You crazy kids and your Add Music and your Sprite Tool. Back in my day, we didn't have none of that--when we wanted something new, we took a hex editor to the rom, tossed a few A9s, BDs, and F0s in there, and hoped we counted our bytes correctly!

Anyway, I'm hoping you guys know/are willing to find out something about Item Memory--is it possible to disable it? I'm thinking of making a hack that is one giant level, which would work out much, much better if coins weren't spontaneously disappearing once I ran out of Item Memory slots.

Thank you so much. I'm going to use this in conjunction with an overworld hack for devious results.

In my own hack I went a step further and removed bonus stars from existence entirely (and used the bonus star counter for something entirely different). I never cared much for bonuses that encouraged 'farming' the level over, and over again, like a bad RPG.

Regardless, as for the second solution, here's some code that should do the trick.



I might look into writing the score solution later.

Okay, since Item Memory is supposed to be nonfunctional with this hack in place, I used the item memory setting for something else. I load up a level, set it to "Index 3", play... and some coins don't show up even before I collect any coins at all. I'm... confused.

EDIT:

After testing, I realized that the coin doesn't appear even if I don't use the hack... is Index 3 buggy or something?

Hokay, this is a quick and dirty hack that requires levelnum.ips, which is included in LevelASM right here on SMW Central. When you hit message boxes with this hack, it will use the level you're in rather than the level you entered from the overworld. If message boxes are hit in levels that aren't normal overworld levels, Bad Things will happen.

I don't know if this is the kind of thing that could be useful to anyone, but here it is anyway.



Note: This only works on Lunar Magic edited roms.

If you set 0x493 to zero the game will think the status bar has zero scanlines, and so simply won't make it appear. It's a neat little trick if you need the status bar temporarily gone, and need the hack quick. Now, the problem with this is if Mario should hit, say, a message block, Layer 3 is altered, and suddenly everything shows up.

I've hacked it so that I can choose whether or not a status bar shows up at the start of the level, but the whole poofing out of nowhere bit is pretty annoying. There's got to be a better way then pretending there's no scanlines to write, but I don't really know enough about the rest of the process to disable the status bar any other way.

Here's that hack I made, just in case anyone's interested. I cut out some stuff I didn't think was necessary for the post and haven't tested it since, but it should still work.