Disabling the status bar.

If you set 0x493 to zero the game will think the status bar has zero scanlines, and so simply won't make it appear. It's a neat little trick if you need the status bar temporarily gone, and need the hack quick. Now, the problem with this is if Mario should hit, say, a message block, Layer 3 is altered, and suddenly everything shows up.

I've hacked it so that I can choose whether or not a status bar shows up at the start of the level, but the whole poofing out of nowhere bit is pretty annoying. There's got to be a better way then pretending there's no scanlines to write, but I don't really know enough about the rest of the process to disable the status bar any other way.

Here's that hack I made, just in case anyone's interested. I cut out some stuff I didn't think was necessary for the post and haven't tested it since, but it should still work.

212C is only written during level load, so try pulling BG3 off main screen in the NMI handler and setting it back in the IRQ handler. I can't think of any simpler if that doesn't work.