Continuing ~ Super Mario Bros. World Class Track Meet Duck Hunt - Unused Mario 2 Lost Levels Tiles Graphics

Time for another Super Mario Bros. article where we take a look at Super Mario Bros. 2 assets that remain inside of the menu programming of the one of the most videogame cartridges ubiquitous. Seriously, everybody and their dog owned a copy. I still do along with the manual. It never came with an official box as it was bundled with the Action Set NES.

For aesthetic mental reference: The controller (left), NES (middle), cartridge (right)

  

Surprisingly Nintendo for some reason used the Japanese true Super Mario Bros. 2 and character tilemapping to form the basis of the menu; graphic tileset and relative assets. I guess they were porting the Famicom Disk System file system when writing the menu because it may have been quicker or it was just on their workstation at the time? Maybe they did this on purpose just to see if someone would undoubtably notice over time? I really don't know and we will probably never quite know exactly why this even exists on the cartridge at all.

What you are about to see may burn your eyes because it may look like a garbled mess, but actually it is clearly (well maybe not so clearly.) the graphics from Super Mario Bros. 2. The palettes are based on which game is selected in the menu so it is the most visually pleasing to look at the Super Mario Bros highlighted section for better visual analysis.

Long and behold the detail!

Title screen graphics of Super Mario Bros 2 for reference.

Here is the original information I found.

[CODE]
Super Mario Bros. + Duck Hunt + World Class Track Meet (U) (PRG0) [!].nes
Replace Super Mario Bros tiles with unused Super Mario Bros. 2 Lost levels tiles
IEXTGAZE
XEVTAZAV
ZPETALZA

Display unused Super Mario Bros. 2 Lost levels tiles at game select menu (I actually made this interesting discovery about a week ago. All of the CHR from the Lost Levels / Super Mario Bros. 2 is actually inside the Super Mario Bros. + Duck Hunt + World Class Track Meet game select bank! There are also unused tiles in Super Mario Bros. 2! https://twitter.com/nensondubois_/status/924508098907267072)

YPSTLGPA

Fixes Duck Hunt selection palette to match Super Mario Bros. / 2

TLXVYZPZ

YPUTAZTZ

YAUTPZIZ

Fixes World Class Track Meet selection palette to match Super Mario Bros. / 2

TLUTLZYL

YPUTGXZZ

YAUTIZPZ

Replaces Duck Hunt 'upper-left brick' tile with unused Super Mario Bros. 2 tile. The table starts is located at 0x01E556-1E8CA beginning with Super Mario Bros and ending with World Class Track Meet.

E665:??:AD

Replaces Duck Hunt 'upper-left brick' tile with unused Super Mario Bros. 2 star tile (there are other unused tiles but this is just an example)

OYVTIVSZ

[/CODE]

Super Mario Bros NES Unused Game Over Variation Plays Everywhere Game Genie Code!

Today we're going to dunk for the coins.. the gold coins! Because it is time for another interesting Super Mario Bros. exploration writeup!

The music is one of the most memorable videogame soundtracks and for good reason. However, most of us are unaware that a variation of the game over theme, even as most of we threw our controllers at the tv in frustration when losing our last life to fire Bowser's hammers at the last world so either we either have repressed memories of the jingle or were so angry screaming at the game enough to notice. But, I digress-it is still just as memorable as the game itself.

 After wanting to do this for a very long time, I finally got around to looking into this unused variation of the Game Over theme in Super Mario Bros that Kode54 originally found years prior when ripping the NSF. Turns out it is really interesting and surprising that the instrument definitions were left intact by Nintendo when they developed the game because the game was programmed so tightly and compact in order to fit it onto the ROM chip.





 

Original posting:

https://twitter.com/nensondubois_/status/956774684522983424

Forum posting:

https://gamehacking.org/vb/forum/video-game-hacking-and-development/hacker-threads/13028-nensondubois-codes?p=197363#post197363

Super Mario Bros. (W) [!].nes (covers all versions and revisions) Play unused Game Over variation everywhere (originally found by @Kode54 in the NSF rip track 12 but converted to work on hardware by nensondubois) 

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PZSYYUOX

If you modify 12 to a different value you can play any song in the game, some of which are invalid data being read off as actual song data (missing, invalid events, wrong channel pointers and segments, and or looping information.) The unused Game Over theme is a complete song information for this unused variation.

The unused variation is present in all variations of the game and the code may need to be ported to each version, mostly multicart releases. The codes were tested on the standalone worldwide release but should work with most releases of the game.