Well well, it seems it has been a long time as usual. In the time since the last post, the community over on the discord has grown immensely, and I cannot thank everyone enough on the server. You have all been very wonderful and have made this little passion project of mine into something I could never have imagined.
Now onto the information. Since most of the information has been posted to the discord, I will spare the nitty gritty details, but I figured some of you would like to know about....
d e b u g m o d e.
Yep! Very recently I found a few tidbits and things indicating "unused" features of the game, that when delved deep into, turned out to be debug options! So far, I have only been able to mess with two of the options, but it is surprisingly simple to do.
The main culprit of this whole thing is the address $1F06. Now this address has shown up a bit and was stumping me for a while, but while researching the items code, I stumbled upon the routine responsible for item debugging. The good news is that it is super easy to enable this mode (provided you have an ability to edit hex values, via emulator or game genie). Simply set the value of $1F06 to 0x10. That's it.
Now, this debug mode allows you to use any item effect at any time**. To enable each action, simply folow these button combinations:
CodeA: Mushroom
Y: Feather
X: Star
Select: Banana
L: Green Shell
R: Red Shell
Y+Down: Boo
Y+Up: Lightning
However, the two "Y+Up" and "Y+Down" inputs must be entered on the same frame, which is sometimes a bit tricky to pull off. However, I find that the most fun ones are easier to use. I may or may not have spent about 20 minutes messing around spamming mushrooms and feathers to break courses. And yes, you can spam them, because you are in essence enabling the "item used" action for that item.
** because time trial does not have the notion of place-able items, they cannot be used in time trial mode. However, the non-place-able items like mushrooms and feathers can still be used. Everywhere else though, no restrictions apply.
The less exciting debug option that can be enabled is done by setting the value of $1F06 to 0x04. This mode simply allows you to press L at any time to change it to the last lap for every racer. You can now have the fastest Ghost times ever with little effort.
(or, you know, you could spam mushrooms and feathers like a mad man like me)
Another recent discovery, made as a side effect of the debug options, was that SMK handles item memory allocation in a very odd way. Normally, it will reserve the $1A00 bank for 2 items, however it is possible to allow up to 8 items easily by changing 2 bytes of code. Now, I won't go into the full explanation here, as I am still looking into this, but it seems that there is a possibility to be able to allocate 23 (!!!!!!!) items, provided there is enough free RAM. This would probably not be feasible in GP, but for a quick and dirty solution it is PROBABLY possible to get a battle or a match race with 23 items zooming around. (combine that with debug mode for a world of fun... or pain).
If you would like to be a part of this ever-growing community of SMK lovers, the discord link is in the top of this thread and in the bottom of this post. Information to here is a bit slower for me as I am more active on the discord. I tend to publish completed and polished notes here to keep accurate content on here, whereas I post general notes on the discord where the information can be discussed. I promise there is WAY more information there than I have discussed here.
Thanks again!
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MrL314
Join our Discord!: https://discord.gg/QNcKNQC