Mario Bros XE Hack

[tep392]

These sounds are great. I especially like the music and the more arcade-like footsteps.

I would love for these to be included, but I do not have the knowledge to make this work. Do you know anybody who does?

I decided to take a quick look at the sound code. It doesn't look to complex to reverse engineer and identify all the sound calls in the code. There isn't much extra space in the ROM for the new code. I haven't added up how much space the current code uses yet. That would be pulled out and replaced. There is also a 450 byte block of unused space that we could use.

[+darryl1970]

 

I decided to take a quick look at the sound code. It doesn't look to complex to reverse engineer and identify all the sound calls in the code. There isn't much extra space in the ROM for the new code. I haven't added up how much space the current code uses yet. That would be pulled out and replaced. There is also a 450 byte block of unused space that we could use.

 

That would be awesome. I'll PM you some info. The 5200 doesn't have as many tunes. Would you mind taking a look at that version too? These sounds would be great for BOTH versions!

[+darryl1970]

Unfortunately I don't, but I wonder if it would be just a matter of disassembling the game and finding where the music routine and data are stored, and replacing it with the new code. I am assuming the source code for this no longer exists, right?

 

Tep932 is working on this.

 

One thing I noticed is that your intermission two (sounds so much better) has the extra life bell in the beginning.

That is not actually part of the tune. (The ringing twinkle sound) It is common for players to reach 20,000 after the first coin rack. When that happens, the bell is triggered at the beginning of the intermission.

However, it is not part of the music.

Is that able to be removed?

[Synthpopalooza]

 

Tep932 is working on this.

 

One thing I noticed is that your intermission two (sounds so much better) has the extra life bell in the beginning.

That is not actually part of the tune. (The ringing twinkle sound) It is common for players to reach 20,000 after the first coin rack. When that happens, the bell is triggered at the beginning of the intermission.

However, it is not part of the music.

Is that able to be removed?

 

That actually is. I had no idea that was not part of the music. All you would need to do is just silence the sound data on that channel (replace them with zeros) or just modify the code to where that sound does not play. You can then have that sound elsewhere for when the player gets 20,000 points. It's all on one sound channel so it shouldn't be hard.

 

One other caveat, there is a protocol for using these sounds that will require floating changes to AUDCTL, and for assigning sounds to channels. I included a txt doc with the zip that documents how they are designed to work. Hopefully this won't prove to be too difficult a problem.

Edited November 10, 2016 by Synthpopalooza

[Synthpopalooza]

Don't know if this will help, but here is an Atari 8-bit executable with some of the sounds. SELECT goes to the next sound, and START repeats.

 

 

sound_a8.zip

[Atari PAC-MAN Fan]

These sounds are great. I especially like the music and the more arcade-like footsteps.

I would love for these to be included, but I do not have the knowledge to make this work. Do you know anybody who does?

Do you think you could make Mario run a bit faster? I always thought that in the XE version, he was a little too slow for my liking. Thanks for sharing!

[+darryl1970]

Update: Final version can be found here.