My Super Mario Bros 3 Hack - ROM Saves Player(s) Progress

Holy shit, I've been hoping someone would do this for so long. Thank you, it look awesome, specially that I always thought SMB 3 was made with SRAM save in mind.

Thanks!

Huh ? Save states exists since almost forever now.

Almost forever, yes. Everywhere, no.

A variant of the shareware model has become common among developers of applications for Android devices. Unlike the version of an application offered without charge, the paid version usually has no advertisements and more features. The free version of an emulator is more likely to support SRAM save than save states.

Hack updated to v5.

When in a world with cleared areas, and you use the whistle to advance to a further world, the world you warp to would have areas already cleared. I needed to clear the flags for all levels for Mario & Luigi when using the whistle.

This has now been fixed.

Thank you for your hard work, this hack will be well appreciated. I haven't played All-Stars or Mario Advance 4 that much to remember how they worked, but does this hack, so to speak, "replicate" their save system?

Updated to v6
Please goto first post to obtain/view original release thread.

2 glitches were brought to my attention.

One is, when you obtain a 3rd level cleared card, and decide to reset/power down the rom, the 3rd card is still present in your inventory. This is not supposed to happen, and will cause errors when you obtain another level cleared card. This has been fixed.

The other glitch is, when you use the whistle, and warp to whatever world you'd like, the timer is set to 400. This is not supposed to happen when you warp from world 9. This has now been fixed.

@OneCrudeDude, thank you very much for your kind comments! The asm I wrote for this particular game isn't like All-Stars. I have various things automaticly stored into sram, during various conditions, so that they can be saved for future play once the rom is powered off.

Thanks for the reply! This is just my opinion, but I think it's a bit redundant to save all that data. It's your project though, so do as you wish!

I believe that the most important things to save would be:

What world you are on?
Did you beat the mid-boss? If so, remove the lock and enable access via a shortcut.
What items do you currently possess?
The game would prompt a save screen every time you beat the mid-boss or Koopaling, similar to SMW.

But that's what I would've done if I did this project, as saving lives, coins, score, and even cards collected seems a bit trivial, but is still appreciated. To put into perspective, Kirby's Adventure only saves what levels you have cleared and what you have unlocked, nothing more or less!

Regardless, thank you for your hard work, and I wonder what you will make next! Here's to hoping for an SRAM hack of Kid Icarus, possibly in the same vein as Metroid with save and map. Sorry for not having anything like bugs to report.

If I burn a new PRG can this hack run on hardware on an MMC3 cart with a battery? Also, any chance of making this hack available for the SMB3j release?

@OneCrudeDude - the reason I liked those specific things saved were, from personal choice, and, the vast majority of those things are already located within the sram.

The reason things are crammed onto sram originaly, is due to lack of ram registers. The reason why the Megaman games are so popular to add in sram saving, is because all the registers are in ram, and those games dont touch the $6000-$7FFF region.

With smb3, the developers delibritly used that area, so they could pull off all the functions throughout the game, that they wouldnt have been able to pull off due to lack of ram.

So with the sram in smb3 being virtualy entirely used, and the ram registers being used, thats why imo there was no save function. Well, that, and cost from the battery.

The only way imo, you could have a dedicated set of specific things you want saved, is by personal prefrence, by removing certain things from the game that (you) could live without.



I know of people that have used my sram hack on actual mmc3 boards, with the battery functional.

As for smb3j, the rom is different than the us version, and I simply dont have the desire to do it all over again for a different region rom. Im glad everyone likes the patch, but ive moved on back to my Zelda project.