Yoshifanatic's ASM Showoff: Part 12 (Day 4)

Happy C3 guys!


For this C3, I'm not going to have quite as much to show off as I did last time, but this thread will still be jam packed with stuff by day 4. I also attempted to keep the text mountain more manageable, but there is still a lot of things I have to say. These past 6 months have been quite the journey, as those on my Discord server are likely already aware since they witnessed much of the madness for themselves. All sorts of interesting stuff happened with all the projects I did, like seeing glitch city from a different perspective, being sucked into elevators, putting a stop to the glitch banditos, having many nice days, falling into deadly ball pits, accidentally becoming a proctologist, giving rise to lord glitch, and much more.

Here are links to each day's post:
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4

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

Cutscene Revolution Patch






What happens when you give a bored madman a request? Magic happens.

Additional Info: Show/Hide

This is technically my second collab with LadiesMan217. He wanted me to re-create the Super Mario Advance 2 cutscenes in SMW for his 30th Anniversary celebration hack of SMW. Initially, I wasn't very motivated to do it, but when I eventually felt up to it, I went above and beyond by not only re-creating the cutscenes fairly accurately, but creating a framework patch for others to be able to create their own cutscenes.

Due to how LadiesMan217's hack is set up, I designed this patch to require use of as few external ASM resources as possible. So no DynamicZ, custom sprites, custom blocks, UberASM code (though it does modify 4 bytes of its ASM if detected), or SA-1 (though the patch is compatible with it) was used, for example. Other than something to handle a "play alt intro" SRAM flag, Lunar Magic ASM, and AddmusicK for the custom music, this patch works as is. If anything, the lack of external resources may make it more impressive I pulled this off, especially the All Yoshi Coins cutscene where 38 Yoshi coins can be on screen at once (76/128 16x16 sprite tiles).

By default, this patch will give you all 4 of the SMA2 cutscenes, 3 of which can trigger with no further input. The alt intro requires you to set the condition to make it appear, preferably with a global SRAM/BWRAM flag that's set when the All Exits cutscene is triggered.

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

Mega Man 7 Disassembly


I've uncovered Dr. Wily's latest evil plan! Use this to help Mega Man fight for everlasting peace!

Additional Info: Show/Hide

On day 4 of the previous C3, I gave out a small challenge that would allow someone to pick out the next game I disassembled. The person who ultimately won that was imamelia, and the game chosen was Mega Man 7. This is a game I probably wouldn't have disassembled normally, as it's a game I don't have and it didn't stick out to me in some way. That said, this game may make for some interesting ROM hacks for those of you that want to give it a try.

Here are the technical details:
- The game code is stored in bank C0, C1, C2, C3 ... and D8. And it's not even the only game I've looked at that has its code stored in a weird way.
- This is the second game I've looked at that uses split HiROM banks, after Super Mario Kart.
- To be honest, I don't remember much else other than that, while it only took me 8 days to disassemble, disassembling it was as obnoxious as the time I disassembled Pac-Man 2. Which is to say, very very tedious and annoying.

As for my personal experience:
- I did not fully play through this game while disassembling it, but what I played was enough to convince me to buy a copy of it in some form. I really should get more into the Mega Man series.
- I had quite a lot of trouble playing this at first, almost to the point where it felt unfair. But, I very quickly adapted and got to the second set of robot masters without too much issue.

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

Kirby's Dream Land 3 Disassembly


Kirby's coming right back at ya, for the SNES's last hoorah from Nintendo within it's lifespan.

Addition Info: Show/Hide

I planned on disassembling this game during my disassembly spree before the previous C3, but chose not to both because Yoshi's Island took way too long and I suspected this game would take a while. Turns out that was for the best, since it took me 3 weeks to finish this disassembly (and that was with my upgraded disassembly script that saved a fair amount of time).
Now that I was able to take my time, I figured I'd tie up this loose end of sorts.

Here are the technical details:
- Like Super Mario RPG, this game uses the SA-1.
- This game allows for 2-player co-op, with the second player being a character called "Gooey". He can do everything Kibry can, except for scrolling the screen.
- If playing single player, Gooey can be called to act as an AI companion. He follows all your movements with some exceptions. For example, he will never swallow enemies, never ride animal buddies, and he'll sometimes go after enemies on his own.
- KDL3 has some gorgeous graphics that are some of the best the SNES has to offer.
- This game makes use of pseudo-hires mode to handle transparency. This is why playing this game in emulators like ZSNES results in layer 3 often being opaque, since ZSNES doesn't emulate this correctly.
- The uncompressed graphics for Kirby, Gooey, all 6 animal companions, and various animated tile graphics were stored in a really obnoxious way. A similar way that bad SNES Frogger port I disassembled does it, in fact, where each frame has a 8 byte header stored alongside it.
- The soundtrack is really good.
- The USA and Japanese version differ by only 41 bytes, as both versions contain the assets exclusively used in the other. As you can imagine, adding support for both in my disassembly was trivial.

As for my personal experience:
- I used to like messing around with the metroids in the one level they appear in. It helped that they were one of the only enemies that couldn't hurt you.
- I once 100% this game on console, including unlocking the "view cutscenes" menu option. I will never do that again, since the "Minigame" and "Jumping" are torturous to complete.
- While this game lacks the ability depth of Kirby Super Star, it was fun to mess around with the different copy ability/animal companion combinations. Some of my favorites were Coo + Thunder, Kine + Thunder, Kine + Broom, and Rick + Stone.

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

For tomorrow, I'll be posting a long overdue update to Mario & Yoshi's Strange Quests!

Click here to continue to Day 2's post

---

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.

Damn.. nothing more to say... It's good

---

the cutscene patch looks like a real game changer, and it's always great to see disassemblies for quality SNES games being developed.

---

NewPointless

The cutscene tool is so cool. It's just amazing

The Cutscene Revolution Patch stuns me. The SMA2 cutscenes are very well made for SMW. I suppose you'll hae more in store for us. Can you at least give us a hint for the next day? It can be small also. Your choice.

---

This is some cool stuff you have here! Of course, my brain is too small to understand some of it (particularly the disassemblies), but regardless I can tell you have done a lot of work here.

Also, as a big fan of YSQ, I'm really exited to see the M+YSQ update tomorrow!

Dang.. This is extremely impressive. Never would I have thought that we would get to see SMA2 cutscenes in Super Mario World and made it available for everyone to use too! I know from working with ASM (not very good at it obviously) that it can be tricky to make code use the least amount of external resources depending on what you're working with.

Excellent work on disassemblies too! It's great to have more game code disassembled and documented, especially for the future of hacking these games too!

Absolutely fantastic job! I'm looking forward to seeing what other awesome things you'll do!

Its pretty nice to see the sma4 cutscenes in smw good job

---

This is my non existent layout I plan on adding one soon.. or never

I have a discord server, feel free to join if you want

OMG, that's amazing dude. As a writer i love the way you can fortify the lore even more with a cutscene like this

I'm amazed how little external ASM resources this Cutscene patch uses. Fantastic job with these. And wow, didn't expect a Mega Man 7 disassembly. This Mega Man is easily on my top 3. Although many people don't like, I'm already fine with the physics and how "heavy" the game is compared to its NES predecessors. Also, Kirby Dream Land 3 is a gorgeous game and is in my top 10 Kirbys, I love the sidequest stuff they put in the game and the OST is amazing. I'm glad you gave a bit of attention and love to these games. They mean a lot to me.

---

Super Mario Advance 2 in SNES SMW is real, looks pretty amazing so far!!

---

Kirbo was here

Love the recreated cutscenes, it's great to see them at a bigger resolution than the GBA.

---

I feel like we are getting closer and closer to just taking all the SMA additions and stuffing them into SMW at this point thus creating the ultimate SMW experience.

I really like how faithful if not 100% accurate these cutscenes are to the GBA version. Really Impressive work Yoshifanatic!

That cutscenes patch rules! Very nice work. It's really great seeing the few nice additions to SMA2 incorporated into the better game.

---

[?] Miscellaneous Helpful Hints
If I moderated your hack, there was apparently a 90 percent chance it was rejected.

Thanks for the support! ^_^



Thanks! ^_^ There are some differences with my re-creations and the original, but those can be explained by SNES/GBA hardware differences, SMW/SMA2 engine differences, stylistic choices (ex. Luigi's sprite), or because something would have been way too obnoxious to implement (ex. The bird's flight pattern in the exit cutscene).

Also, I already said what I'll be doing for day 2 at the bottom of the post. I'll be posting a new update for my SMW hack for the first time in 3 years.



Yeah. A lot of SMW hack cutscenes are usually not very dynamic looking. With a little bit of ASM knowledge, one could easily create some simple scripts to make some sprites move around. And compared to using UberASM to do this, this patch runs the cutscene code before anything else, which has the advantage of being able to run the cutscene completely isolated from anything else (which I did use for the Yoshi coin cutscene just to guarantee there would be no lag, even though it runs fine if the rest of the game mode code runs).

Also, it should be compatible with the VWF Dialogues patch, as I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't. It'd be especially useful with the V1.3 update I made of it (once its issues get fixed), because you can use the messageASM feature in tandem with this to sync up cutscene movements to dialogue.



I'm surprised by how much stuff I was able to do with just some good usage of Lunar Magic's features. I initially thought I'd need to use DynamicZ and my custom player graphics routine from MYSQ to handle Luigi being on screen with Mario. Or that I'd have to figure out how to expand the overworld tilemap to handle those overworld intro scenes. But the solution I went with ended up being a lot simpler.



Like I said in response to the above post, I thought it was going to be a lot more complicated than it ended up being. Lunar Magic's ExAnimation feature was the MVP that allowed me to do stuff that would have otherwise required DynamicZ. Main reason I chose to minimize the use of external resources was because LadiesMan217's hack was really complicated and I was worried adding additional ASM resources to the ones he was already using would have caused both of us headaches. Of course, the final patch still did, but it wasn't too bad. XD

Also, I'm glad you like the disassemblies! I've got more to come this C3, and I'll be doing even more after C3. There are still plenty of SNES games that would be cool to have a disassembly of.

Also, I'm glad you like the disassemblies! There are more to come!



At least for the cutscenes, I have all the code for them commented. Even if you don't understand ASM, you'd be able to follow along with how I scripted these cutscenes if you want to see how they work.

Also, most of the changes I made to MYSQ in the new update are for MSQ, but YSQ did get some changes and improvements.



I wonder what else there is to port over from SMA2 at this point? XD

Also, with these cutscenes, I'm pretty glad with how well they came out, especially the All Yoshi Coins one. To the casual observer of the original cutscene, one may get the impression that the coin deluge would be too much for the SNES to handle by itself at full speed. But, that wasn't an issue at all. The only thing the SNES couldn't handle was having 16 16x16 sprite tiles be drawn on the same scanline. That's why the coins look cutoff at times. It's not the usual sprite tile limits, but sprite overdraw. I couldn't slow down the spawning either, because then the music wouldn't sync up with the cutscene. Some sprite overdraw was the lesser of two evils in my opinion. XD

---

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.

For some reason I'd never thought of the need for a flexible cutscene system like this. There just keep being areas to be a pioneer in! The SMA2 intro recreation is impressive and it's really generous of you to release it (even though obviously some ASM knowledge is needed).

And it almost goes without saying that I'm baffled by the disassemblies you keep churning out! Making one disassembly is a huge feat, but multiple each C3 I can barely wrap my head around. Kudos for all that dedication!

---