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Super Mario World Central Production 2 - First Official Release!

i'm glad it's over! or well... almost over, at least. glad to see it in a releasable state. really incredible how it turned out, with so much great effort and love put into the aesthetics and content, and a lot the stuff that's been developed in the restoration projects is really well designed. the design of some of the levels definitely shows its age, but it's pretty well polished at this point.

feels great to have been a part of it way back. sorry for not helping much with the completion project, though. #lm{owsprlist}
aran - Graces of Heaven
Ooh, neat.

I remember making a thing for this.

But seriously, the first year or two had such great camaraderie, and was a genuine joy to be a part of, and then...it felt like an exercise in exasperation and general malaise. After stepping away for a few years I remember popping in one day out of sheer curiosity. The whole thing read like a shit storm. I remember testing the stuff I contributed; it felt like a shit storm. Again, years pass and I catch the tail end of Blind Devil's tenure...and stuff's happening. Then Falconpunch, the "kid brother" who was always hanging around in the SMWCP2 threads early on annoying the crap out of everyone, takes the reins, and actually sees this thing through to the end...with "necessary" improvements (not just updates for the sake of updates so it isn't so blatantly obvious that this thing was made a decade ago, like that actually matters).

Awesome to see it finally released. Cheers to all who were involved: those from the early years, many like myself who are no longer ROM hackers and/or active members to those who have come along in the latter years. And cheers to all the leaders over the years - hope you all didn't bang your heads against the wall too much. And to Falconpunch, congrats on finishing this fucking thing!!

As far as the stuff yet to make it in, I'd say leave it as is unless it truly adds something of importance. Do what patches are deemed necessary, but lamenting over stuff that's sitting on the cutting room floor...let it lie.
Every so often I would retuned back here to check to see if this would ever be released. Today was the day. Props to you Falconpunch. I remember your passion for this project back when it first started it. Cant want to load it up and play.
May as well tell my own tale.

The very first time I was contacted about the project was from brickblock369, who referred me to Blind Devil himself. This was very early into my fork's existence... actually, on the day it was created, November 20, 2020! This was not too long before Blind Devil's resignation.

The problem was the infamous sample optimization problem that I was talked to about multiple times when the user decides to just pick random samples without referring to a sample group that causes major difference between ROM compilation and SPC compilation. I recommended for the song to just use #optimized at the time, as the other option was the -u command line option, which forces inclusion of all samples indicated, and I thought the optimization was by design (Tamaki finally gave me a use case that told me that there was a major inconsistency between ROM and SPC compilations, causing me to finally make things more consistent).

My fork debuted with a couple of arpeggio fixes and a readahead softlock bugfix, both SPC-side. I didn't send these over to the version you see here, but you'll find out later on that I brought out my fork, specifically the C++ side, due to dissatisfaction with the version they were using.

Blind Devil initially told me that it was 1.0.3 they were using (as I found out, that was incorrect on a technicality). I joined the Discord Server in early February 2021, shortly after debuting my fork on the SMWCentral forums. I ended up using my own self-compiled version of 1.0.8, as I determined they were using 1.0.5 and there were no significant C++-side differences between 1.0.5 and 1.0.8 that I could see.

The very first problem I ran into was outdated information on the git repositories, since this was shortly after Blind Devil's resignation. (I am so glad that Disk Poppy maintained the git repo in the long run so I could keep up with the updates, because I was having major concerns about things getting scattered and possibly lost in the long run). This actually ended up affecting my design for three out of the four songs, because I was thinking of the death jingle and samples already being present, not realizing they had already been replaced and I was looking at outdated files. I decided to carry on for now, since I wasn't actually interested in playing the game for the most part (I eventually did briefly look around for contextual reasons for one of the levels, but I otherwise didn't really play the game).

My main contributions were the following:
  • Providing a C++-side build of my 1.0.9 release candidate in order to resolve major problems.
  • A few SPC-side fixes from my 1.0.9 release candidate: specifically, I added in my slowdown fix from 1.0.7 and up and I also added in a music bugfix for $DD interacting with $FA $02 (after making sure that nothing else was affected: I did end up catching one, so I corrected that one) and optimized the SFX data to get rid of that leftover data that plagued the original SFX collection.
  • Four music revamps. Two of them were entirely my work on the remastering (Electrospire and Lucid), a third one was a hybrid of a port of someone else's revamp and original material (Iron Notes of Industry, where Magi was the original person that revamped the song) and the last one was me revamping the entire song after it had already been revamped and partially ported (Machine-Made Mayhem, where Magi was the original person that revamped the song, and Torchkas was the one that started on the porting prior to me giving it a second makeover in the sound design department).


Electrospire was my first revamp. Initially I used almost zero custom samples, but a lukewarm reception instead convinced me to do the opposite and go almost completely custom sample pack-wise (I didn't replace the bass and distorted guitar: the former because my replacement, a similarly small sample. didn't really work, and the latter because I never got around to doing so).

Lucid was my second revamp. Once again I went pretty much completely custom: the main obstacle was that in the process of porting the filter steps I ran into a hardware pitch overflow problem with the samples I was recycling from, so I had to create shrunk down versions to circumnavigate that problem.

Iron Notes of Industry was my third revamp, collaborating with Magi. This was a very interesting process: initially I was utilizing the original .mp3 file that covered the original song. Then a climax section was added on to give it a more proper loop... and then it was extended after some feedback, with Magi providing part of a second iteration, then I brought out my pitch modulation magic to bring it back to the beginning again. This one ran into the most serious memory constraints in the long run, though it was partially by accident caused by extending the song and going a bit too far.

After Iron Notes of Industry, I took a break of about a month (the first three were all completed in mid-March 2021, so this was in April 2021), then I asked Torchkas for a collaboration with Machine-Made Mayhem (well... it didn't quite turn out to be a collaboration in the long run, but for this one only, I was actively releasing betas with the source .txt files, expecting anyone else to possibly revise it: ultimately it never happened). I ended up abandoning my work in May-June after getting to around where Torchkas had left off on the original version because of dissatisfaction with AddmusicK (the last beta prior to the hiatus was released in September). I still provided my feedback, but I otherwise left to work on my AddmusicKFF fork.

My work on AddmusicKFF as far as the C++-side goes started to get incorporated in late September-early October 2021. I ended up returning to complete the Machine-Made Mayhem revamp in late February 2022 because of time constraints within the project itself (they made the right call to start finalizing the assets for an initial release) as well as my development of my fork not going as quickly as it could have. I did give them an updated version of the C++ side for them to use... and they also caught a bug that I accidentally introduced in the process.

As far as Machine-Made Mayhem goes, this particular revamp ended up being the last one ever completed: the project was initially released May 2, 2022. I finalized the revamp of Machine-Made Mayhem on April 8, 2022, about a month prior to release: to put things simply, it ended up being a bit of a close shave.

I also discovered that the soundtrack was to be prepped for general release with AddmusicK 1.0.8. Well, in addition to having to undo my adaptations for $DD interacting with $F4 $02 (which saved memory for Machine-Made Mayhem in particular, but since I was cautious with my sample usage, I had room to spare to undo this optimization), I also discovered four instruments were modified from their original settings, three of them percussion instruments (one of them was found out to have been completely unused). So I catalogued them all and marked down which songs needed either custom instruments or an ADSR VCMD in order to be utilized for general use.

My tale ends there for now.
This... actually released? I think I'm having a stroke.
Click here to enter the world of mediocre!
Huh, whoops, just ran into a freeze bug during the Dryad boss fight.

Got a cape and used it to spin-fly upwards in an attempt to get an early hit in on her. As I was still spinning, I got hit by one of those red "Nippers" falling down, which made the game freeze. Had to reset and replay the level.

That aside, world 2 was pretty fun. It had one or two levels that felt a tad too long, as well as one or two SMWC coins in somewhat annoying places, but overall, nothing too troublesome. Was definitely a lot less stressful than Japan world.

EDIT: Gosh, there must be a special place in hell for anyone putting a tricky-to-get SMWC coin right after a checkpoint. Especially if it's a "puzzley" one that requires obtaining an item first. Those are always so annoying when having to get them multiple times.

Although I guess the real issue here still is not saving SMWC coins immediately. I'm not sure if level designers back then even knew how the coins would work in the end, so they might not have been able to work around the issue.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!
i rember promising to code the dreamer. just send me 10 BTC and ill dig up what i had ;)
Originally posted by Ladida
just send me 10 BTC and ill dig up what i had ;)

That's what, 5 dollars by now?

This is quite the accomplishment though. Congrats to everyone involved, it's pretty amazing this actually managed to see (some kind of) a release!
Originally posted by RPG Hacker


Although I guess the real issue here still is not saving SMWC coins immediately. I'm not sure if level designers back then even knew how the coins would work in the end, so they might not have been able to work around the issue.


another person reported the SMWC coin saving problem here.

in early SMWCP2 base ROM versions (like the old 7-2015 and some of the 2017/2018 versions Lui37 made & I've played these old unfinished versions) before SMWCP2 was "finalized" in 2022, this was not a problem where after getting the missed or remaining SWMC coins and exiting the level with Start+Select or dying would immediately save/update the SMWC coin status

edit - the 2020 SMWCP2 base ROM versions that BlindDevil made, did not save SMWC coin status while dying or exiting level with Start+Select. only saves the SMWC coin status by touching the midway gate, roulette goal or beating a boss
Great work! Congrats!!!!! #smrpg{y}

Participated or not, it feels so good to see this happen! We’re witnessing history right here, this doesn’t come around very often!
Every dream is but another reality, never forget…

My In-Progress Hack

Just made it through world 4, and I gotta say, its boss easily felt the most broken so far. It doesn't take long to realize what you're meant to do, since there aren't really a lot of options, but actually making it happen takes a lot of stress.

It seems like the movement code of Jelectro (was that its name?) only works one third of the time. I mean, maybe this is just a hardware thing, who knows, but it's obvious that whenever the boss turns red, it's meant to launch into the player's direction, giving opportunity to steer it into the spikes. However, when I was playing, this just outright didn't work reliably. Most of the time, I was somewhere to the left or right of the arena, but the boss just aimed diagonally down, missing the spikes entirely. It took many, many tries for it to finally hit the spikes.

The torpedo didn't really help much, either, since its controls are... well, not very great. It's hard too describe, but it either goes super slow or super fast, it really lacks precision. I think it's nearly impossible to beat the boss with a Big Mario hitbox because of this. Having a Small Mario hitbox makes it a lot more manageable, but random boss jank can very easily lead to immediate death - which leads to quite a bit of stress, considering that particular level also happens to be quite long.

I guess all of these boss issues are ultimately to be expected, though. Polished bosses are hard to make, and the hack just contains a lot of custom ones.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!
Originally posted by RPG Hacker
Jelectro (was that its name?)


His name is King Jelectro, since I drew a crown for him to wear. Sadly it wasn't implemented, but this is how it was meant to look:

Just so you know, I'm very active on the site anymore like I was before; I'm mainly on Discord now.
Sometimes I wonder if less is more; rather than trying to code 8 different unique boss battles focus on coding 1-3 unique boss battles for the final world(s). The other worlds can make do with ones already in the sprites section, or no bosses at all.

It seems very few people are willing to commit to coding a custom boss these days.
Originally posted by RPG Hacker
...

I had the same problem at first, he wouldn't go where intended... but
it seems to work better if you dodge by swimming upwards rather than downwards
Hi people

first of all thanks for this great hack

I couldnt find a custom cover art for it, so I made one. Not perfect I know but I hope is serviciable for those who wish to have the hack on a digital librairy




I've played it on Real Hardware (using a SD2SNES) and it works flawlessly
The hack was pretty good until the water levels started. I just quit on the medusa boss and never plan to continue.
I did a playthrough on this hack for those who need help finding certain exits or SMWC coins.
Done on Version 1.1!

100% Playthrough
how do i patch this? There's 3 files, but i don't know if your supposed to patch them WITH the .bps, or just patch the rom with the .bps and have the cutscene stuff in a folder WITH the rom.