super mario world

6 Articles

Super Mario In Sed, Sort Of

August 9, 2023 by 7 Comments

We definitely needed to reach for a sed reference guide for this one, but looking at the animated GIF of the script running, it is recognizably Super Mario Bros. albeit with minimal gameplay beyond jumping obstacles and avoiding or destroying koopas et al. Creator [Ivan Chebykin] is for certain a master of the dark arts.

Digging in a bit deeper, it’s not strictly speaking 100% sed. A wrapper shell script is required to interface to the shell and grab the keyboard input to pass along. This is simply because sed is a stream processor, and as such it requires text to be fed into it, and it produces a text output. It has no way of reading the terminal input directly, hence the wrapper script. However, all the game logic and ‘graphics’ rendering is pure sed, so that’s perfectly reasonable.

Such programming demos are a great way to hone the finer points of various tools we use every day, whilst not being serious enough to matter if we fail. Pushing the boundaries of what can be done with these basic nuts and bolts we take for granted, is for us the very essence of software hacking, and bravo we say.

Reckon you could top this? Show us! In the meantime, here’s a guide to hacking the recently released Game and Watch, and then doing the decent thing and running DOOM on it. Finally, sed is notoriously tricky to work with, so to help here’s a graphical debugger to make things a little clearer.

Modifying A SNES Rom To Be Widescreen

June 22, 2021 by 7 Comments

Turning a game like Super Mario World for SNES into a widescreen game is not a small task, but [Vitor Vilela] accomplished just that. [Vitor] has a long list of incredible patches such as optimizing code for better frame rates and adding code to take advantage of the SA-1 accelerator chip, so out of anyone he has the know-how to pull a widescreen mod off. This patch represents a true labor of love as many levels were designed with a specific screen width in mind. [Vitor] went through each of these single-screen width levels and expanded them by writing the extra assembly needed.

On a technical level, this hack was achieved by using the panning feature built into the game. The left and right shoulder buttons allowed a player to pan the camera to the left and right. The viewport is considered to be two times the screen resolution and so items will be rendered within the widescreen resolution. By taking away the panning feature and render a larger section of the viewport to the screen, you get a widescreen view. However, to save cycles, enemies and items don’t start moving until they get close to the screen edge. So how do you make a game widescreen without ruining the timing of every enemy that spawns? Suddenly the hours of muscle memory that fans have drilled in over the years is a disadvantage rather than a strength. The answer is a significant time investment and an eye for detail.

All the code is available on GitHub. A video of a playthrough of the mod is after the break.

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Super Mario World Jailbreak Requires No External Hardware

June 3, 2017 by 24 Comments

[SethBling] has released a Super Mario World jailbreak that allows players to install a hex editor, then write, install and run their own game mods. What’s more is this all works on unmodified cartridges and SNES hardware. No hardware hacks required.

[Seth] is quick to say he didn’t do all this alone. This mod came to be thanks to help from [Cooper Harasyn] who discovered a save file corruption glitch, [MrCheese] who optimized the hex editor, and [p4plus2] who wrote some awesome mods.

While no soldering and programming of parts are required, installing this mod still requires quite a bit of hardware. Beyond the SNES and cartridge, you’ll need two multitaps, three controllers, and clamps to hold down buttons on the controllers. Even then the procedure will take about an hour of delicate on-screen gymnastics. Once the jailbreak is installed though, it is kept in savegame C, so you only have to do it once.

What does a hex editor allow you to do? Anything you want. Mario’s powerup state can be edited, one memory location can be modified to complete a level anytime you would like. It’s not just modifying memory locations though – you can write code that runs, such as [p4plus2’s] sweet telekinesis mod that allows Mario to grab and move around any enemy on the screen.

It’s always awesome to see old video game hardware being hacked on by a new generation of hackers. We’ve seen similar work done on Super Mario Brothers 3, and an original GameBoy used to pilot a drone, just to name a couple.

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Hacking Flappy Bird By Playing Mario

April 3, 2016 by 24 Comments

This is a hacking and gaming tour de force! [Seth Bling] executed a code injection hack in Super Mario World (SMW) that not only glitches the game, but re-programs it to play a stripped-down version of “Flappy Bird”. And he did this not with a set of JTAG probes, but by using the game’s own controller.

There are apparently a bunch of people working on hacking Super Mario World from within the game, and a number of these hacks use modified controllers to carry out the sequence of codes. The craziest thing about our hack here is that [Seth] did this entirely by hand. The complete notes are available here, but we’ll summarize the procedure for you. Or you can go watch the video below. It’s really incredible.

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Mario Hack

Reprogramming Super Mario World From Inside The Game

January 22, 2015 by 72 Comments

[SethBling] recently set a world record speed run of the classic Super Nintendo game Super Mario World on the original SNES hardware. He managed to beat the game in five minutes and 59.6 seconds. How is this possible? He actually reprogrammed the game by moving specific objects to very specific places and then executing a glitch. This method of beating the game was originally discovered by Twitch user [Jeffw356] but it was performed on an emulator. [SethBling] was able to prove that this “credits warp” glitch works on the original hardware.

If you watch the video below, you’ll see [SethBling] visit one of the first available levels in the game. He then proceeds to move certain objects in the game to very specific places. What he’s doing here is manipulating the game’s X coordinate table for the sprites. By moving objects to specific places, he’s manipulating a section of the game’s memory to hold specific values and a specific order. It’s a meticulous process that likely took a lot of practice to get right.

Once the table was setup properly, [SethBling] needed a way to get the SNES to execute the X table as CPU instructions. In Super Mario World, there are special items that Mario can obtain that act as a power up. For example, the mushroom will make him grow in size. Each sprite in the game has a flag to tell the SNES that the item is able to act as a power up. Mario can either collect the power up by himself, or he can use his friendly dinosaur Yoshi to eat the power up, which will also apply the item’s effects to Mario.

The next part of the speed run involves something called the item swap glitch. In the game, Mario can collect coins himself, or Yoshi can also collect them by eating them. A glitch exists where Yoshi can start eating a coin, but Mario jumps off of Yoshi and collects the coin himself simultaneously. The result is that the game knows there is something inside of Yoshi’s mouth but it doesn’t know what. So he ends up holding an empty sprite with no properties. The game just knows that it’s whatever sprite is in sprite slot X.

Now comes the actual item swap. There is an enemy in the game called Chargin’ Chuck. This sprite happens to have the flag set as though it’s a power up. Normally this doesn’t matter because it also has a set flag to tell the game that it cannot be eaten by Yoshi. Also, Chuck is an enemy so it actually hurts Mario rather than act as a power up. So under normal circumstances, this sprite will never actually act as a power up. The developers never programmed the game to properly handle this scenario, because it was supposed to be impossible.

If the coin glitch is performed in a specific location within the level, a Chargin’ Chuck will spawn just after the coin is collected. When the Chuck spawns, it will take that empty sprite slot and suddenly the game believes that Yoshi is holding the Chuck in his mouth. This triggers the power up condition, which as we already know was never programmed into the game. The code ends up jumping to an area of memory that doesn’t contain normal game instructions.

The result of all of this manipulation and glitching is that all of the values in the sprite X coordinate table are executed as CPU instructions. [SethBling] setup this table to hold values that tell the game to jump to the end credits. The console executes them and does as commanded, and the game is over just a few minutes after it began. The video below shows the speed run but doesn’t get too far into the technical details, but you can read more about it here.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this type of hack. Speed runs have been performed on Pokemon with very similar techniques. Another hacker managed to program and execute a version of single player pong all from within Pokemon Blue. We can’t wait to see what these game hackers come up with next. Continue reading “Reprogramming Super Mario World From Inside The Game” →

Teaching Mario To Play Pong And Snake Through Innumerable Exploits

January 10, 2014 by 30 Comments

This is the coolest classic Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) hack we’ve seen in quite a while. What you’re seeing is called “Super Mario World (Total Control)” by [Masterjun]. Our first recommendation is that you watch the video, then come back here for an explanation. Similar to what we saw for Pokemon Yellow on Gameboy, [Masterjun] created entire Pong and Snake clones within Super Mario World. He also created a menu and ending screen, along with his trademark smiley face graphic. Even more amazing is that this was unveiled live on a real SNES running an unmodified game cartridge. [Masterjun] actually used dual multitap cables, effectively connecting 8 controllers to a SNES. This gave him enough bandwidth to quickly download his new binary through the controller ports alone.

Welcome to the world of Tool Assisted Speedruns (TAS), where emulators and scripts are used to create high-speed runs through video games. The runners often work frame by frame, painstakingly inputting commands to create the perfect run. Game bugs and glitches are often exploited in these speed runs. In fact, in runs such as this one, the speed run takes second place to showing off the exploit. The output of speed run creation is a script file of control inputs which can be executed on an emulator to “re-run” the TAS at any time. This script can also be saved to a PC or Raspberry Pi and played back into the controller port of a real game system. A PIC based hardware translator is used to convert the data to NES or SNES controller format. As one might expect, these scripts run open loop. With no feedback from the running game, they can and do become desynchronized due to differences in console hardware, such as the tolerance of the oscillator crystal. When everything is in sync and does work , the results are awesome.

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