Yoshifanatic's ASM Showoff: Part 10 (collab with LadiesMan217) - Summer 2020

YOSHIFANATIC, YOU'RE AN ABSOLUTE MADMAN!!! I wonder if could use this version of AMK for my hack...

Keep it up, dude! And LadiesMan217!!

The Hacking of PuyoPuyo. Come join the fun, friends. 『いけいけ団長、頑張れ頑張れ団長！』

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“Even if you personally are so dissatisfied with life that you want the world to end, surely the cruel reality is that it will continue on, unchanging. All the better for someone perfectly content, like me.”
– Aya Shameimaru, Touhou Suzunaan ~ Forbidden Scrollery

Fanatical like a Demon

Originally posted by MarioFanGamer

I had a feeling that SMAS reuses SMW's sound engine and, ignoring the songs, only adds two new samples (a trumpet and timpani) and sound effects.

Yes and no. It reuses the same source samples but not the same brrs. They're slightly downsampled and not only that, but instead of having instruments calling the same sample but with different ADSR, SMAS chooses to make insert the same multiple times for different ADSR, such as sample 1 and 2 being SMW's @1, or sample 5 and 6 being SMW's @4 (with different ADSR). In case anyone's curious, here's the table matched to SMW (courtesy of tcdw):

Code

;Don't require custom sample:

    $00 @0  $FE $6A $B8 $05 $F0 
    $01 @1  $FA $6A $B8 $02 $F0 
    $02 @1  $FA $6A $B8 $02 $F0 
    $03 @2  $AE $2F $B8 $02 $EF 
    $04 @3  $FE $10 $B8 $05 $F0 
    $05 @4  $A9 $6A $B8 $03 $00 
    $06 @4  $BE $1A $B8 $03 $00 
    $07 @8  $AE $26 $B8 $1D $F0 
    $08 @22 $8C $E0 $70 $07 $A0 
    $09 @22 $0E $6A $40 $07 $A0 
    $0A @5  $AE $26 $B8 $07 $00 
    $0B @6  $FA $6A $B8 $03 $00 
    $0C @7  $9E $1F $B8 $02 $F0 
    $0D @9  $EE $6A $B8 $05 $40 
    $0E @10 $FE $6A $B8 $07 $A0 
    $0F @13 $FE $70 $B8 $03 $00 
    $10 @14 $AE $26 $B8 $06 $F0 
    $11 @29 $8F $E0 $B8 $04 $70 
    $12 @21 $8F $ED $B8 $07 $A0 
    $13 @12 $0E $6A $7F $07 $A0 
    $14 @17 $FE $6A $B8 $09 $F0 
    $15 @15 $8E $E0 $B8 $06 $55 
    $16 "13 SMW Thunder.brr" $8F $E0 $B8 $07 $A0 

;Requires custom samples:

    $17 $FF $E0 $B8 $02 $50     ;Sample 17 (timpani)
    $18 $FF $E0 $B8 $03 $C0     ;Sample 18 (timpani)
    $19 $FF $E0 $B8 $03 $00     ;Sample 19 (trumpet)

With this AMK we got rid of all these duplicates and thus saving a little more space (after now only having one SPC Engine) and have a slightly higher quality OST for SMAS which results in some some songs sounding slightly different (mostly those that uses Sample 6 in chords like SMB2's Boss theme).

Originally posted by MarioFanGamer

I find it really impressive how you managed to make AMK work with SMAS. Too bad there hasn't been anyone to modify AMK's source code, though.

This is indeed sad, however we managed to work with a few people to make minor adjustments such as KungFuFirby's edits and a slowdown tolerance along with some of Lui and Catfish's fixes. Not sure how much I'm allowed to say about this but Intron (alongside with KunFuFirby I think) is working on implementing something into AMK quite a few people have been asking for which will be implemented into SMAS amk too for a missing feature but I'll let them talk about it should they wanna reply.

Major thanks to Suika Ibuki for layout!
I'm open for music requests, just DM me on discord and we can further discuss there.
SMAS Soundtrack Status: 100% finished
YI Soundtrack Status: 100%
YI Unsampled Soundtrack Status: 100%
NSMB Soundtrack Status: 7.89%
Killer Instinct Soundtrack Status: 14.63%
SPC Thread
From our family to you, keep your pants dry, your dreams wet, and remember, hugs not drugs.

Originally posted by MarioFanGamer

Originally posted by yoshifanatic

As for the AMK stuff, I'm actually pretty lucky that not only do all 5 SMAS+W games and menu/title screen handle the SPC stuff the same way as SMW, but that SMAS uses mostly the same samples as SMW (albeit down-sampled versions, according to LadiesMan217). This meant implementing the addmusick engine would be a lot easier than if someone were to try this on some other game that communicates with the SPC700 differently. And the fact that the samples are roughly the same means that music porters don't need to make SMAS+W specific ports, unlike something like Yoshi's Island. Getting AMK to work with SMAS+W may not have happened if all 5 games had a wildly different implementation of communicating the the engine (thankfully, the only thing that differed is what RAM addresses are used as the mirrors).

I had a feeling that SMAS reuses SMW's sound engine and, ignoring the songs, only adds two new samples (a trumpet and timpani) and sound effects.

That's not completely correct. The game previously used two builds on the SPC side: one dedicated to Super Mario World (which is almost an exact match to the original game: the main difference is that it has a new command that zeroes out the echo volume, keys off all notes, stores zeroes to a few memory locations, activates the IPL boot ROM via the CONTROL register, then jumps to the IPL boot routine at $FFC0, done by sending $F0 to $2141), and one dedicated to all of the other games, which is effectively standard N-SPC/Kankichi (meaning it's a later version than what Super Mario World uses, and the VCMDs start at $E0 rather than $DA), with music banks allocated to each of the games (except for Lost Levels, which uses Super Mario Bros.' music, and Super Mario Bros. 3 has two music banks, and the main menu has its own unique music bank).

Due to the different VCMD formats between the two games, this means I would have to do a complete sound driver swap in order to play Super Mario World music any earlier... if that was even possible. It's far easier to do with just one sound driver.

Waialae no Kiseki (Japanese version only: the US version is just standard N-SPC/Kankichi throughout the game) is an even more extreme case of sound driver swapping, as it uses a completely new sound driver for the music while playing a game of golf. Otherwise, it falls under standard N-SPC/Kankichi.

Originally posted by LadiesMan217

Originally posted by MarioFanGamer

I find it really impressive how you managed to make AMK work with SMAS. Too bad there hasn't been anyone to modify AMK's source code, though.

This is indeed sad, however we managed to work with a few people to make minor adjustments such as KungFuFirby's edits and a slowdown tolerance along with some of Lui and Catfish's fixes. Not sure how much I'm allowed to say about this but Intron (alongside with KunFuFirby I think) is working on implementing something into AMK quite a few people have been asking for which will be implemented into SMAS amk too for a missing feature but I'll let them talk about it should they wanna reply.

Yes, the feature in question is in development, and the developer info is correct: Intron is doing the main programming for that. I have no further commentary at this time integration-wise.

Originally posted by Scrydan

Really interesting finds here! Gotta love some good ol' fashion Mario trivia as well.

This thread is wonderful!

Originally posted by Final Theory

Dude your ASM and coding knowledge and abilities are amazing!!!

I'm glad to hear that! ^_^

Originally posted by NewPointless

Wow cool! I would love to design levels for All-Stars!

While that may be hard due to the lack of an editor, you could potentially improvise with an editor for the NES versions. I know someone who is making a SMAS SMB3 hack where they use SMB3 Workshop to make the levels using NES SMB3, export them, then import them into SMAS.

Originally posted by lordkronos100

What Strange Thinks i Have Seen There i Dont Have understand it Fully yet But is This an Actually Bug with The Big Block

Yes, the giant ? block bug is a thing. You have to touch the right side of the block while you're holding right, which means you need to build momentum and attempt to turn around in midair as you touch the block.

Originally posted by MarioFanGamer

I find it really impressive how you managed to make AMK work with SMAS. Too bad there hasn't been anyone to modify AMK's source code, though.

Yeah, I wish I could have edited the tool itself, but getting these programs to compile always turns into an ordeal for me. XD If I could, then editing the tool to work directly on SMAS+W likely wouldn't be too hard though, since the main reason it doesn't work is because it expects patch.asm to be inserted at $0E8000, a location I can't use in SMAS+W. Although, even if that were corrected, asar's freespace finder would be problematic, since there is no way to tell asar that bank 50 is the start of the expanded area in SMAS+W without using RATS tags (this is why RATSMask.asm is needed, in fact. It sets up the SMW ROM to effectively trick asar into thinking most of the space between bank 10 and 4E is being used).

Originally posted by MarioFanGamer

A classic issue why you can't straight up port games.

Yep. It's also a case for how a tiny change can have unintended side effects.

Originally posted by MarioFanGamer

I don't know, it's aesthetics.

Yeah, but you'd think they would have simply removed these clouds from the level data if they didn't want them anymore. The fact that they left them there and just hardcoded them not to spawn is just another example of how wasteful Nintendo was with ROM space in this game. It's so bad, I theorize one could cut 1/5 of SMAS+W's total size if one were to clean up all the wasted space, compress most of the graphics, and re-code certain things to be more efficient.

Originally posted by MarioFanGamer

A classic issue on what mistakes you can do when you port games (similar thing happended with SMB1's brick blocks where you basically phase through them instead of falling down like in the NES version).

Yep. I'm surprised there aren't more issues like this, as far as I'm aware.

Originally posted by MarioFanGamer

I had a feeling that SMAS reuses SMW's sound engine and, ignoring the songs, only adds two new samples (a trumpet and timpani) and sound effects.

No. LadiesMan217 and KungFuFurby pretty much explained it.

Originally posted by MarioFanGamer

That's why I'm wondering how Super Metroid handles the status bar as it almost never fades the complete screen to black. It could be HDMA, though.

If I had to guess, Super Metroid handles its status bar similar to SMW. Ie. With an IRQ, and it's fade code doesn't touch the status bar palettes. In fact, I checked, and it does use an IRQ. The game also still renders layer 1 and 2 behind it (although the tilemap updating isn't handled as well as it is with SMW with the LM VRAM patch, as there are scrolling artifacts at the top of the screen and cutoff in areas you were never meant to see):

Originally posted by MarioFanGamer

Reminds me of Revival block which suffers from this issue. There also is the fact that SMB2 and 3 allow you to carry stars and activated p-switches between levels.

The problem with that block is that there is nothing telling AMK that the death music should prevent sample uploads. The problems I was having were because the star/P-switch songs were preventing sample uploads in situations where they shouldn't.

Originally posted by kamekku14

YOSHIFANATIC, YOU'RE AN ABSOLUTE MADMAN!!! I wonder if could use this version of AMK for my hack...

Keep it up, dude! And LadiesMan217!!

Indeed I am. XD

Also, if you're making a hack using the SMAS+W USA version of SMAS, then yes, you can use it.

My Hacks:
Mario's Strange Quest V1.6
Yoshi's Strange Quest V1.3 / V1.3.1 Beta 4.6
Mario & Yoshi's Strange Quests (2/10/2023 Build)

Other stuff:
My SMW/SMAS/SMAS+W disassembly
Yoshifanatic's Discord Server: A place for fans of my stuff and/or Yoshi to chat with others.

I always wanted to hack SMAS in my life! I played it a lot on the Wii! Thanks!

Layout created by Dominicentek

lets take a moment to thank this man for all of his skill because without it I may of never had the chance the rom hack smas

Man I might have to have a fair playaround with AMK on SMAS+SMW one of these days. Definitely good stuff you got there as usual!

Want progress on 100 Rooms of Enemies: The Nightmare Edition? Go here to see.

Originally posted by LOLRyan2006 the Goombud

I always wanted to hack SMAS in my life! I played it a lot on the Wii! Thanks!

Originally posted by Sping bot

lets take a moment to thank this man for all of his skill because without it I may of never had the chance the rom hack smas

I'm glad to hear that me and LadiesMan217's efforts got people interested in hacking SMAS! ^_^

Originally posted by Daizo Dee Von

Man I might have to have a fair playaround with AMK on SMAS+SMW one of these days. Definitely good stuff you got there as usual]

Thanks! ^_^

I assume that at least 90% of the music from the music section should work in SMAS+W, with the only exceptions being songs that barely fit into the ARAM in SMW with default global music/sounds. You'll definitely have a lot of variety with your playaround either way.

---------------

Also, a couple of small announcements. I've recently worked on my disassembly some more and I've added support for the USA version of regular SMAS to my dev build. I plan on adding support for the other 3 SMAS versions (PAL, Japan, Japan Rev 1) as well, bringing the total number of supported ROMs to 19 (20 if you also count the partial EB disassembly). If you're interested in following along with my projects, I have a Discord server linked to in my post signature. I may also post a thread for SMAS+W addmusick after C3 posting ends for those that either don't have or don't want a Discord account or don't want to join my server.

In addition, since LadiesMan217 played an important role in making SMAS+W addmusick possible, be sure to support him as well. Same with KungFuFurby for his contributions.

My Hacks:
Mario's Strange Quest V1.6
Yoshi's Strange Quest V1.3 / V1.3.1 Beta 4.6
Mario & Yoshi's Strange Quests (2/10/2023 Build)

Other stuff:
My SMW/SMAS/SMAS+W disassembly
Yoshifanatic's Discord Server: A place for fans of my stuff and/or Yoshi to chat with others.