Home Page Forums Other Emulator Message Boards Nestopia Super Mario "1" - begins world 0-1?

Hi,

Nestopia plays "Super Mario Bros. 1" at world 0-1 swimming....

The rom is okay because when rocknes plays it, it begins in world 1-1 as expected...

Curious about this one....

Thanks.

I think that the ROM was Dumped from Pirate Cart.
It is the pirate cart by which a title is not displayed.
Since there is no initialization code, it begins from world 0-1.
The Mapper0 support by Nestopia is right.
Possibly, this Pirate Cart may be initializing by hardware.
In that case, it is necessary to set another Mapper to this ROM.

Some older emulators inaccurately clear RAM rather than set it to mostly 0xFF, making you think that your game dump is clean when it really isn't. One workaround for playing these inferior Super Mario Bros. game dumps on a more accurate NES emulator like Nestopia is to hold the A button while pressing start to begin.

You could download the "smb_fix" utility . It should hopefully repair your bad SMB ROM.

That pirate dump is way too easy to find in circulation (it took me a LONG time to find the legitimate dump online - I probably hit 20 ro 30 ROM sites before I finally found the good dump). When I got the correct ROM image, the file name was "Super Mario Bros. (JU) (PRG0) [!].nes" (the "[!]" is key here - that indicates a verified good dump). The site also had the pirate version, under the name "Super Mario Bros. (JU) [p1].nes" (where "[p1]" indicates "pirate dump #1").

The pirate dump came from a multi-cart, which apparently allowed the user to set the world number to start on before beginning the game. The ROM code was hacked to prevent the world number from being initialized. Since this dump of the game does not initialize the world number, it is at the mercy of what that spot of memory is set to on power-up. Accurate emulators set RAM to 0xFF, which in equivalent to world 0, while inaccurate emulators (including RockNES) set RAM to 0x00, equivalent to world 1. (There are a few games that expect RAM to 0xFF at startup, or so I remember hearing, so an emulators really doesn't have much flexibility in this area.)

Not completely related, but it seems that by the time of GoodNES 3.10, Cowering or one of his assistants determined that the SMB1 dump formerly marked as PRG1 is bad (the only good dump now is called "Super Mario Bros. (JU) [!]").

Thanks everyone. I found and used "Super Mario Bros. (JU) (PRG0) [!].nes"

game on!

Sorry to butt in, but... this pirate cart was commonplace here, and it used to run correctly on real hardware (at least on the NES clones that were commonplace along with this pirate cart) without any trickery (holding A prior to pressing Start). I used to own one of these NES clones, and I really thought Super Mario Bros. had no title screen until I saw the original years later. Any ideas on that? May it be that ALL the NES clones sold here in the time have differences from Nintendo's hardware...? The main chips on their boards are UA6547 and UA6548 from UMC. I think the UA6547 is the CPU and the 6548 is the PPU, but I'm not sure.

Hello nitrousoxide82

I also regard this problem as strange.
When writing Pirate SMB Image which the My friend Dumped a long time ago in EPROM and playing it with the Nintendo original Family Computer system before, it began from the stage 0-1.

However, my friend says that he began from the stage 1-1.

Ah, now I see. Although the commonplace pirate cart that I used to see here had the title screen removed, it always started from world 1-1 and didn't allow selection until going past world 8-4 once. After clearing the game, you could select world with button B, and all the turtles would be replaced with the black-shelled "fireproof turtles" and move faster than normal. Perhaps the ROM I used to see here didn't include this hack... and perhaps this hack was made to fit NESticle, which was THE NES emulator way back then...

And by the way, MESS doesn't set it to either world 0 or world 1. The world number is glitched, but you start from level 3-1 and can progress normally through levels, however the pipes don't work and the game hangs after clearing level X-4 (where X is the glitched character) - at least when I tried. I think that might be because MESS allocates memory and leaves it as-is - so leaving the game "at the mercy of what that spot of memory is set to on power-up".

There was also another pirate cart with level selection from the beginning, and an altered title screen (that showed some image and had a big "2" in it), and with the water level tune sounding somewhat different. This was also common in multicarts.