Originally posted by LadiesMan217The Jurassic Park randomizer looks sick. The palettes in the vid remind me of some nightmare mod from Resident Evil 5 were they made all the colors similar in darker shades and red skies. The Mario smooth turnaround patch is awesome! Are there any bugs to it? Cutscene wise (vanilla and your patch) or anywhere else? I may use this in my SMW 30 hack though I don't want it to mess with the sma2 cutscenes since the turn rounds Mario and Luigi do when they see Peach is missing make more sense as is since it looks like they're worried/freaking out (plus Luigi would still have sharp turns since he's simply animated).
Yeah, that's one of the custom palettes that can be chosen. I called it "Moody". Other ones include "Bizarre", "Monochrome", "Winter", and more.
As for the turn around patch, I don't think there are any bugs, and I doubt it would have a negative effect on the cutscenes (that scene with Mario turning around repeatedly wouldn't be affected, because this patch hijacks the code for when the player turns around using the d-pad. That scene writes to $76 directly to turn Mario around, so this patch would have no effect).
Originally posted by idolat risk of sounding illiterate, does that turnaround patch work w/ 32x32 / sa-1 innately? it looks very funny and good
If Mario's turning looks fine while holding an item with that patch applied, then it will look fine with this patch applied. I also added the SA-1 defines so it should work with the SA-1 patch.
Originally posted by MarioFanGamerThat's pretty cool, though aside from the fact that there are more things to upload, how does it handle the palette? After all, 16 colours are limited. I also wonder how the outside sections are stored in the ROM.
The game still updates the property bytes of the layer 1 tilemap so it has access to more than 16 colors for everything. The devs saved V-Blank time by not updating layer 2 at all, as it's just a 32x32 tilemap containing a repeating grass pattern.
Originally posted by MarioFanGamerDespite being quite interesting, the first two are quite familiar to me.
Though there still are some quirks with the HDMA polygons which are probably worth to point out, namely the spinning platforms (those with a vertical pivot) theoretically allow you to place them onto different X positions but due to the limitation of HDMA (which is also used for the horizontal position), it is possible for the platforms to appear at an incorrect position.
I can also understand that the island is rendered dynamically and not with different sprites with fixed graphics considering there would be too many object per scanline.
Regarding the former, I figured there would be limitations like that with these HDMA polygons.
As for the latter, I was surprised it wasn't just sprites when I saw it, since it really does look like Nintendo just rotated around a bunch of sprites (perhaps with some clever handling to avoid potential sprite overdraw by culling out sprites that can't be seen).
Originally posted by MarioFanGamerWhat does that exactly mean?
The short answer is that I found a bug resulting from a typo that causes the game to use a pointer's low byte to initialize something unrelated.
The long answer: You know how when you move the cursor on a level, the Yoshi that will play that level does an animation where it runs while carrying baby Mario? That RAM address that controls that is initialized wrong. The instruction used is supposed to use a constant, but it instead reads from RAM address $00. The last place $00 was stored was at $00BA7A, where $00 contains the low byte of a pointer to some data at $5FA000. By sheer chance, $00 contains #$00 so nothing appears wrong in game. But, when I scrambled the ROM around to make the disassembly edit friendly, that pointer to $5FA000 was changed, so $00 would contain a different value. This caused the bug to now be visible. Here is an image I took demonstrating this, where I replaced the instruction at $17A6A3 with LDA.b #$13 : NOP to simulate it:

Notice how green Yoshi is both running and holding the level 1 sign? That's the bug. This happens if you exit out of an extra/bonus level.
Originally posted by MarioFanGamerWow, just wow... It's even moreso when you consider that RAM was quite expensive back in the day (especially SRAM). That's still some very cool, though.
Yeah. There is a noticeable delay when erasing a file because of the sheer size of the data (and also because I opted to save ROM space over speed with the implementation). Saving doesn't cause a delay due to how this game's main loop works, but it does sometimes cause Grant to blink out of existence for a frame for some reason.
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.