how ASM truly worked like. smkdan probably had to laugh while helping me :D

Another thing I try to do is to go from the most important thing to the least important thing. I mean, lets take ASM again for example. It's important to know opcodes and all, but what's more important: ASM or counting in hex? If you don't know hex, you might as well forget learning ASM. That's why I'd explain hex first, then ASM.

I will also try to supply as many examples as possible. They demonstrate how everything is supposed to be, and how you're REALLY supposed to do things.

Next up: An image tells more than a thousand words (it was worded that way, right?). The next version of my ASM tutorial will feature this. An example is the bookshelf behaviour of the stack. I actually illustrated that because I found it difficult to explain. I added an explanation regardless though because you know, placing an image without any explanation isn't really useful.

Finally, I try to not overcomplicate things, and try not to involve the other chapters in the current chapter, otherwise it'll be almost the same as 'spaghetticode'. When I explain LDA and STA, I'm not suddenly going to involve conditional storing which involves processor flags or something - I'll divide them into multiple chapters. This is actually my main struggle in writing my ASM tutorial, because nearly everything is linked together in such a strange way. I might have to reorganize my chapters D:

Also, don't make mistakes in your tutorial (common sense but I should mention it regardless).

As for the other type of tutorials, I haven't really looked into that one, so I can't say much about it.

And again, this is from my 'instincts', everything made up by me, by teaching myself. There are bound to be better tutorial writing methods out there!

College so far - Part 2

2011-06-23T00:20:00.004+02:00

So, I'm in the process of finishing the current two (or should I say three?) courses/classes (I'll just stick to courses) I have right now: Database Applications and Product Quality.

Database Applications is exactly what the name says: Applications of a database. Basically you make a database management system. In the end we had to show a project. We could work in groups of two, but I chose to be alone because I suck at teamwork.

The project started with SQL Server 2008 R2. Installing it was a pain because I already had an (older) version of SQL Server thanks to Visual Studio 2010. I had to remove everything related to SQL server, then re-install it. I repeated this progress about 4 times in total. Now, that wasn't too bad compared to the REST of the course... But anyway, I pretty much dominated the first exam (it was about SQL), so I had a very good feeling. The good feeling lasted for quite a while.

Then we had to work with MS access. Using SQL server and an ODBC connection, I linked the database to MS access. "Okay, this is still tolerable", and tried to keep up the good feeling. Then the day came where I received bad news.

We had to create applications for the database in MS Access. Applications... still tolerable. Then came a part where we simply couldn't do something with drag and drop and wizards and all, so the coding part got introduced. This is where my nightmare began because we had to code in VBA: Visual Basic for Applications. The first two words already sent chills down my spine, and my teeth were chattering. Anything but Visual Basic!

I'm going to be blunt here: why the HELL does MS access use Visual Fucking Basic? Why DOES that language exist? Honestly, that language is the most terrible language in existence, next to Delphi. Both of them made me want to shoot myself in the skull many times.

Anyway, so at some point I was working about 8 hours straight on this project, and I was proud of my work. Then the assessment arrived, and the instructor didn't like the project. He said the forms were lacking "information" which I agree with. What I don't agree with is that he said the forms were lacking a title. You know, he did NOT mean the titles you see at the top of the applications, but titles embedded INSIDE the applications. What's the point of titles INSIDE the application and not at the very top inside that bar? Which brings me to another point: The forms I developed, are they really forms? They really seemed like they were part of MS Access and I couldn't see an option to "export" them as stand-alone executables. Anyway, I failed the assessment that day, and I got a (final) chance to redo it a week later.

Another few hours were spent on improving it, and the day came. I basically had to show that the application worked. It did work perfectly except for one thing which worked half. I did know the cause but it seemed like the instructor ignored my explanation. He still liked one of the forms I developed because "nobody else has done it this way". Another bad thing was that there was a missing check/business rule I just couldn't manage to implement in the database.

In the end, I got a 7 for the entire project. The grade pissed me off though, I deserved a grade much higher than that because the application was perfect except for two things: that small error, and that check. What pissed me off more is the fact that the teacher said "Actually this project deserves a 6, but because you made that one form so nice and unique I give you a seven". What the FUCK? I was working entirely ALONE on this project, I made it PERFECTLY except for two errors, and I actually deserve a SIX OUT OF TEN?

Anyway, I'm still glad I passed this course because I seriously was about to turn insane from the shitty syntax of Visual Basic. Ask the people of #serioushax if you don't believe me. Once summer holidays start, I'm going to remove SQL server. It's a waste of valuable space now, and I don't want to be reminded of this terrible course. I would banish MS Access to hell, but I don't want to make Microsoft Office incomplete.

With database applications aside, here's another strange course with the results pending: Product Quality.

It's nothing like I expected it to be. I expected it to be like testing applications for bugs and user-friendlyness and all, but no, it has to be something completely unrelated. It's basically "Computer engineering" and "Business computing" ("Bedrijfskundige informatica" in Dutch). Basically, this was a course made of two subcourses.

The business computing part is a freaking PAIN in the ass. It's a course with more theoretical things than practical. In my honest opinion the classes weren't that great and was lacking information, A LOT of information. I couldn't pick up anything from the classes because almost nothing got explained. We only got a few sheets of paper and had to do... stuff with them, but who knew that we were supposed to master the entire course with those? Furthermore, we almost never discussed those sheets of papers so I really had the feeling of "this isn't going anywhere".

Of course, this course too, had a project. We had to write am excruciatingly detailed analysis of a company, and write an "advice report" too on what this imaginary company could improve on. We had to work in groups of three, no exceptions. So I was in a group with two other people. One of our group members eventually dropped out the project near the end, saying "I'm too busy nowadays and I will be going to another school". I mostly had to rely on my remaining group member who barely contacted me with instructions on what I could do for the project, so I was a sitting duck pretty much. I could only hope the group member was actually doing something, otherwise I wouldn't survive this course. See, this is why I HATE being in a group. Atleast working alone can make me keep track of everything, and I don't have to rely on other people.

The other subcourse is Computer Engineering. We had to program PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) to make a conveyor belt system work - basically simulate a factory. How do we program PLCs you ask? Drawing stuff. I wanted to jump into a bottomless pit after seeing this. Why is a bunch of drawings called a programming language?

In this subcourse, we had to create a project too (that conveyor belt system). We were in a group of 8 people, but two of them dropped out of the project so we were left with six. The instructor didn't mind - he said the less people, the more incomplete the project may be, which is relieving to know. On the final week, the instructor happened to be wounded or sick or whatever happened to him, so he was in the hospital. We couldn't finish our project on the final week. Then, a substitute instructor emailed us he would be taking over. Then, he emailed us again telling us pretty much "Nevermind, the original instructor will finish the course with you guys after all". Then the original instructor emailed us "I will be finishing this course with you guys. There won't be a final presentation. There will be an individual assessment, ONLY IF it's really needed". It has been 8 days, and I haven't heard from him ever again.

This isn't going anywhere indeed.

I'm not sure if I'll ever pass this course. It doesn't seem like it, because I haven't received ANY information about the course again after that final email. I still have to receive a grade for the half-assed projects I've worked on with my groups-reduced-in-numbers. I was the brain of the Computer Engineering part in my group. If the instructor wasn't in the hospital I would've finished the project. I couldn't do anything in the Business Computing part. I was pretty much a freeloader.

Now I have 22.5 European Credits out of 60. Normally I would've had 30 out of 60, but because Product Quality is such a freaking pain in the ass with pending results, and seeing I still have hope for this (oh who am I kidding), I just assume I have 22.5 points now. I hope I can do better when I redo this course. I'll update this blog post once I actually hear the results.

On an unrelated note, I think this is the biggest wall of text I've ever written on the internet so far. Excuse the lolgrammar as I wrote this at midnight.

SMWCentral being blocked

2011-06-13T01:51:00.005+02:00

There were moments on the IRC about how people were annoyed because their highschools block SMWC. SMWCentral is blacklisted on most (high)schools, and the sole reason for that is because it's about "hacking" - atleast I assume that. Maybe some schools use a whitelist instead, who knows.

Now, when schools hear about SMWC, they are probably thinking about "hacking" into computers, accounts, wi-fi and all, because I'm pretty sure almost no school knows about ROM hacking, and if they do they probably wouldn't care. Obviously hacking can't be interpreted as "chopping" either, because chopping SMW totally makes sense. So here is an idea I have: Make a school-safe version of SMWC which never mentions the word hacking.

How does this work? To be a bit more technical, Kieran could use a $_GET variable in the end of the SMWC links to enable the safety mode. This safety mode would replace all the instances of "hacking" with something else like "modifying" (or "chopping", I don't care, as long as it doesn't mention hacking) dynamically while the server generates the page. Heck, even the banner would be replaced with "Your primary SMW modifying resource". These words could be replaced:

- Hacking: modifying (e.g. He is modifying SMW)
- Hack: Modification/Modify (e.g. #1 Modification on SMWC/I modify SMW)
EDIT: Come to think of it, "Mod" is good enough (e.g. #1 Mod on SMWC/I mod SMW), but people could mistake it as "Moderation"
- Hacked: Modded/Modified (e.g. He modded/modified SMW)
- Hacker: Modder/Modifier (e.g. He's a SMW modder/modifier)

"Hack" is going to be tricky though, because it has two meanings, and I'm too lazy to come up with a solution for that.

I'm pretty sure this idea will never happen, but hey, atleast I shared my idea!

Idea: The Muncher Run 3 - Same idea, different ROM

2011-06-08T12:07:00.003+02:00

That's right. Someone told me that I should create TMR3 on Super Mario All-Stars SMB3 (was it Aqualakitu or Patgangster, or neither? I forgot). Personally I like this idea, however there's only one problem: The SMAS Hacking scenes hasn't progressed that far. If I wanted to create TMR3 for SMB3 I would either have to wait for SWR to finish MushROMs, or I'll have to create it entirely in xkas. I'm somewhat leaning to the latter now, because it would make me look cool once I finish it.

SMB3 has something by default which I planned for the SMW version: a statusbar in the bottom. Customizing it to my needs shouldn't be that difficult. Planning my levels around the statusbar was a freaking pain in the ass!

Besides, TMR3 - SMB3. I hope you get the relation :D

Reflecting upon my past

2011-05-30T13:54:00.006+02:00

At some point in this month, I simply was thinking: "~~what the fuck am I thinking?~~ how did I end up in this college to begin with? Why do I love programming so much? How did I end up ROMhacking?"

Tracing back the memories I had, I eventually ended up at one single answer: my early childhood. Now this will be a long story, but everything I write here is related, so please take your time to read this.

In the past, I used to play on the Super Nintendo a lot. I was pretty much addicted. The games I especially loved back then were Starfox (Starwing in EU), Super Mario All-Stars, and Super Mario World. Heh, I still remember me trying to find hard-to-perform glitches in Super Mario World while I was sick, not going to school, and once I've found one glitch, I'd call my mom to show it to her. Unfortunately, it didn't really succeed in front of her. :D

Eventually I simply stopped playing on the SNES. I got tired of it. I've finished all the games so many times (except Star Fox' hard path). I didn't touch Super Mario World again for a looong time. I've discovered emulation thanks to my brother (to be honest I didn't even know that I was in the process of actually emulating something). Then someday, I felt like searching for glitch videos of Super Mario World, just for the sake of seeing if I really found everything. I found a video of a hacked SMW.

It was about one of the Star World levels (where you have to spinjump your way down), and that there was some secret there which would lead you to the moon in Star World, which had an utterly crappy level in it (at that time I considered that "OMG AWESOME"). Come to think of it, those were the fun and exciting times, seeing I quit SMW hacking by now. Another video I saw was KPhoenix' laser suit.

I read the comments people left. The comments were screaming "LUNAR MAGIC". I got curious. Just what is this Lunar Magic? I went off to google, then found FuSoYa's site. I thought I ended up in heaven, but that was simply the beginning of something more awesome.

Eventually I ended up at SMWCentral, that was the TRUE heaven. I registered there, asking for some help regarding the SMB3 music patch. I got help from BoingBoingSplat and Bad Luck Man. The former pointed me to some patch, the latter pointed me to some hex edit with the same results. Surprisingly, I decided to do the hex editing instead.

Then I've noticed the more awesome people at SMWCentral who could do ASM. Specifically, those people were GhettoYouth and Bio. My mind was blown when GhettoYouth released his 64x64 Nintendo Presents logo. It inspired me to do ASM. My thoughts were something like: "I'm going to show these people how awesome I am by learning ASM! I will become someone special!". Being naive, of course I had these thoughts. I decided to learn ASM without even knowing what programming was, hahahaha.

So I decided to look up tutorials on ASM. I learned it was actually called "65c816 ASM". I ended up in board2 and found Sukasa's ASM tutorial, which was the only tutorial with a SMW example at that time. I decided to read it over and over again until everything stuck to my brain. Although I've learned everything, how do I apply the ASM? The tutorial mentioned custom blocks, so I decided to ask help on SMWCentral on how to make your own custom blocks. My way of assembling blocks was changing the extension .asm to .bin. :D

People pointed me to TRASM (now known as TRASH), and I used that to make .bin blocks and insert them into SMW. Using custom blocks, I've been practicing more and more and became much more better in ASM. I started contributing custom blocks to SMWCentral; slow and steady.

On IRC, KilloZapit eventually mentioned the "Programming language C#". I was interested. Programming languages? I asked more about it, then I learned what it was all about. I immediately downloaded Visual C# 2008 express, and made some simplistic GUIs ~~to track someone's IP address~~. It was interesting, yet addicting in some way. I decided to make an editor for my favourite game SMAS, and called the editor "SMAS annihilator". Of course, this was nothing but a big dream I could not achieve without legendary GUI programming skills. Luckily, SWR took over the role of creating a SMAS editor when I started the SMAS project.

Programming... programming... it affected my school too. I've wanted to become many things - firefighter. I gave up on that and my new goal at high school was a doctor. Of course, I wanted to become rich too. After I've discovered programming however, I've discovered my true potential. I picked up on the programming tutorials incredibly fast - even faster than Biology which was my best subject before I discovered programming. I decided to take an extra subject and chose Computer Science. When I received my high school diploma, I've noticed my best subject was Computer Science. I mean, that PERFECT (10/10) grade in the programming project surely helped me. :D

I've decided to go to the college I am in right now, to study more Computer Science. First two courses were basic Java and PHP. Java was meh-ish, but I enjoyed PHP the most. I already had basic PHP (or rather, programming) knowledge before all of this, so it was a breeze. My final product's PHP engine blew the minds of my class, and I convinced the instructor that I'm awesome in PHP. Although my site's design wasn't that well, I still made it. Of course, I finished Java successfully too.

So that's how I ended up in college! SNES -> ROM hacking -> ASM -> Programming -> Different ambitions and potential, therefore studying programming. I love how Nintendo affected my life in such an awesome way.

Test post

2011-05-29T23:58:00.002+02:00

This post is made on my mobile phone for testing purposes.

SMWC3 Spring 2011 & ASM Tutorial v2.2

2011-05-10T13:23:00.013+02:00

For those who don't know: "SMWC3" is a/an SMWCentral event where people show off their creations, pretty much. It lasts for two whole days.

Superheroes and Supervillains

I have to say, it has been a blast! This C3 was very unique, compared to the other C3s so far. The most notable thing was that this C3 was superhero/supervillain-themed, and you could pick either side.

Someone coded a bot (either Kieran or Smallhacker) to spam up the C3 forums. By deleting the spambot's posts, you could slowly gain karma to join the heroic side (yay). At first, the bot didn't post very often. However, after a small conversation with Kieran he decided to make it post 5 times every minute (which was notable during the final C3 day). Smallhacker became the "leader" of the evil side while me and SNN became the "leader" of the heroic side. Of course, someone also made a "join side" I have no idea what it is all about. I pretty much ignored that thread, heheh.

Once you became rank 2 of a side, a secret forum would unlock and you could gain access to it. In the heroic case, it's "Guardian of the streets". I don't know the evil one's case, but it's probably "Power abuser". ~~Sounds like something I do with my admin powers.~~ I'm not sure if these forums will stay or not. Even if they remained there, what would be the point...?

Threads which caught my attention

With the superhero gimmick aside, I've noticed quite a bunch of C3 entries. I've made two C3 entries too. The one which caught my attention the most is edit1754's thread. I mean, a command-line levelASM insertion just like spritetool? That's just awesome. And following that, a parallax HDMA editor too? Although edit mentioned both of these to me BEFORE C3, my mind was blown when I tried them both out. Really, I wonder how long it took him to make the HDMA editor. It's still WIP, but hey, it's still awesome.

Another thread which caught my attention was Koyuki's hack thread. Me being a fan of SMAS graphics + me seeing that hack = me going all like "WOAH". I remember giving Koyuki that SMB1 flagpole on the condition that his hack will make decent progress. It seems like he's doing well so far, even after I gave him the flagpole. :D Of course, I've made the flagpole public now. Just browse the Custom Sprites section of SMWC.

SNN's "Content v2.0" thread also is pretty cool. It's of his hack "Gimmick". I've played a few demos of it and the hack is awesome so far. I can't really tell much about it though (because I don't know what to tell about it anyway). After he finishes this Gimmick hack, I hope he'll continue on either Keytastrophe or Final Destination.

Kipernal's Y.I.P.E.S. is pretty much a revolutionary development in Yoshi's Island hacking. A proper WYSIWYG text editor is just great. I have no idea what this "Sprite set editor" is however. I've never looked into Yoshi's Island hacking, so yeah. I've already noticed potential in this guy after he made "MML Editing Tool" (found in tools section) and "A MAD SCHEME" (I forgot where it is, browse the C3 archives), and he's improving at an impressive rate!

Alcaro's AlcaRobot release thread. Now that's something useful for the SMW ASM hackers. This robot beats the purpose of CTRL+F. It's WAY better than that. Use it, and you'll see what I mean. I've betatested it before he released it, and I have to say, it is very easy to use. As far as I know, this is made with pure C++, and it works on Linux too (if you use WINE). Of course, this AlcaRobot misses a few IRC-only options such as keeping logs and all.

Ersanio's 65c816 ASM tutorial V2.2 should be pretty helpful to new ASM hackers. He has worked on it for a few months now, trying to make it as beginners-friendly as possible. Originally he waited to get feedback from andy_k_250, however, it seems like he was busy. The tutorial is prone to improvements, so it isn't available in the tutorial's section yet.

Ersanio's SMAS SMB1 LevelASM is obviously the best SMAS-related C3 entry out there. I mean, trippy rainbow clouds made by using LevelASM? Who wouldn't want that in SMB1? Ersanio's a badass enough dude to work on levelASM before a level editor is brought out! He won't release this until SWR releases his SMAS SMB1 level editor, due to compatibility issues.

Also, p4plus2 was supposed to release something revolutionary for SMW, but he kept it for the next C3 after all. *baw*

Overall thoughts on this C3

I found it a fun event as usual, but I didn't have the time to check most of the threads. I was mostly busy promoting the heroic side, as well as working on SMAS SMB1 levelASM. I kind of regret doing the former, because it really beat the purpose of C3. To be honest, I think this spam-hunting gimmick has received more attention than the C3 thread themselves. I'm not sure if this is true, but I really got that impression. It's a good idea to get more traffic, but really, I think the amount of attention to the C3 threads is much more important than silly gimmicks like that... Next time, I hope it'll be the good old C3 again instead of another gimmick.

CTRL+SHIFT+S

2011-04-29T16:36:00.004+02:00

What is this key combination you might ask? This key combination is a very handy feature in Lunar Magic - I first saw feature tool in a post Hadron linked in his custom title.

I was interested in this tool, so I went ahead and googled "ROM user area scan results" (WITH the quotes) and it dropped me to this thread. Atleast I knew it was not a seperate tool, but an actual feature of Lunar Magic.

I went ahead and private messaged Hadron, asking where to access the feature. He told me that the key combination CTRL+SHIFT+S should do it. It's kind of disappointing though - NOWHERE in LM's readme is mentioned that such a key combination exists. FuSoYa should add a page with all key shortcuts and all, that'd be convenient. If it does exist already, then he should make it more noticeable. As far as I know, the only time this shortcut got mentioned was this post...

tl;dr CTRL+SHIFT+S shows up a dialog in Lunar Magic which shows free space, amount of bad RATS tags, RATS-protected space and all.

So, how late am I in noticing this?

My activity on the ROM hacking scenes

2011-04-26T00:18:00.006+02:00

My blog activity... is dropping of course in case you haven't noticed yet. It's because my hacking activity dramatically dropped.

Every since I've quit SMW hacking, I have nearly nothing to post, which is disappointing. Sometimes I've considered to hack SMW again, I even tried to start a hack again, but my determination (laziness) is so strong that I immediately quit afterwards. I suppose I won't be ever creating an SMW hack again - I'm more of a resources guy who likes to create things for other people.

SMAS on the other hand... is making no progress either! I really need to stop being so horribly lazy and actually make progress. I mean, it has been over two years now and the project still isn't finished. If it wasn't for my laziness, the project would've been finished a long time ago. My laziness is just crazy. Is there a remedy for laziness at all?

This all is leading me to slowly lose one of my skills... ASM. Yeah, that's right. By not ASMing for such a long time I kind of forgot all the tricks and how to deal with tedious work and all. Really, I forgot to put a SEP after a REP, I can't even code the most simple algorithms anymore... I really don't want to forget ASMing, because it's what got me into ROM hacking in the first place. ASM is like, my ROM hacking pride.

At the very least, I want to 'pass on' my ASM skills, therefore I'm working on updating my ASM tutorial. If I'm not lazy enough, I might actually finish it before this C3!

With HFD's addmusic edit of Romi's addmusic...

2011-04-17T15:52:00.002+02:00

...and me being too lazy to add the proper headers to my custom music = this blog having outdated songs.

Well, seeing that I can edit the zips directly instead of downloading -> editing -> uploading, I'll probably have my custom music submissions updated in this blog sooner or later, but not today.

College so far

2011-04-07T16:24:00.007+02:00

People who have been ~~stalking me~~ following me on IRC might know that I've been going to the college recently. I've finished the first block out of four of this year. Each block contains 2 subjects; in this case it was Web Development (webdev) and Embedded Applications (EmbAp(p)). Of course, I have some opinions on the college so far.

Lockers

Lockers are not present in this college, so we have to bring everything we have with us to the class. It sucks so far because I don't have a place to put my rather heavy leather-ish jacket at. I always hang it behind my chair and as time passes by I eventually happen to sit on it. I see that me sitting on things can destroy stuff because I've discovered massive amount of rips on a specific portion of the jacket. I don't think it'll get any worse though, seeing that it's almost summer so I don't have to wear it. But seeing that I love to wear coats/jackets though... Atleast we don't have to move stuff from classes every other hour, which brings me to the following

Class schedule

Our class schedule this block was so straightforward. I've been literally stuck in one specific classroom for 9 whole weeks. Atleast the next block we will have a different classroom everyday. Finally, I get to explore the college more, which brings me to the following

Labyrinth-themed college interior

Self-explanatory. The fact that this college has like 3 or 4 structures doesn't help either. There are no maps around. All we have is some signs with writings which most of them don't even make sense to me.

Projects

We had to hand over the projects at one particular day (everyone has to that day), but our instructors felt the need to make things more complicated and were like "Hand over the CDs with the projects to the officials that day, and one week later you can give me the updated version". I'm even unsure if they went to the officials and gave them the new, updated CDs. If they didn't I'm pretty much screwed if the inspection check out those projects and see I got high grades for crap-quality stuff.

Grading

The requirements to pass a class here is so strict, that once you have ONE bad grade, even if it's only ONE, you fail the class and have to possibly redo it. In other words, be a perfectionist or you won't survive.

Calling a day off

How DO I call a day off from college? Apparently you have to email the appropriate instructor, but most of the people of my class seem to not care about that and just stay home whenever they want to. The instructors don't even care. I understand that there's much freedom in this college, but I'm not used to it. I blame highschool and the strictness of being present.

All in all, I find the college very confusing and intimidating so far. Almost nothing is clear to me, even after 9 weeks.

On a more positive note though, I've been taking exams and projects and all to pass the first two classes. The results are (out of 10):

WebDev:
HTML and CSS exam: 7.5
PHP exam: 9.3
Dynamic site project: 8.0

EmbApp:
EmbApp exam: 7.3
EmbApp 1st application project: 7.0
EmbApp 2nd application project: 8.0

As you can see, I'm pretty much dominating those subjects! If I have at least a 5.5 for the 1st app Embapp, I pass the EmbApp class. If I don't, I fail it due to the aforementioned strictness. Yes, this means I've passed WebDev as far as I know. I'll update this post once the results are released.

So, do you have school today?

Update:
Got the result of EmbApp 1st application project (finally)!

[SMW] [Sprite] Portable Bill Blaster

2011-03-08T01:06:00.005+01:00

This was meant for TMR3. I admit, the idea of this pseudo-powerup is completely stolen from SMBX, except with a few modifications (limited ammo & other). Once you grab the blaster, it'll start shooting projectiles straight-forward which can hurt enemies and interact with blocks. It can not hurt you. It scares Yoshi when you carry it while riding Yoshi.

You can download the sprite here.

[SMW] [Sprite] SMB1 Flagpole

2011-03-08T01:00:00.005+01:00

This is a sprite Romi made for me, for my side project. I really owe him one for this (actually I owe him a lot, he's very generous and helped me a lot). Romi told me that I could do whatever I wanted to do with this, so I (finally) decided to release this at the last C3, along with other resources of TMR3. Surely this must satisfy a lot of people!

You can download the sprite here.

SMW hacking - Accuracy or compability? - Take 2!

2011-02-27T15:04:00.003+01:00

Surely you must remember this post. If not, you should read it first before reading this post.

So what happened? 2 days ago a new hack submission rule was spontaneously set up which said that your music should work with HFD's new addmusic or AddmusicM. That's fine. However, the next rule wasn't amusing to most of the regular userbase: All your hacks must work in bsnes 070 or higher. Later that day, those rules were officially nullified by Kieran because something went horribly wrong behind the scenes. SMWC is advancing towards accuracy, but this was just too fast. What if the rules were NOT nullified by Kieran?

Nothing major would've happened. That's right.

As emulators are being worked on, they are increasing in accuracy. They are, after all, designed to copy the original hardware digitally. If we don't use the hardware (e.g. SNES) as our standards, our submissions will break in the future emulator versions. Take for example: zsnes 1.something as a standard. In the future, a version (version 2.0) will be released with a very accurate sound core. The music which would work in the standard emulator would break later in future versions of zsnes. Playing hacks on your favourite emulator without ear-rape quality would become difficult. In order to prevent that, we should make our submissions already as accurate as possible, to avoid these situations.

Up to this day, only one emulator is capable of very accurate SNES emulation: bsnes.

Making things work on bsnes/SNES would make the submissions automatically backwards-compatible with emulators 99% of the times. Only stuff which would break on the mainstream emulators such as snes9x or zsnes would be things such as messing around with hardware registers (with exact timing) and all. There would be no loss of switching over to bsnes. I can understand why people are still complaining about this though. Either:
1) They don't know that almost everything will be automatically backwards-compatible or
2) They're too lazy to fix stuff.

Too lazy to fix stuff, I can understand that. I'm sure that some/most/I can't really tell/etc of the submissions will actually break on bsnes/SNES. Not everyone knows ASM/music/writing tools and so on. ALL the sections (except ExGFX) will need an overhaul - the submissions should be tested on bsnes (preferably the latest version). Custom music will be a problem though. Now we have TWO addmusics working in bsnes: HFD's addmusic and addmusicM. I can already foresee the music section receiving notes such as "works in AddmusicM only!".

If only someone could make an addmusic which became THE standard... Maybe I will, but I don't know anything about the DPS registers. I would have to show true dedication to finish it!

Sooner or later, I'm planning to go through all the submissions in the latest version of bsnes (076) with the accuracy core. I can because my new laptop is a beast. I shall make a list of broken submissions, and plan stuff with the staff members (who are experienced in ASM) if they are interested in this too of course.

Old hacks, reviews, scoring, featured hacks

2011-02-19T23:44:00.005+01:00

Just a friendly reminder, like almost all of my wall of texts, this too is a matter of opinion.

Hacks such as these and these were probably one of the best hacks in the site way in the past (e.g. during the first few weeks I registered at SMWC).

It's sad to think they are now considered as "Just a vanilla hack" or "A hack without ASM", "No custom music = fail", and so on. Come on, think! SMW hacking wasn't that developed in the past. Not so many people knew that much ASM compared to now! Sadly, such reviews do pop up once in a while, and I can do nothing but facepalm. I really think 'old hacks' should have their own seperate page in SMWCentral (idea was proposed by someone else a while ago, but I forgot who. He named it "Legacy hacks" or something). I have to say, I enjoy old hacks once in a while. Super Challenge World was my very first favourite hack.

It's very impressive how people such as Pac were able to pull off stuff such as his SMAS games remakes, given the small amount of graphics space: now we have two more extra BG files at our disposal! Things such as the SMAS music patches were plain awesome back in the old days, but now we have custom music!

Reviewing hacks is no easy thing in my opinion. You have to keep in mind that some hacks are old and some hacks are brand-new. If you're reviewing a hack which is 3 years old with today's standards, the score won't be very high obviously.

Reviewing hacks should be a wall of text, providing constructive critism - much like most of my ranting posts here. It should be beneficial to the author of the hack, and it should make the other players also realize what the hack quality is like. A scoring system just doesn't cut it. I have to admit, I used to make crappy reviews in the past. Anyway, here's a small bad and a good example review:

Bad:
Levels: 5/10 - Some levels were boring, other levels were fine
Overworld: 1/10 - woah this is the worst OW I've ever seen it's like blargg puked on it
Graphics: 1/10 - Original SMW graphics
Total: 7/30 this hack sucks ass

Good:
The hack wasn't really enjoyable, but it did show some potential regarding level design. At level one-dash-one, some ledges were cutoff. If you look around the object editor, you can find the correct tiles to replace the cutoff with it. That way, the level will look nicer. Furthermore, the next 55 levels has this problem too. I have nothing to say about the graphics you have used, because these are original SMW graphics. About the overworld, I recommend you to look up tutorials on how to design an overworld. In general, you should ask people about how your hack looks so far, because this hack is pretty much below-average quality-wise. Remember that other people are going to play your hacks, not you only!

I have to say, this is a bad example because such hacks would get rejected instantly but I hope you get my point. Remember people, hack reviews should be benificial to the hacker so he/she may improve!

Another thing which bugs me in the bad review system is, people seem to... consider things in their scores which aren't even used at all. Take for example a hack which doesn't use custom music. Someone would drop by and rate everything a 10/10 except music because it's vanilla. Unfortunately, sometimes they do count it in the scores, and it would reduce your total score. The potential to get for example, a 50/50 would become a 40/50. WHY would people include unused features in their scoring anyway? It doesn't make any sense! Make a perfect vanilla hack, and someone stupid would drop by and rate it a 20/50 for "using original SMW graphics", "no custom music" and "no ASM". That'd make the hack score a 4/10 in the end.

I mean, really, hack scoring should be mostly about how much you enjoyed the hack, not only some random mathematical formula which will determine the overall hack score in the end.

I don't know about the current system of featuring hacks. People seem to think that some hacks are getting featured because "they are made by staff members". Although this statement always manages to piss me off, last time I checked, to get a hack featured the hack had to get 3 votes with a good reason why. If hacks made by staff members really get featured "just because they're staff", then that'd be a bit wrong in my opinion. Every hack should undergo the same process - moderation, (optional) voting for feature.

From my point of view, a "legacy hacks" section indeed would be very nice.

The end of The Dwellers of Dischord

2011-02-18T13:19:00.006+01:00

You should've seen this coming months ago, but yesterday I officially announced the end of DoD.

DoD started when I was bored in the staff IRC channel someday. I felt like composing some music. Then somehow I got SNN and me to start writing the song in the staff channel. The result was Ear Rape - A journey through time and space. We decided to make a thread for it. Soon enough, we moved to etherpad.

We started to show some real dedication, but in the beginning of Album 2 we both were bored. It just died off by itself.

Yesterday I've compiled all the SPCs in one zip which can be found here.

Honorary mention: this. Credits goes to Uhrix for creating this lol image.

Minecraft - Extreme griefing & Valley Fortress

2011-02-14T20:24:00.007+01:00

In Caffie, after our little place got griefed to hell (literally) last night ^[1][2], I decided to move to another server with Kc & co. I mean, even my poor floating muncher didn't survive. That's unacceptable! Then again, this place was one of the three places being griefed last night. 2nd village griefed was DaxterSpeed's village, 3rd village was Brad172's village. After the bad news, Kc and I decided to leave Caffie forever.

My only good screenshot of our (previously) little place is this. If Kc ever decides to remake this monument in the new server, this screenshot is the only clue I have.

While heading back to spawn to donate our last valuables (which were untouched, hurrah!), we saw a word made by stones saying "AVOLITION". I heard it's an infamous team of griefers with all kinds of mods and hacks. It's really depressing how people actually make whole groups commited to griefing servers. How "AVOLITION" ended up in Caffie is beyond me.

I have to say, Kieran IS a good server owner. The problem is that all the griefing happens when everyone is absent, so no proof can be obtained. Anyway...

On a more positive news, in this new server I had an idea to remake an overworld tile in Super Mario World. It happened to be the ~~grass~~ fortress tile. After endlessly begging for lava, black wool, and smooth stone and 3 hours of work, it has been completed!

[1][2][3]

It's actually 3D. Now that's co0l. I call this fortress the "Valley Fortress", an obvious reference to the final fortress in SMW. I'm proud of my fortress, definitely better than my wooden box thing :D

Team hacks

2011-02-05T01:28:00.004+01:00

Team hacks - something you start off with high hopes and expectations. Everything is coming along well, and the team is doing everything just fine. Then, the team becomes disappointed at the team leader, and in some cases, the team falls apart. In other cases, the hack doesn't get finished. In yet other cases, the hack doesn't meet today's standards. Why? ~~because of large justice~~

Team hacks are never meant to be organized like the following scenario:
<Leader> Okay members, make a bunch of levels, send them to me and I'll slap them together in the hack with no organization and thought-out difficulty curve whatsoever!

Creating a team hack requires tons of effort. It would've been cute if all it took to create a team hack was the above scenario. As a project leader, you will need the ability to co-ordinate people, convince them, share your ideas, listen to your team members, support your team members, provide feedback, do things yourself and most importantly: teamwork! That's right. Your team members aren't slaves. You and your team have to work together. Treating your team members as slaves isn't exactly pleasing for them.

It's also a good idea to know the team member's strong and weak points. Creating a random application thread in SMWCentral and waiting for people to join without restrictions just doesn't cut it. You will need to set standards; good standards of course. In my opinion the best option is to get your good friends to join the team. Since you know more about them than your average member, you'll be able to know when to give them task and what task. If you know that your friend is an ASM genius, you wouldn't give him a music porting task would you?

From my experience, keep the team as small as possible. Organizing teams of +10 people isn't too pleasing for the leader, and keeping track of everthing would be very difficult.

Another thing you should look out for is the difficulty curve. Everyone has their own unique way of level design, and their difficulty always varies. It isn't fair to stick a next-to-impossible level as the 1st level, and afterwards a piece-of-cake level. You have to think about what you need, not what you want. If you're designing world one, specifically ask for easy levels. If you're designing the final world, ask for difficult-but-fun levels. As for the middle ground, what you should ask for is obvious.

Optionally, you could make a (public) logbook to keep track of everything happening.

Regularly giving feedback is a good idea too, especially if you know what should be and shouldn't be in a hack. If your member is doing something wrong, point out the error. Don't hesitate with a silly reason such as "it'll render his effort useless". You don't want to end up with a hack with flaws here and there, do you?

Most important thing is planning things throughout the entire course - what will the hack be about, what will it look like, who does which levels, who will do GFX, who will create music, and so on... and keeping your members up-to-date with the ideas. It isn't easy!

Also, Dropbox. It might be very handy for team hacks.

That's all I have to say on this matter. I don't have too much experience regarding team hacks so I might be wrong here and there (maybe I can blame 2 AM too), but this is from my logical viewpoint.

Also, I had a very strange dream last night. It was the blog having 100 000+ views. Ah, how I wish the blog had so many regular followers. :P

[SMW] [Patch] No Star & P-switch music

2011-02-04T14:20:00.005+01:00

This is a patch I released at C3 along with the rest of the TMR3 sources. I would've posted this earlier but ~~I needed atleast one post this month~~ it has been waiting in moderation since last year. Fortunately, it got accepted. The patch wasn't that big anyway so I can't see why it took so long. >_>

The patch disables the P-switch and the star music, so the level background music keeps playing. Thanks Romi for helping me with this patch a bit. I wanted this patch because who would want to get epic music interrupted and/or keep hearing the same star music over and over again? After all, TMR3 was going to involve lots of starmans too.

Anyway, you can download it here. Like the .asm file says, apply this patch each time you run your ROM through addmusic. For the lazy people, what I did was simply make a batch file to insert music and apply the patch:

addmusic smw.smc
xkas nostarpswitchmusic.asm smw.smc
@pause

Save as .bat. Each time you run the .bat it'll insert the music, THEN apply the patch, therefore doing two things in one step.

[SMW] [Tool] Translevel to $7E:13BF

2011-01-23T11:57:00.002+01:00

This is the tool included with the overworld earthquakes patch. I'm releasing this seperately, because it could be very useful for those who simply don't understand the RAM address description, but want to base their patch around it.

It converts the translevel number (the level number you enter from the overworld) to RAM $13BF format.

You can download it here.

[SMW] [Patch] Multiple Overworld earthquakes

2011-01-23T11:47:00.003+01:00

It's something I made 5 months ago, but forgot to release it on this blog... whoops.

This patch allows you to have more earthquake events on the overworld by using translevel checks. If you enable level 1 and 2 to have earthquakes for example, and you beat those levels, the earthquake will occur for both of the levels (not at the same time of course).

You can download it here. It has a nifty javascript tool which converts translevel to $7E:13BF format. I shall release that one in my next post!

New pages!

2011-01-20T01:56:00.004+01:00

You might have noticed the blog has two pages. They were incomplete until now. In case you missed them...

The blog now features two new pages:

Hacks: A generic page with a list of hacks in chronological order, along with screenshots and downloads. Up-to-date as of now. Who knows, maybe I'll whip up a hack of some other ROM sometime.

About myself: Self-explanatory.

Have fun browsing those, especially the hacks page. You'll learn what I was able to do in SMW!

Floating muncher in Minecraft!

2011-01-15T17:21:00.009+01:00

In case you don't know, yes I play minecraft too. Yesterday, I decided to join Kieran's server after a few weeks of break and hearing about the new update which includes colored wool. I created a wooden box thing (AKA a square house), then I started to beg everyone for black wool/ink sacks. Meanwhile I went to mine like an addict of course. After all of that and various donations (thanks!), I have made the most amazing creation:

Click for larger image. Muncher made by me, Mario made by "SolidYoshi". It's completely "legit", no hacks/glitching and all, because cheating is for the weak!

Today I've managed to make a Dweller of Dischord generator, although when I enable it my FPS drops dramatically. I'd love to make a video of it but the performance is eh. I'll have to wait for my new laptop which I should be getting soon(tm). When I make the video (and improvements), I'll make sure to post here.

And now, a sentence made in SuperFX opcodes!

2011-01-14T02:07:00.003+01:00

Excluding parameters due to obvious reasons.

PLOT BRA SEX WITH COLOR OR MERGE CACHE TO STOP LOOP.

I couldn't think of where to stick NOT and FROM. Too bad!

SuperFX ASM is fun~

Floating munchers (and water)!

2011-01-12T23:18:00.004+01:00

I don't understand how people seriously like floating, black plants (also known as "floating munchers"). Sure, there are floating question blocks, coins, cement blocks and all but they are meant to be that way. Are floating munchers a poor attempt to make a level more difficult?

You might wonder what I define "meant to be that way" as. I define it as "it was intended to appear in commercial games like that, lets don't ruin it". Really, floating munchers do look bad. It doesn't make sense to plant a muncher in the air, does it? Plants don't grow on the air; they are always rooted.

"What about that jumping pirahna plant in SMW then? Isn't it floating too?" No. It's jumping up and falls down obviously. If you want to use that as a lame excuse to make munchers float, then make your muncher jump up and down too. Another option is to attach a jumping pirahna plant-propeller on your muncher by using ExAnimation or come up with something creative.

If someone really wants to put obstacles in a level which hurt you, they should use ExGFX and add some spike graphics or something using the new BG2/3 slots, in combination with a hurting custom block. That way, the original SMW graphics remain untouched.

"If munchers shouldn't float, then water shouldn't be floating too!" I beg to differ. If you think the water floats because there's no gravity in the space, think again: why is Mario able to fall down? Floating water is fine in my opinion, although it'll be better if it is between two pillars (in a |======| fashion). That way it won't look weird.

Why I put two floating muncher bosses in The Muncher Run 1 and 2? Well... ^_^;;

Why do people even like their own, bad creations?

2011-01-01T01:39:00.003+01:00

Yes, I'm talking about things such as this and this. How do the authors even like this?! Sadly, these are actually real hacks submitted to SMWC (and rejected obviously).

Like, seriously. It was a pain in the ass to pass the level shown in the 1st screenshit with a powerup (had to use auto-fire), and I had to abandon Yoshi. The color choice isn't that great either. Red on green which hurts, and that red shape is animated weirdly too. In the 2nd screenshit, the game froze due to podoboos being placed in the level while the buoyancy is turned off while the player suffers from massive slowdown until he reaches the podoboos (AKA crash point). I mean, what's the big idea? Is the crash supposed to be the climax of the hack? Why would one even stick random enemies all over the room? Why multiple switches? I can hardly imagine the following situation:

"Oh f*ck yes, extreme slowdown. Now THIS is what I call a quality level - It's almost like The Matrix! I have to play this level with my eyes half-closed due to bad palettes. I call that a real-life gimmick and I'm totally the only one who does this. Oh, where can I find the ledge objects? Oh well, things look nice cutoff too! I'm also placing random flying 1-ups all over the level so the hack becomes more promotional and encourages the player to continue to play! I'll also make the best puzzle level ever by making the level repetetive". Are the authors really thinking this?

Maybe this is all about new hackers being proud of their own creation regardless of how shitty it is. Maybe it's laziness. Maybe it's about being inexperienced and not knowing how to avoid cutoff. Maybe it's about showing off the "amazing" hacking skills to the community. Maybe the hacker doesn't even know what a quality hack looks like!

Only thing I can do to find the reason why hackers like such things, is to make assumptions like these. One thing's for sure though: those hacks always keep me entertained. I've taken screenshits of such hacks which can be found here.

Did you guys make such levels too when you first started hacking SMW? I sure did. I did realize my errors, however.

Happy new year!

SMWC Mosts: Winter 2010 - Results are out!

2010-12-24T22:43:00.000+01:00

See This thread.

Most Likely to TAX the pig STY with ASM:

Smartest:

Funniest:

To be honest I didn't see the 2nd one coming, because you know, I usually act all laid-back and joke around a lot and so on, and rarely show my smart side - or so I thought! I think a 3rd place for funniest is fine, because there are definitely funnier people out there. Of course, I expected the 1st place in the main ASM category! :D

I wonder what the punny pun of the ASM category will be next time. It reminds me of this one punny sentence I have created over a year ago (with the help of Roy):

DMA IT! Can you guys STP and do a Barrel ROL so TAY Zonday visits this place? Oh, whats the ASL of the TAX collector? I need to BRK his bones and JMP on him. I suddenly have the urge to devour PEAnuts and learn PHP. No WAI. I'm starting to get SEIzures which INC my sanity! Is this true? NOPe. I'm MVN' on this beat, AND touching a BRA!

"touching a BRA" ...

My blog layout, once again!

2010-12-23T18:48:00.000+01:00

I've grown bored of this layout, and I want something new (and pleasing of course). I'm going to try messing with the raw design CSS, and if I just can't manage to make the blog look nifty I'll just have to pick a new template. Another option is to keep the current layout of course and wait for a miracle to happen (which is never).

Update: It's going to be a brand new template after all!
Update2: No custom background though because I don't really want to resort to cutoff borders again.
Update3: Eh. It doesn't look that bad actually, but now I have to find a way to seperate the link color from the post title color.
Update4: woo! Now I'm satisfied but if I can manage to kill the cutoff at the sides it'd be great.

SMW hacking - Accuracy or compability?

2010-12-15T22:13:00.001+01:00

A hacker might hate it when they make something which works on the most-commonly used emulators such as snes9x and zsnes, but breaks in very accurate emulators such as bsnes. Well, I can't blame bsnes; it's serving its purpose. The hacker is either forced to make fixes - which isn't that bad - or degrade his creation. Nobody likes degrading their own creations. This problem often occurs with music porters and these 58493583 versions of addmusic (especially when echo is enabled).

This post is inspired by a thread made a long time ago, and I decided to share my point of view with you guys (assuming people visit this place often, do-ho-ho-ho).

In the SMW hacking scenes, three emulators are used 99.999999% of the time. These emulators can be divided in three categories:
zsnes: Probably one of the most inaccurate emulators you'll ever see but still manages to emulate some of the SNES games somehow. Often used for its rewind function/quickness/netplay support/etc.
snes9x: More accurate emulator. Nothing interesting. Used as an example of accuracy before people discovered bsnes.
bsnes: Extremely accurate emulator but not 100% accurate (and never will be is my guess) + requires high system requirements if you want the most accurate emulation in SNES emulation history.
And of course there are a VERY few people who plays hacks on a real SNES.

Like I mentioned in my first post in the aforementioned thread, playing some of the hacks in bsnes doesn't really work out well at times (especially with custom music). Back when addmusic was first released, people didn't really know about bsnes I suppose. Then again, bsnes was early in development and there was probably no-one who played hacks on a SNES. Heck, especially when Lunar Magic was first released which is years ago, way before bsnes even existed? Anyway, the hacks from years ago don't require too much ASM hacks so I guess it would work on a real SNES. On a side note, I have a real SNES myself (PAL) but I don't have a flash cart thing and I don't intend to buy one.

The hacks from now has a low chance of working in bsnes or a real SNES because SMW is just hacked so darn extensively nowadays. ASM hacks, sprites, blocks, hardware gimmicks, SPC-700 modifications, and so on... The more features, the less chance a hack gets playable on a real SNES, which is why I prefer playing on emulators such as snes9x and zsnes.

When I have to pick my hacking style though, it'd be "accuracy". However, I'm not an 'extremist'. I only test things in bsnes if I feel the need to (such as testing EXTREME FastROM). If small things work in snes9x and zsnes I'm already satisfied. I'm pretty sure the majority of SMWCentral use those two emulators almost always anyway.

I'm not a supporter of "SNES purity". I do have to admit that it's challenging to do stuff the "legal way" and getting it to work, but I think it's mostly a waste of time because I think not many people play hacks in bsnes or a real SNES. I wish I didn't really think this way but hey, laziness! However, if something big I created (such as FastROM or LevelASM) would break on a real SNES or bsnes, I'd just try to fix it because it'd concern me. On a related note, I've always felt obligated to fix the addmusics, but fixing them is way beyond my current SPC-700 skills.

What I would do regarding this accuracy/compability thing is very obvious... fixing problems so stuff can work on bsnes/SNES while maintaining compability with the other two major emulators. But hey, I left the SMW hacking scenes so I won't really do anything about addmusic and all. As far as I know, none of my work breaks on bsnes/SNES. Although now I'm really wondering... how will people deal with this compability/accuracy problem? I'm really hoping a couple of projects will pop up here and there to fix stuff the way I would do. Due to the emulation errors snes9x and zsnes have, it's easy to identify the emulators using ASM. I heard that division registers work different in all the 3 emulators... You'd simply code things, see if it breaks in one. If it does, add extra code to do emulator identification and modify the code accordingly.

I really hope someone will come up with a brilliant solution to fix the addmusics + other things which break in bsnes. Then we'd have one less thing to worry about!

I think I wrote this post in a poor way, but I tried my best. For some reason I've always found it difficult to express my opinions (it took about one hour to type this out), so yeah.

Woo, post 69 for real this time!

[SMW] [Patch] Windowing fadeout/in v1.1

2010-12-08T23:32:00.000+01:00

Uh... just a small mistake I have overlooked. The previous version of the patch had a glitch which set the overworld mosaic to MAX after you beat the bonus game. I'm sure nobody likes an overworld which looks like this:

Well, I have a technical explanation for this problem.

See this line of code in original SMW:

CODE_00C9EB: A2 F0 LDX.B #$F0
CODE_00C9ED: 8E B0 0D STX.W $0DB0

This executes in original SMW before you get sent to the bonus game on the black screen. It sets the mosaic to max. Why does it, though?

When you finish a level, you fade into the overworld without mosaic, so the mosaic is always MINIMUM when you end the level and go to the overworld. The overworld doesn't look broken that way when you fadein. However, level fadeins always start with maximum mosaic. The game expects that to happen. When you're about to enter a bonus game, the mosaic is set to max manually so the bonus game mosaic and brightness fadein works properly. Come to think of it, ALL *somewhere*->level transitions do this which in turn sets the mosaic to max. The bonus level was just a special case which used seperate code.

Since my patch doesn't involve brightness and mosaic at all, simply removing these two lines did it.

Download

~~Woo, post 69!~~ whoops, this isn't true apparently.

[SMW] Basic Windowing HDMA tutorial!

2010-12-07T23:08:00.000+01:00

Many people don't know how to do Windowing HDMA, so I felt like sharing my knowledge. You may ask, "although it's a feature of the SNES itself, why SMW specific"? Well, we're going to use SMW's windowing HDMA engine for this to make things easier! In this tutorial I will assume that you have basic HDMA and ASM knowledge. You can put the code in LevelASM.

Well, first of all we want to make windowing HDMA actually appear as black lines on the screen. To do this, we must mess with some SMW's hardware mirrors first. I simply used this piece of code:

LDA #$22
STA $41
STA $42
STA $43 ;setup HDMA properties
LDA #$20
TSB $44
LDA #$10
TRB $44

This will set the screen settings so, that windowing HDMA will appear in a black color on the most common level modes.

Next thing we need to know is about SMW's default windowing HDMA RAM table. This RAM table is located at $7E04A0, and is 448 bytes long. This HDMA table covers the entire screen. Keep in mind that the screen has 224 scanlines. 224*2=448. This means, each scanline will have 2 bytes transferred. Well, what are those 2 bytes then? In other words, what's the format of this HDMA table?

It's quite simple. Windowing HDMA works by using a "Left edge" byte and a "Right edge" byte every scanline. So, the format of the table itself is: $LL $RR $LL $RR $LL $RR [...]

First two bytes is for the first scanline, next two bytes is for the second scanline, next two bytes is for the third scanline, and so on. For example, we want scanline 0 covered entirely with a black line. You'd use the values $00 $FF. If you want the right half covered only, you'd use $80 $FF. If you want the left half covered only, you'd use $00 $7F. Another random example would be $42 $69, and so on. If you don't want windowing HDMA on a specific scanline, you'd use $FF $00 instead!

Modify the windowing HDMA table to your needs, then... The HDMA activation code of course!

LDA #$41 ;\
STA $4370 ; |
LDA #$26 ; |
STA $4371 ; |Enable HDMA
LDA.b #IndirectPtrs ; |
STA $4372 ; |
LDA.b #IndirectPtrs>>8 ; |
STA $4373 ; |
LDA.b #IndirectPtrs>>16 ; |
STA $4374 ; |
STZ $4377 ; |
LDA #$80 ; |HDMA enable
TSB $0D9F ;/

Yup, we are using indirect HDMA. And that's why we will use indirect pointers! Using direct HDMA would simply be a freaking pain in the ass. Indirect HDMA is useful here because you're actually pointing to a bunch of pure values, instead of the generic scanline/values combination.

Put this table somewhere in your code so the above code can actually function:

IndirectPtrs:
db $F0 : dw $04A0 ;Ptrs for indirect HDMA
db $F0 : dw $0580
db $00

Here's windowing HDMA in action (writing a huge "E" on the screen):

And the table used for it:

$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00
$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00
$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00
$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00
$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F
$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F
$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F
$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F
$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F
$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F
$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F
$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F
$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20
$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20
$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20
$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20
$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20
$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20
$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20
$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20
$08,$40,$08,$40,$08,$40,$08,$40
$08,$40,$08,$40,$08,$40,$08,$40
$08,$40,$08,$40,$08,$40,$08,$40
$08,$40,$08,$40,$08,$40,$08,$40
$08,$40,$08,$40,$08,$40,$08,$40
$08,$40,$08,$40,$08,$40,$08,$40
$08,$40,$08,$40,$08,$40,$08,$40
$08,$40,$08,$40,$08,$40,$08,$40
$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20
$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20
$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20
$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20
$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20
$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20
$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20
$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20,$08,$20
$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F
$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F
$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F
$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F
$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F
$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F
$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F
$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F,$08,$7F
$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00
$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00
$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00
$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00
$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00
$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00
$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00
$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00
$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00
$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00
$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00
$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00,$FF,$00

Well, this is the basics of windowing HDMA. You can use math and all to make stuff like expanding/collapsing circles (much like SMW did), but I only know this much so don't expect an intermediate/advanced windowing HDMA tutorial or anything!

By the way, this new code box thing is WIP. I need to find a way to make the border blend with the layout of this blog.

[SMW] [Patch] Enter level sound

2010-12-07T21:25:00.000+01:00

This is nothing big. Basically: This patch makes the overworld play a sound when you enter a level, much like in SMB3. SFX to be played is customizeable in the ASM file.

Download.

[SMW] [Patch] Windowing fadeout/in

2010-12-07T21:19:00.001+01:00

Well, this is yet another thing from last C3 I didn't mention in this blog until this month (I think). Why I didn't? Because I'm sure there won't be anything exciting this month, so precautions have been made for the sake of more content. Haha, I'm such a genius!

...

Anyway, what this patch does? See this video:

It's something I decided to give it a try, because I have never ever worked with windowing HDMA and the SMW windowing HDMA table before.

Download.

Yet another For Your Information

2010-11-28T20:22:00.002+01:00

I am moving the files put up for download to a new host: Dropbox. I don't really like how googlesites handles files and stuff: they call the files "attachments" - might as well call it "My files". The file interface is messy. It's slow to go back a couple of pages. All in all, it's annoying. I heard dropbox is great and all so I'm giving it a try, so yeah!

The existing links will be edited to link to the dropbox files.

If you'd like to have a dropbox too, I'd love to be your referrer.

In other news, this month has the most posts so far. Yay

Some old to-do list I've found...

2010-11-22T01:54:00.000+01:00

...I made this list like a half year ago I think. It has been a while since the paper is actually looking 'old and worn-out'. I felt like sharing this to-do list with you guys because there's no point in keeping it for myself anyway!

Things in parenthesis are my comments added just now.
----------------------TO-DO LIST STARTS HERE----------------------

ASM ideas

- Marquee overworld names
- HDMA which actually scrolls vertically (CHECK)
- OverworldASM Super Deluxe
- Extended Sprite Tool
- Something with SuperFX? (Surely descriptive, yes)
- More powerups
- Dynamic Overworld sprites
- Disassemble SMW sprites (fuck yeah laziness)
- Custom layer 3 stuff (CHECK)
- IRQ stuff (...what was I even thinking here?)
- 32x32 blocks package
- Proper slippery blocks which can actually melt (merged version of 2 block packages of mine)
- Work on TMR3 (guesswhat)
- Do some spriting for TMR3 (guesswhat)
- Recreate a few graphical effects from commercial games
- Do stuff on test ROM (experimenting stuff ftw)
- Make a to-do list (CHECK)

----------------------TO-DO LIST ENDS HERE----------------------

So yeah. I had quite a few ideas I forgot about/was lazy to finish them/got cancelled.

Current plans on my SMAS hacking adventure!

2010-11-20T01:53:00.000+01:00

SMAS... how I love that game. I love it more than SMW. I played it more than SMW.

And that's why I started to disassemble Super Mario All-Stars while I was still hacking SMW, but I barely had time for it because I had SMW projects now and then, was busy with high school, gaming, etc. Now I have a little more free time, and started to focus on SMAS by quitting SMW.

I am planning to make quite a bunch of ASM hacks for SMAS. But where do I start, you might ask? That's why I am making the disassembly; to make my job easier. I have the following plans in mind:

SMB1&SMBTLL:
LevelASM + Init
Custom Sprites
Custom Blocks
Custom Music
Maybe adding support for vertical levels with the horizontal wrapping effect.
Maybe allowing to carry items.

SMB2:
LevelASM + Init
Custom Sprites
Custom Blocks
Custom Music

SMB3:
LevelASM + Init
Custom Sprites
Custom Blocks
Custom Music
Even more powerups.

Hall screen:
Custom hall images and all.
Compress the stuff because it uses so much space.

Menu screen:
Custom game select images and all
Compress the stuff because it uses so much space.

LevelASM is something I just can't miss. Custom blocks and sprites are cool to have. I mean, imagine a thwomp in SMB1, or a balancing platform from SMB1 in SMB3, or munchers in SMB1! And music is just for fun. I will try to make the custom music engine compatible with the music section in SMWC. I heard the powerups system in SMB3 is very convenient, so I shall give it a try too. The custom hall/menu images are to give future hacks a 'unique feeling'.

How long will it take to finish this all? Well, I don't even want to imagine, considering I have to finish the disassembly first. >_>

Will I ever make a full hack of one of these games? I don't know...

In other news, I have begun documenting parts of SMAS again. I'm making slow progress though; I just began 'warming up'.

[SMW] [Tool] Addmusic Tie Optimizer

2010-11-17T22:55:00.000+01:00

(C3 thread)

This too was something I released at this C3. I saved the best for the last, which was this tool which was supposed to be revolutionary. It reduces song insertion sizes by a fantastic amount, and yet I received little to no comments at all in my C3 thread. I was a bit disappointed. Well, I will do something unusual: submit it to the tools section. Normally I'd keep it in my filebin or something because I don't submit javascript tools, but this one just will be an exception, because of large justice!

Download

[SMW] [Music] Starfox 64 - Map

2010-11-17T22:28:00.000+01:00

The final music I have released at C3. It got rejected while submitting it to SMWC but eh, I completely understand the reasons why.

It's probably the first time a serious submission of mine actually got rejected over this course of 3 years, and I'm kind of proud of it. 3 years of solid-quality submissions. Self-ego inflation ftw. >_>

Download

[SMW] [Music] Tay Zonday - Chocolate Rain (Remixed)

2010-11-17T22:06:00.000+01:00

Oh yeah, it's that 1337 song I used in The Muncher's Treasure in TMR2 (the castle part). People wanted it. There was no point in keeping it for myself, so... here you go!

Download.

[SMW] [Music] Starfox 2 - Fortuna Underground Base

2010-11-17T21:53:00.000+01:00

Wooooooooo for C3! I've released a bunch of TMR3 stuff as planned, along with a surprise tool which is pretty much revolutionary, but almost everyone probably missed the thread because it got buried deep. Oh well, too bad. Anyway, I shall release the TMR3 stuff here seperately.

I've ported the Starfox 2 Fortuna Underground Base music. It's one of the few music I like in SF2. This is actually an update of an old port of mine. An important update. The old port pretty much raped the listeners' ears on the long run.

Download.

For your information

2010-11-17T14:31:00.001+01:00

I shall now start renaming my blog, and all my blog post titles because I want the blog to be a general-purpose blog now.

I will rename my blog to "Ersanio's Blog of Wonders and Other Miracles" :D

Of course, this means a new banner. Oh oh oh oh dear

TO-DO list:

- Banner - Done
- Rename post titles - Done
- Add tags/labels/whatever to posts - Done
- Add prefixes to post titles with the relevant name of the game. - Done
- Remove this TO-DO list after being done with stuff - Lazy

This means for example, this:
ASM Dump #69 - "lorem ipsum" level mode
becomes
[SMW] [Patch] "lorem ipsum" level mode

SMW hacking - The End

2010-11-04T00:24:00.000+01:00

Oh noes, I haven't made a post here for over a month. What a shame except not really because I have my reasons.

Most of the reasons are nothing exciting (gaming, moderating SMWC, etc). Here's the most significant reason (which might be shocking (or not?)): I quit SMW hacking.

Yep. You read right. I quit SMW hacking. And it's no big deal at all. I was bound to quit someday anyway. You might be wondering though: why'd I quit now, and why? Well, it's quite a bit of a story...

I've grown bored of SMW hacking since about a year ago. I don't know why. I attempted to quit SMW hacking but failed to do so, because I had nothing better to do anyway which was a pretty sad reason. Since then I learned more about ASM and stuff (I just can not stop learning can I?). Then out of boredom I felt like making a level which was supposed have a style of SMB3 World 7-7, which eventually became "The Muncher Run" series.

Then I finished 2 hacks for the heck of it, and people liked it. So I thought "well hey, why not make a 3rd part which should be something biiiiiiiiiiiig?" and started working on it. I put various videos of TMR3 up on my youtube account (mostly ASM gimmicks) and people seemed to like it. Great motivation and all.

Now this is the most disappointing part. After designing the first level I had these hopeless thoughts, that I'd simply stop working on TMR3 after a while and let some people down. Where'd the motivation go? Heck if I know, maybe it simply was adrenaline. Those hopeless thoughts came true. I talked to some people about it and some of them were disappointed after hearing that I will cancel TMR3, but they understood the reasons which I'm glad about.

The Muncher Run aside though, the source of the hopeless thoughts became clear to me now: lack of creativity (Reason #1).

I've always wanted to do something original, but I couldn't because I'm not creative enough. Even when I try hard, I can't come up with an original idea. Why can't I? Because most of the things are already made in SMW (Reason #2).

I hate it when I think about that.

I think I've made some pretty revolutionary stuff for SMW - mostly for the ASM people: Better levelASM (complete ripoff from BMF's idea. How original), EXTREME FastROM patch (inspired by a "HiFast" Japanese patch. I made my own version so I wouldn't be accused of 'stealing' things), Overworld ASM, LC_LZ2 decompression optimizer, Allow direct page register usage and Free up RAM $7F:8000. Something more practical such as the SMB3 P-Meter are revolutionary too I guess. Of course, I am not the only one who is pushing SMW to its limits. smkdan did some 1337 stuff (VRAM patch), as well as Roy (Layer 3 ExGFX, Mario ExGFX). There were also bigger advancements such as Custom Music after I joined SMWC. Now with almost everything being made, what else is there left for me to make? That's why I hate having a lack of creativity. You know what else I hate? Laziness (Reason #3). When I get a great idea I open notepad, write "HEADER LOROM ORG !FreeSpace" then think "meh, this minor thing is not worth my time" and there goes Notepad's window.

I also quit SMW hacking because it became too easy now. It's not challenging anymore unlike my n00bish days 3 years ago where I enjoyed SMW hacking to the fullest (Reason #4). Everything was cool and stuff until the day I heard about ASM. Then everything was just awesome until time passed by and I learned the 'behind-the-scenes' of SMW. Then it became less exciting. Then I thought I should create new things. But wait, I have lack of creativity and most of the things are made! Then what the hell did I learn ASM for anyway? Anyone could've created the revolutionary stuff I made! Only things left in SMW hacking are now these little details people mostly do not care about.

This graph pretty much should show you how much I indulged in SMW hacking over these past 3 years:

1 - First few weeks of hacking
2 - After hearing of ASM and creating various things, started working on first hack ever and first side-project ever. Also, Nightfall is real.
3 - First attempt of quitting SMW. Froze all my hacks and projects.
4 - The Muncher Run series. Cancelled the other hacks I had.
Now - Not only I've grown bored of hacking SMW, I'm sick of hacking SMW now. Cancelled everything SMW-related.

I won't be gone from the ROM hacking scenes altogether though. A good thing of ASM is that I can hack almost any SNES game now (if I invest enough time of course). This is why I will move on to Super Mario All-Stars hacking. I think it's about time I'm going to have a fresh start again.

Also, I won't leave SMWC because of this. I simply love the community too much for that.

I will 'officially' quit SMW hacking at SMW C3, and release the final SMW things I have made then. After that, more SMASH DIZ. It's about time.

MSU1 & my opinion

2010-09-02T19:53:00.000+02:00

Ah, the MSU1. People from the SMW hacking scenes heard about it since videos of BMF's hack with demonstration of this extension came online ^[link]. Although I have to say, those people were pretty late. Anyway...

What is this MSU1 chip you say? Quoting from byuu's page:
"MSU1 is a special enhancement chip for the SNES that grants a full 4GB of additional storage space, and allows the playback of full motion video at 240x160x256 colors @ 30fps and lossless 44.1KHz 16-bit stereo PCM audio."

So yes, you can put things like videos in SNES using this enhancement chip. As far as I know, the earlier version of MSU1 was called "21FX", and there was already a video demonstration of it available ^[link]. This was made by smkdan. I assumed that MSU1 was capable of the same thing.

With the introduction of MSU1 aside, this extension has reached the SMW hacking scenes. And of course, people have different view of this chip. In this post I will post my own points of view.

When I first heard about this chip, I was amazed. I still am. To think that SNES is capable of such stuff. The extra 4GB storage space is great too. Useful to store things like GFX, maybe level data and all the other stuff although I haven't tried this out yet. You can also play wav files, although it's still unclear to me if they are part of the 4GB storage or not.

The awesome thing is that this is a SNES extension. For people who hack SMW: This extension is not limited to SMW only. You can stick this in SMAS, YI, or even a homebrew ROM. Atleast I didn't have to learn how the SPC-700 works to get some nifty music in my homebrew ROM which I used for testing SuperFX things anyway.

In my opinion, there are downsides to this too.

The first downside is that this requires XML mapping to work. I frankly have any idea of how XML mapping works. It IS simple though. Just editing a few values here and there and you got the thing to work. The fact that it requires XML mapping itself is annoying. Isn't there a way to enable MSU1 by default?

Another downside is that for music files, you need wav. Well that isn't a problem. But if you surround your ROM file with wav files so it eventually becomes a maze, it does get annoying unless I missed a feature where you can stick the wav files in a directory. The wav files themselves can get horribly big too, but that's nothing compared to the 4GB storage space.

The final downside in my opinion is compability; this only works in BSNES, and I've met people who can't run bsnes properly even when the performance core is running. I have to admit though, I think those people's PCs use charcoal as a CPU. And bsnes is a great emulator. I can't see why you should not use it unless your PC is crap.

More SMW specific, I've been hearing things like "this chip is a curse to SMW hackers who specialize in porting". I have to say, that statement is stupid. Porters aren't enforced to use the MSU1 for their future music projecs, nor do they have to stop providing custom music to the SMW community.

Why they shouldn't stop is pretty simple; there are people out there who are simply not willing to use MSU1. Either that, or newcomers in SMW hacking.

Another thing is that music porting requires effort which might get annoying at times, but custom music is easier to use in SMW than MSU1. Don't ask why, I don't want to analyze SMW's current music engine.

Also, I'm 100% sure that not everybody will use bsnes as their favourite emulator. People shouldn't expect MSU1 working in emulators like snes9x, zsnes, and so on (for now?).

Now, what could people use the MSU1 for in SMW? It's pretty simple. Enhancing music, enhancing graphics, level data storage, HDMA tables and maybe full-motion cutscenes probably made in flash then 'converted' to... 'SNES format'. Lets just hope that people won't put things like 256-colored goatse timebombs in their hacks. I'd just shoot myself if this happens.

Using MSU1 isn't a 'shortcut' to anything. It became/will become a feature of the SNES itself, so why not take advantage of that?

So those are my thoughts about MSU1. The features are awesome. The usage however, is pretty ugh. D:

This has to be the biggest wall of text I've written in my blog so far. o_O

H-DMA Gradient Ripper updated (v1.2.2)

2010-08-19T20:20:00.001+02:00

This new version allows you to recolor scanlines, to fix any oddities of the gradient. The downside is that you need pixel-precision aim when it comes to using a mouse. Maybe you could use a magnifying glass software or something too but I never tried that.

Download the update here

Random thought while making this post: about:blank

[SMW] [Patch] Free up RAM $7F:8000

2010-08-19T20:17:00.000+02:00

Oh man, this is embarassing. I thought I posted this patch here already but it seems like I'm a few months late now.

Patch thread.

This patch frees up 387 bytes of RAM at $7F:8000. It moves the unrolled loop to the ROM instead and shrinks the routine to 285 bytes instead (RATS included). I've moved the routine to the ROM because as far as I know it never gets modified after the upload.

Download the patch here.

Random thought while making this post: I think I forgot to post the update of the H-DMA gradient ripper tool too. Well, look forward to the next post.

Javascript SNES color convertor updated

2010-08-01T17:35:00.000+02:00

See this.

I've enhanced it with a color picker. Javascript has a lack of color dialogs so I've searched for a custom-made one. The genius who made this color picker is... a genius. Therefore, I've mentioned the site where I got the picker from on the color convertor page!

I think this will be the first and last update on the color convertor.

Note: you might need to refresh the page to see the changes.

Random thought while making this post: about:blank

LC_RLE1 and LC_RLE2 documented

2010-07-18T01:36:00.000+02:00

Gee, what's with me and compression lately?
This compression format is extremely simple. And I really mean extremely. Although it's simple, it's effective as well.

These 2 compression formats are used by Super Mario World.

LC_RLE1 and LC_RLE2 is basically a run-length encoding format. That's all to it. However, LC_RLE1 is one dimensional while LC_RLE2 is two dimensional.

Basically, LC_RLE1 decompresses everything normally. Read byte, unroll it, store every byte normally in buffer, read next byte.

But LC_RLE2 is different. Read byte, unroll it, store byte in buffer -while skipping every other byte-, read next byte.

Yep, every other byte. Keeping the compression format in mind, take for example the bytes 82 00. This would unroll 3 bytes of 00. But it doesn't get stored in RAM as 00 00 00. It gets stored as 00 XX 00 XX 00 XX.

Since the format is like this, there are two compressed tables. One to fill the bytes the 00 covers, and one to fill the bytes XX covers. Additionally, LC_RLE2 doesn't possess over an 'end-of-data' word (LC_RLE1 does though). You will have to give the length manually. The length should be the length of the original, decompressed data. That's how it works. Yep.

With the wall of text aside

I've took notes of the compression data as usual, and I've ripped both the decompression routines. See the txt file inside the zip:
Download.

It comes with 2 routines ready to be assembled with xkas. However, you'll have to code the bankswitch routines manually if you really need it.

As a final note, LC_RLE1 and LC_RLE2 both only gets used once in supamariowarudo; once for the ENTIRE overworld layer 2 tilemap (both tile # and tile properties, RLE2) and once for the overworld layer 2 events tilemap properties (RLE1).

As another final note (will those ever end?), I've made SMWiki articles related to the compression format.
* LC_RLE1
* LC_RLE2

Random thought while making this post: I wanted to code a compressor for those 2 formats badly, but I failed. D:

High School finished + new SMWiki pages

2010-07-09T14:31:00.001+02:00

Yesterday it was the graduation evening for me. It was pretty amazing, but it somewhat got embarassing when they put up two pictures of mine on a gigantic screen using a projector. One of me recently, and one of me 5 years ago just for comparison on how much I have grown. They put it up for about 5 minutes too. I guess I was pretty unlucky back then. I'm pretty glad that I got my diploma though, but I kind of got saddened when I realized that I won't be able to relive the high school days again with all the people I've got to known. I guess I'll grow used to it over time.
I'd like to thank my 4 mentors who guided me throughout the 5 years of high school.

In other news, recently I got bored so I decided to improve the SMWiki a bit. I've fixed a few articles and made new SMWiki pages. You can find the pages in the right menu area thing.

When I get bored again, I'll just work on the layout of this page or something, or work on TMR3 or SMAS Dis or whatever else.

Random thought while making this post: I'm just a bored guy.

LC_RLE4 documented

2010-07-04T14:51:00.000+02:00

This time I felt like documenting the LC_RLE4 routine which is only found in Radical Dreamers, a SNES game. After multiple headaches, I've finally figured out the format. It's kind-of complicated, especially the offset addition byte. But once you understand it it's pretty easy.

Although the offset addition byte might seem useless, it could be useful for raw data such as $01 $02 $01 $02 $01 $02 $01 $02, which could compress into $01 $01 $04 $02 $02 $04. You'd set the offset addition byte to $02 for that. It would keep skipping 1 byte. If Lunar Compress had that data, it would try to compress that as "$01 $02 $01 $02 $01 $02 $01 $02" AKA Direct Copy bytes.

Maybe I should code a compressor for this, but as you may know, I still kind of suck at C#. I'll give it a try anyway.

You can download the LC_RLE4 documentation here: Download. It also has a working decompression routine ready to be inserted anywhere, although the bankswitch parts only works for HiROM.

Also you can find some other stuff regarding LC_LZ5 here: Download. It has a rougly-commented disassembly which is mostly wrong I assume. To figure out the LC_LZ5 format I started to fiddle around with the compressed data in the end.

Random thought while making this post: Aww, I forgot the random thought for the previous post.

LC_LZ5 documented

2010-07-03T20:55:00.001+02:00

Yesterday I've decided to document the LC_LZ5 compression format. After a while of documenting routines and experimenting with Super Mario Kart, I've figured out the LC_LZ5 format. You can find the documentation here.

[SMW] [Patch] EXTREME FastROM v1.1.0

2010-06-26T23:34:00.000+02:00

Original thread.

Well actually I've made this patch with the idea of eliminating occasional slowdown which occured in Supamariowarudosentorarupurodakushon. Then I came up with the idea of implementing this in Lunar Magic. But seeing that I obviously can't do that, I had to contact FuSoYa.

He gladly accepted the idea of implementing this patch in Lunar Magic. So I began to test this patch for bugs and made a few re-releases with fixes. In the end the patch was bug free except the statusbar's right half of its last scanline glitched up due to the faster IRQ execution holy crap long sentence. So in order to fix that, FuSoYa decided to place the IRQ in SlowROM again, only in the future Lunar Magic releases. All goes well anyway.

With all those aside, you can find the download link in that thread. But of course I've uploaded one somewhere else:

Download.

You should read the readme before patching this. And after the new version of Lunar Magic gets released with the patch implemented, this patch will become obsolete for that version.

Random thought while making this post: WATER. I NEED WATER. BRILLIANT IDEA TO COOL DOWN A BIT.

[SMW] [Patch] Allow direct page register usage

2010-06-26T23:25:00.000+02:00

As mentioned in my previous post, I've made a patch which will enable the usage of custom direct page register values in SMW. You can find the download here:

Download.

Please, read the readme for more information.

Note: Causes glitches on the right side of the last scanline of the statusbar in accurate S-PPU emulation.

The only emulator with an accurate S-PPU emulation is the cycle-based S-PPU which BSNES uses. Also, this glitch will occur on a real SNES too. But who is going to use both of those with this patch anyway?

Random thought while making this post: The weather should cool down a bit. Either that, or the mosquitoes should become extinct so I can open my window again.

Direct page - why it's so awesome

2010-06-26T02:26:00.000+02:00

It's pretty late so this one will be pretty short.

Note: I assume you have intermediate ASM experience.

Some people who are learning ASM may not know about SNES' registers, such as direct page, data bank, processor flags, and so on. Using them wisely is one of the keys in ASM hacking.

Personally I find using the direct page fun. Why?

It saves both processing time and bytes. Basically, it can transform certain absolute addresses into direct page addresses.

So how can I use this?
Before you use the direct page register, you'll need to preserve it so you don't break the game. Personally, I prefer this wrapper code:

PHD ;preserve
PEA $0D00 ;example value for the direct page register
PLD ;stick it in the direct page register
*code*
PLD ;recover

Now lets take for example, you're writing a mass of values to the SNES PPU registers ($2100-$21FF). Note that the possible values of the last 2 digits are $00-$FF in the $2100 range. So we use that as our direct page register value, and then write stuff to the registers (perhaps as an initialization):

PHD
PEA $2100
PLD
STZ $00 ;Store #$00 to $2100
STZ $01 ;Store #$00 to $2101
STZ $02 ;Store #$00 to $2102
STZ $03 ;Store #$00 to $2103
STZ $04 ;Store #$00 to $2104
STZ $05 ;Store #$00 to $2105
STZ $06 ;Store #$00 to $2106
STZ $07 ;Store #$00 to $2107
[...]
PLD

That's pretty much how the direct page register works. It's pretty awesome.

SMW doesn't like its direct page register getting changed though.
Since the SMW developers never were in need of changing the direct page register, they didn't preserve the direct page register in the NMI and IRQ routines. So whenever you affect the direct page register and an interrupt occurs, the interrupt will basically execute faulty code due to the modified register. In order to fix this, I have made a patch but it's getting late so I'll release it after my sleep.

Random thought while making this post: Go to bed already.

Unimportant news

2010-06-17T01:26:00.001+02:00

I've added more screenshots to my crappy hacks screenshot collection.

That's pretty much it.

Random thought while making this post: Well I think I can't come up with something within 30 seconds... wait, I just did.

[SMW] [Music] Zero Wing - Opening

2010-06-06T20:43:00.001+02:00

Hey guys, remember this video?

I've actually decided to release this port after all. I actually finished it a few days ago but never bothered to release it. Thanks Atma for rearranging the MIDI and providing advice for this port.

Download here. Have fun being on the way to destruction.

Random thought while making this post: I'm bored but that's nothing special.

[SMW] [Patch] LevelASM v1.4

2010-06-01T17:21:00.000+02:00

Original post.

This is more like an update than a fresh dump of ASM... but whatever!

Yeah, some people told me that there's a major bug in LevelASM version 1.3 which didn't run the MAIN code for about 1.5 seconds after unpausing the game. I've decided to fix this for the sake of Supamariowarudosentorarupurodakushon. ...Well, to contribute to the community too of course. I've also made long jumps point to the mirror ROM. In less technical terms, LevelASM is using FastROM addressing.

I've also added a small patch (REVERT.asm) which restores the previous 2 MAIN hijack points in the earlier versions of LevelASM to their original state, for the sake of compability and so that the MAIN code doesn't run twice/thrice each frame.

Download LevelASM here. Before applying the patch, please read the readme. Please

Random thought while making this post: I just lost the game.

[SMW] [Music] Wonderboy in Monster World - Biomecha's stage

2010-05-21T13:24:00.001+02:00

There was always a game music I've always wanted to port ever since addmusic first came out. It happened to be this one:

It's from "Wonderboy in Monster World" for the Sega Genesis.

Of course, with the porting skills I have now I managed to port it, and in my opinion it sounds pretty nice. For me it's rare to port music with distortion guitar as the main melody. But of course, I backed this one up with piano if you listen carefully.

Oh! Of course, the download link:
download.

Random thought while making this post: I wonder if smkdan has school today.

[SNES] [Tool] HDMA Gradient Ripper v1.1.3.2

2010-05-04T16:33:00.000+02:00

Original thread. This is originally intended for SMW but of course you can use it with any SNES ROM.

What this tool does is accepting .PNG or other images (PNG is preferred for obvious reasons).

Click for a bigger image.

Basically, the tool rips the colors from the provided image line by line, by grabbing the very first pixel of the processed line.

Then the tool converts the colors to register $2132 or $2121-$2122 (CGRAM) format so you can use it with HDMA later. And finally, it actually outputs two HDMA tables ($2132 and CGRAM regs) of the image you provided. I have included few example images in the release so you can try them out.

I've included a few basic filters for the output, such as turning the gradient into grayscale with one of the two algorithms, turning the gradient negative, or turning the gradient into sepia. I've also added an option to join/compress the scanlines so it uses less bytes, otherwise the output would be for every single scanline which would eat up lots of bytes. If you don't compress the scanlines, the output's size will be ((height * 3 + 1)+(height * 2 + 1)) bytes big, which is pretty big when you use 224 scanlines already. Thanks edit1754 for taking the time to code the compression function and optimizing the tool a bit.

I've also included basic levelASM codes to enable HDMA on either the backdrop or CGRAM. People with basic ASM skills should be able to figure their way out using it.

Aaaaaand to drag this out a little longer, here is an image I made so you can compare the tool's SNES preview output with the ingame output (Snes9x); Backdrop HDMA:

If you HDMA to the CGRAM registers ALONG with the palette destination, you can create gradients on a single color on the palette!

Protip: I didn't make this tool for SMW only! One could technically use the outputs in a homebrew ROM, or in some other SNES game as long as you have the appropiate ASM code! For SMW hackers: you can literally use the output everywhere as long as the code runs every frame.

You can download the tool here.

Random thought while making this post: Why is my blog's width so small? I can't even embed big images properly.
Another random thought while making this post: I just realized all of the tools I make aren't meant for SMW only.

Brief news about some ASM project.

2010-04-11T12:36:00.000+02:00

Anyone still remembers this post? Ever wondered how I even coded that thing to be wavy and stuff to begin with? Well, the answer is in this post.

Originally, the video is a demonstration of my Extended Spritetool project as the video name implies. I just used in that post to show off my speed routine too.

Now I haven't mentioned a thing about this project anymore for weeks because I was stuck at sprite clipping, but that's because I wasn't really too great in ASM back then. You might be wondering, "Huh? over 2 years of ASM experience and you STILL have to learn things?"

Well, to be honest I know all the opcodes. But you can't make a good meal with awesome ingredients if you don't know how to use them properly. Although I haven't put a lot of effort to learn ASM nowadays, I managed to learn quite a lot by spriting only. Then I finally understood the system behind clipping.

First, a routine gets called. Then, another routine gets called. Then finally, a third routine gets called to check if there's a collision. The first routine can either be a 'get sprite clipping' routine, a 'get cape clipping' routine, 'get mario clipping' routine or anything like those. The second routine call is the same. Then The 3rd routine checks if there's a collision between those two. I've figured that out and I managed to continue with my Extended Spritetool.

So how far is the progress? My guess is that it is 80% completed IF I do not encounter ANY oddities in the original extended sprites. Also, new in my extended sprite system are the following:
- An 8-bits configuration table; Currently there are only 2 used.
- You can have up to $FF extended sprites now
- An optimized, easy-to-modify clipping table.
- No more hardcoded OAM slots like in the original SMW.

Currently unchanged in the system:
- Extended sprite $0A remains collectible as a cloud game coin.
- No documented Object-to-Extended sprite interaction code (except with fireballs and underwater air bubbles Mario creates).

And here's my todo-list:
- Handle Extended Sprite-to-Sprite interaction/write a library routine for it.
- Document the Object-to-Extended sprite interaction code.
- Write more library codes to assist ASM-beginners.
- Rewrite my own version of "GET_DRAW_INFO" IF my sprites breaks up OAM stuff somehow.

Finally, there's one thing which bugs me. I'm not sure if I should make this a command-line application or not. If I'm going to make a command-line application, I only know C#, which uses .NET . As far as I know, only windows uses this.
But if I do not write a command-line application the tool's going to get confusing as hell. I'm anticipating this dilemma when I'm about to release Extended Spritetool.

Random thought while making the post: I like how I've improved my ASM skills to build a patch like this, along with an example sprite. Am I pulling a Mikeyk?

[SNES] [Tool] SNES Color convertor

2010-04-09T14:25:00.000+02:00

This tool can convert colors between these formats: SNES hex, PC hex, PC RGB. I've coded this in javascript due to boredom so it isn't really a 'tool'. But it does the job of a tool so yeah. Just input stuff and you get the conversion immediately, no need to click stuff.

You can access the tool here.

Random thought while making this post: Should I really implement the SuperFX chip in SMW, or is it more trouble than it is worth it?

[SMW] [Music] An Untitled Story - Mist

2010-04-02T22:21:00.002+02:00

I liked this soundtrack, so I decided to port it. Personally, I like the percussion. Listen:

Download it here.

Random thought while making this post: what if all the SuperFX features were emulated in the SNES CPU, so that it did all the rotating, scaling and whatnot, would that melt the CPU in real life?

[SMW] [Music] An Untitled Story - In the dark

2010-03-31T21:37:00.001+02:00

Yeah, I got interested in music porting again. This time I was pretty much determined to port one of my favourite An Untitled Story soundtracks, "In the dark". You can hear this in DarkGrotto. You can download it here.

In other news, Googlepages should stop being a derp. It keeps giving me a 500 error and all my files got moved to Googlesites instead. If all of my googlepages links suddenly die, blame google, not me.

Dear boredom

2010-03-04T15:49:00.000+01:00

I do not know why. But you make me do hilarious things at times.

So basically there was an English assignment: 100 words minimal, I had to write a 'part of a letter' about myself, my school, my residental area and whatnot. Although I forgot the residental area part I pretty much managed to finish this letter within 15 minutes. The red striked out words mean that the word/sentence was incorrect, and only red words are the corrections. With that, here's the letter:

"Hello there. In this letter I'm going to give you a general idea of my place of residence. Additionally, I will tell you random stuff about my hobbies which might bore or entertain you, depending on the fact if you like useless information or not. Knowing that I'm going to exceed fifty words soon, I better get started.

My name is Ersan. I'm a high school student who studies in HAVO 5 right now. My school's located in Duiven and it takes approximately fifteen minutes to get there by bicycle (this only goes for me of course. I'm not sure about the other ~~mortals~~ humans. Or rather, people).

My greatest hobby is programming. Currently, ~~I'm practicing~~ I practice C# (pronounce: C-sharp). It's a pretty easy language I love. After high school, I'm going to study programming. So that was pretty much it. I hope I didn't bore you by forcing you to read this wall of text.

Yours
*signature*
Ersan."

I was bored as hell as you can see. Teacher's comment: *laughing* "Very good!"

"I don't know why I'm so shy".

2010-03-01T23:01:00.000+01:00

Before I get started, I would like to say that this post is just a summary of my thoughts I had recently. I'm not responsible for any brain damage this post causes to you in any way. Nor do I claim that these thoughts are absolute facts. With that aside, let's get started.

Being shy... It sucks. But I've always been wondering: How can people become shy to begin with? Is it determined in the genetic information? Is it determined by disorders? Or is it determined by the people around you?

Personally, I think two options are correct: disorders and the people around you influence your behaviour. I'm not going to get to the genetic stuff because I simply do not know. I also won't get to the disorders stuff because that's common sense.

But wait, people around you influence your behaviour too? Yes, they do. Take for example this situation:

You're living in a foreign country. You look 'weird' compared to other people. As in, you're quite noticeable. You're also chubby since forever.

This is where your life begins. You're going to the primary school. Since you don't know the country's native language you can't do anything. You can't communicate for the slightest bit. In other words, you're completely undefended.

Then kids start to bully you because of your appearance. (Kids at such a young age do not care about logic anyway). They're most-likely going all out (verbally). Even a teacher physically abused you (for example, trying to make you drown in the sink as a 'punishment'). This goes on for years. You move to another school, same case with the children because your religion is different this time. "bla bla your religion sucks" "you suck" etc.

People who do not defend themselves at such situations will end up exactly like me: extremely reclusive, never starts a conversation. You're suffering from a trauma. You don't speak to people because you're afraid you're going to get called a 'weirdo' or get yelled at. You're just fearing to fail.

The only way to get out of this situation is to actually put effort to socialize again. Instead of waiting for someone to talk with you, why don't you go talk with them instead? Be the first one to greet people. Do some 'small-talks'. In breaks, don't wait people to get at your table; Go to people's table instead. This list can go on forever. The possibilities to get rid of shyness is endless!

But there's always two problems: You're shy. You might think, "how the hell are you going to start conversations?" Another problem is those darned "What if?" questions. For example: "What if he's going to tell me to fuck off? What if he's going to ignore me? [...this can go on forever...]"

My way would be this: Persevere. Do not think of the "what ifs". Even if it happens, do not continue thinking about it.
"Screw shyness, experimenting won't hurt." Of course I'm experimenting (since I'm studying scientifical stuff at high school at the moment >_>). But seriously, personally I keep my head cool. I'm not trying to think about the consequences. And I keep this in mind: "If I talk properly, I will succeed".

I'm not sure what your way of dealing with shyness would be. But if you're going to deal with your shyness anyway, then best of luck to you. Forget about the dreaded past and look forward. It's easier said than done.

Underestimation, procrastination, and fear.

2010-02-19T00:56:00.000+01:00

Before I get started, I would like to say that this post is just a summary of my thoughts I had recently. I'm not responsible for any brain damage this post causes to you in any way. With that aside, let's get started.

Underestimation... I do believe it is in the human nature, and almost nothing can be done about it. Let's talk about regular homework and assignments here.

For example, it's Monday and you have a Computer Science test at Friday. Knowing that you're seriously experienced with Computer Science, you just leave everything as it is until late Thursday. The day before the test. Then, you start reading through the information you will have to learn, 'just in case'. After reading, you start thinking: "shit, shit! I've never even seen this before! What the heck am I going to do now?!"

Anyone recognize this? I sure do. This is a case of procrastination. And procrastination is not fun. You can screw over your future easily by thinking you're oh-so-talented. You're convincing yourself that you're oh-so-talented. Yet, you got screwed over by such a simple test. Why? Because you procrastinated. You have underestimated your test. Thus, you thought you could do the studying later.

See where the essence of procrastination lies? It's underestimation. Like I would say in DRGunZ: "Underestimation will lead you to your grave." To make it less subliminal: Underestimation can screw you over. Underestimating someone or something already means you're doing it wrong. It can't hurt to do everything while fully motivated. You won't lose anything. You will just gain more. You can gain victory. But if you start to underestimate situations, you will slowly lose whatever you want/have.

Then, after failing the test you get allowed to re-do the test. You're thinking: "Oh well isn't that just awesome. I'll surely take the test again! I know what's going to be in it now, so I'll just leave it until the last day again." Then, during the test, you realize that you don't know the essential details. "FML", you think. Yes... Another case of underestimation and procrastination.

Underestimation will eventually call forth fear. You're fearing that you're screwing over your future. You're fearing that you're losing. You want to get out of this mess. Your heart is in chaos. You want to succeed. Now what most people do is trying to fix up everything again by doing stuff dedicatedly. But unfortunately there are some people who don't do this. They are getting intoxicated by underestimation. They end up in a vicious circle. This is the point where they need serious help. They will have to break out this situation. To all those people out there: Persevere. Do not screw over your future. Fight for yourself.

That's all.

EDIT: KilloZapit has a point too (in the comments).

[SMW] [Patch] Special OW color keeper

2010-02-05T21:42:00.000+01:00

Straight from the patch description:
This patch removes every single visible trace of the 'special world beaten' effects, except it keeps the overworld colors only.
Also normalizes Koopa colors, behaviours (speed), and enemy graphics.
Inspired by Aqualakitu. Analyzed and created by me within 45 minutes.
To be honest this must be one of the easiest patches I have ever created.
Download

Also, ASM dump #10. Awesomeness!

Vocabulary tests.

2010-01-31T21:10:00.000+01:00

One type of particular tests which always have annoyed me are vocabulary tests. I never get vocabulary tests for Dutch so I don't have to worry about that. The subject I always have troubles with is English.

Yes, you read that right. English.

I'm having difficulties with English vocabulary tests. We always have to learn it the English-to-Dutch way. It would be even more fail if it was Dutch-to-English so I'm happy about that.

The thing I'm not happy with is that I suck at Dutch, but I'm good at English. What's wrong with being good at English, you would ask? Nothing. It's just difficult to translate stuff from an easier language to a more difficult language, mainly because Dutch isn't my native language (seeing that I'm Turkish).

On an unrelated note, destiny has granted me to be born in a foreign country and be stuck there for a grand total of 17+ years. Yet, I still fail at Dutch. This pretty much proves that Dutch language is complicated as fuck. No offense to the Dutch people themselves though. I find it amazing that THEY can speak Dutch fluently (atleast around my vicinity).

Last time during the test, I recognized ALL of the words. I knew what ALL of the words meant. Heck, I could describe the words in English if I wanted. Yet, I didn't know the Dutch equivalent of it. I ended up with a 1 out of 10 for that part of the test. I did well in the grammar and the reading part, but it wasn't that good. I ended up with a 4 out of 10 for the whole test.

This all pissed me off. Just because my Dutch language is more limited than my English language I failed an English test. I used to get the same results with German and French too. But luckily I don't have those two anymore. Otherwise I would be here ripping my hair out right now.

Moral of the story? Go study two languages for one test if it involves vocabulary.

[SNES] [Tool] Super MagiCom Header Tool

2010-01-19T13:48:00.000+01:00

I've made this tool for the following reason:

People have been wondering how to add/remove headers, so I thought I should help out the new people in some way. The tool must be user friendly, and really really easy to use. Then I came up with the idea of a drag & drop application.

Just drag a ROM file on the executeable, and the header will be added or removed (depending if you have a header or not). If the ROM has an invalid size, nothing will happen. More instructions in the executeable itself, just run it.

Finally, download the tool here.

Just a random note

2010-01-15T18:29:00.000+01:00

I finished doing stuff as stated in this list. ...Most of them anyway. Still gotta finish TMR3.

[SMW] [Code] Spawned sprite Xspeed modifier

2009-12-19T15:23:00.000+01:00

(Original post)
Here's a projectile Xspeed routine I ripped straight from SMB3's hammer powerup throwing routine, tweaked so that it can be used in SMW.

If you played SMB3, then you know that hammers go at different Xspeeds depending on Mario's speed. This routine does that too. Another example of speed modification: a kicked shell goes faster in SMW when it gets kicked while Mario is running, compared to when Mario is walking.

Code can be found here!

Demonstration:

Words per minute!

2009-12-09T18:06:00.001+01:00

(Original post)

My average is about 94 words per minute with one error. To be honest I see no need of going further than 100 words per minute, but I think I'm going to improve my typing even more (reducing amount of backspace hits). In the end I am sure I will hit about +100 words per minute that way.

In case you want to hear me smashing my keyboard with background music:
http://ersan00b.googlepages.com/LETS_SMASH_DIZ.mp3

...Too bad my words per minute drops dramatically to like 8 when I am coding in ASM.

No more 'placeholder' for the sidebar.

2009-11-25T17:20:00.000+01:00

I'm replacing it with a list of pages I created in SMWiki!

Also, my activity is much higher than last year. I can't believe it! :O

[SMW] [Block] 32x32 throw blocks

2009-11-21T15:34:00.000+01:00

Nothing 'big'. It is just a 32x32 throw block, but it actually spawns a 16x16 throw block when picked up.

Brief demonstration:

Download here

[SNES] [Tool] SNES BGR to SNES Reg $2132 converter V1.1

2009-11-19T19:32:00.000+01:00

Straight from my C3 thread, slightly edited to match the tool's current version.

(For advanced people only/for people who know how to work with SNES Register $2132)

You input a SNES color, you get an output you can use for HDMA with register $2132. Since the color formats are different I felt like building a converter. Useful for detailed backdrop HDMA gradients!

Keep in mind that reg 2132 is a write thrice register if you want to use R, G AND B. That's why I have three outputs.

Here are some simple instructions on how to use the tool:

* Create a color you like in LM.
* Stick it in the converter.
* Convert.
* Create a table for HDMA.
* Stick the table in a HDMA code.
* Stick the HDMA code in a levelASM code.
* Stick the levelASM code in your hack.
* ???
* Profit.

Removing the color bits will only give you the color intensity of register $2132.

Additionally, you can pick a color directly thanks to a dialog, to do a SNES -> Reg conversion immediately.

Download.

(Requires .NET 2.0)

(Heh, now I have tool dumps too? >_>)

[SMW] [Code] Count amount of specified map16 blocks within a level.

2009-11-17T22:19:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I've been coding some code for two hours straight. The code was supposed to count the amount of the specified map16 blocks. But eventually I ended up with this fail code. But I didn't give up! The next day (AKA today) I made the correct, finished code within 30 minutes.

Directly from the code library thread in SMWC:

Here is a code I wrote yesterday to check how many specified map16 tiles are in a level (not counting sublevels too). To be used with "LevelASM + INIT"'s INIT routine. The code is somewhat sloppy (I think) and increases the level fade-in time a bit. But I couldn't really find a way to improve this.

I/O:
In: $7E0000: 24-bit pointer to a table with specified map16 tiles.
In: $7E000E: 16-bit size of the table with specified map16 tiles, minus 2.
Out: $7E0006: 16-bit result of how many specified map16 tiles there are within the level. $06 = Low byte, $07 = high byte.

Here is an example usage, which counts the amount of map16 tiles $0000, $002B, $0130, $0132 and $0200 present in the level:
Uploaded since it is too big for the blog.

In case you really missed the previous two download links, download the code here!

[SMW] [Block] Icy blocks which can actually melt

2009-11-14T12:15:00.000+01:00

Straight from my C3 thread:

Yeah, about time I submitted them. Actually I would submit them earlier but I thought I should wait till C3. Nothing big. Nothing special. I just wanted to have a submission.

You can see a brief demonstration here:

It's not even all of them. ...But whatever, here is the download link.

Also, point of advice:
If you are creative, in the map16 page you could make this setup:
[+][+][+][E]
Where + is the map16++ ice block and E is the empty tile.
So the block only melts after 3 hits.

Report any bugs you find and have fun using my boring-but-perhaps-useful submission.

ASM Tutorial v2.1

2009-11-14T12:11:00.000+01:00

Here is yet another update of my ASM tutorial. Straight from the document description:

This tutorial covers almost every aspect in terms of ASM, but it does not cover the SNES itself-related stuff. It has 39 pages now, while the previous version had 36. Included is a HTML file with a list of opcodes and other stuff related to it. I didn't add a HTML version of the document though.

What's new in this version: A whole chapter about the decimal mode, brief explanation about the overflow flag, brief explanation about little-endian, explained BIT more detailed, fixed minor mistakes and changed some explanations.

If you notice any errors, please contact me as soon as possible so I can fix them! I plan to add interrupts in the next version if I ever learn how they work.

Download

This item has been submitted for SMWCentral's C3.

The layout of this blog

2009-11-13T13:27:00.001+01:00

I'm trying to improve it, so sorry if I accidentally the whole thing.

[SMW] [Block] Remove carried item block

2009-11-11T20:24:00.000+01:00

This block will remove the item you are currently carrying. It will remove both the carried items if you carry two items at once. It will remove the carried item while you're riding Yoshi too (you know, that glitch). As long as you are carrying something, it will get removed.

tl;dr the carried item will be removed.

The block is designed for BTSD.

Download

[SMW] [Code] Block acts different depending on X/Ypos?!

2009-11-10T20:58:00.006+01:00

Recently after I looked at some original SMW blocks, which spawn different stuff depending on it's X-coordinate, I came up with a brilliant idea: Make an algorithm which does the same thing, but without finding an example. The block was rather simple to make.

PHX ;Preserve sprite index
LDA $9A ;Load block xpos
REP 4 : LSR A ;grab nibble 1.
AND #$0F ;\Turn it into index
TAX ;/
;X will now have an index of the block xpos
;in a '16x16' grid instead of '1x1'.
**Code ;any code which uses x
PLX

Here is a small example:

PHX
LDA $9A
REP 4 : LSR A
AND #$0F
TAX
LDA Table,x
STA $19
PLX

Table: db $00,$00,$00,$00,$01,$01,$01,$01
db $02,$02,$02,$02,$03,$03,$03,$03

This code would make Mario small on the first four x-coordinates on the current screen, big on the next four, cape on the next four, fiery on the last four.

If you want to do the same thing with the Y-position, you should use $98 instead of $9A. Keep in mind that I haven't tested this in a vertical level.

[SMW] [Code] Introducing new dumps

2009-11-10T18:12:00.000+01:00

Yup, this time I will dump some neat ASM codes too.

Here is a code to determine which top corner of a custom block you are touching. To be used with BTSD's new Corner Offsets feature.

LDA $9A
AND #$08
BNE Rightcorner
*code for left corner here*

The code branches when Mario touches the right corner. If it doesn't branch, it touches the left corner.

On an unrelated note, forget about the Ultra FastROM patch until I like, stop being extremely lazy and fix the LM incompability.

[SMW] [Patch] Ultra FastROM Patch

2009-11-06T15:57:00.000+01:00

Contents removed due to patch not working. See EXTREME FastROM instead.

Apparently I keep forgetting to follow the Note-to-self list.

My recent inactivity when it comes to this blog

2009-10-15T23:05:00.000+02:00

Wonder why I died again? Guess why.

I ran out of ASM ideas. Damn >_> I have a couple of Note to self's though.

Note to self: Make the next post related to the Icy Blocks Package.
Note to self #2: Fix existing patches/add RATS tags to them:
- Ersanio's level ASM: Fix all 3 RATS tags.
- Fire-Spitting Jumping Pirahna Plant SFX: Add RATS tag.
- No capespin in water: Add RATS tag.
- SMB3 P-meter: Fix freespace definition, fix RATS tag, get rid of useless statusbar.bin
- Statusbar scanline hack: Get rid of confusing levelnum.ips comment. Fix RATS tag. Make a version which uses flag bits instead of values too.
Note to self #3: Stop being fucking lazy and release those icy blocks already.
Note to self #4: Start working on TMR3 again after all those.