Super Mario Bros title in emulators

I was just recently reminded of something I had been wondering about for a long time.

For as long as I can recall, every time I have ever played the classic Super Mario Bros on an emulator, (as best as I can recall, dating all the way back to when we used NESticle,) it NEVER displayed the title card that says "Super Mario Bros." It just had the text for one player or two players.

I was thinking about this again today and I tried opening the ROM in FCEUX and it declares that the ROM is bad, which error message I had never seen in the emulators I had used before.

I'm just curious what the story is behind this. Is there just some bad ROM that is very popular and gets passed around everywhere? And even if that is the case, then why is it only the title that fails to display properly? Neither of those really sounds quite reasonable.

I'm just wondering if someone knows what is going on here.

EDIT: Actually since I had it up, I just tried playing the ROM in FCEUX and it actually started me off in world 0-1. In other words, it started in a glitch.
This is very odd because I am quite certain this is the exact same copy I was playing yesterday on an emulator on my xbox, (which is based off of FCE,) and it only had the problem with the title not appearing.

...Anyone else having this pop up with their equipment/copies?

Are you talking about the Super Mario Bros. + Duck Hunt game select screen?


The Super Mario Bros. single ROM should start on the screen asking 1 or 2 players.

Maybe just look for a ROM of SMB + DH instead?

Edit: Ah, sorry, I misunderstood what was being described. (Also didn't catch the post edit that made it more clear it was an actual hack.) Quietust seems to have the real answer below.

Yes.


It's not a bug - it's a pirate version that deliberately blanked the title screen (and the copyright information).



That's because that pirate version also pre-enables the level select mode (which normally requires that you beat the game first), and if RAM is initialized to 0xFF (as it is on real hardware), then it'll send you to world 0-1 by default. Many emulators initialize RAM with 0x00, so they don't have that problem.

You may also notice that the Select button only works about 5% of the time - that's another bug in pirate versions, something that doesn't happen with the authentic version.

Well that's... Slightly less spectacular than I thought it would be.
A pirate ROM that was more popular than the regular ROM.

I thought maybe it would be something like a technical issue with the way the ROM was wired or something.

Well, that does answer my question though. Thank you!