How did they create Status bars like the one in SMB3, that are used in Similarity of Mickey Mouse (Safari in Letterland/Adventures in Numberland) and Super Mario World Pirate?
I learned that it used horizontal mirroring (The status bars used in the games mentioned above used the bottom name table), The real question is but how did they display the high nametables (The main screen) and put the low nametables (Status bar) at the same time in one screen.
What code (at least a disassembly and an explanation) does this to combine the high nametable and part of the lower nametable so it can appear that way?
-Hamtaro126
Background information:
Parallax scrolling on Wikipedia
Super Mario Bros. 3 uses the 32x60 cell ("horizontal mirroring") playfield mode, splitting it into a 54-cell-tall playfield and a 6-cell-tall status bar. It sets the MMC3 to trigger an IRQ near the bottom of the screen. The IRQ handler sets the VRAM address registers to the top of the status bar, and the PPU starts drawing from there.
Don't forget that SMW (hack) is a severly hacked up version of SMB3, so SMW should go w/o saying...
There also seems to be an assumption that SMW is a Hong Kong Original, but if memory recalls correctly, it was done by a young American working at a fast food joint.
In fact if you want to make a demo/game with a status bar there is really one hundred ways to do it, not only the SMB way. It all depends if you game scrolls, in wich direction, by how many amount, if glitches on the border on the screen matters or not, if the mapper you're using have a IRQ available or not, if the mapper you're using allow you to switch mirroring or not, etc... It's better to think you own way to do the thing than just do it the SMB3 way, that was good for SMB3 but that may not be good in all cases.
BTW there is one level or two in SMB3 where it actually switches to vertical mirroring when the level is higher than one nametable and three quarters, in that cases it mainly acts like 1-screen mirroring where it just swap between nametable 0 and 1, one for playfield and one for status bar (even if that nametable isn't fully used).
So that's the reason why the status bar has a blinking line?
atari2600a wrote:
Don't forget that SMW (hack) is a severly hacked up version of SMB3, so SMW should go w/o saying...
There also seems to be an assumption that SMW is a Hong Kong Original, but if memory recalls correctly, it was done by a young American working at a fast food joint.
A young American at a fast food joint? Eh!?! I never would of guessed
Well that's what I remember reading in an article on the hack...although in the article the hack itself was finished, unlike the rest of the articles I've seen on it...
atari2600a wrote:
Don't forget that SMW (hack) is a severly hacked up version of SMB3, so SMW should go w/o saying...
There also seems to be an assumption that SMW is a Hong Kong Original, but if memory recalls correctly, it was done by a young American working at a fast food joint.
I think you're confusing the SMW pirate (which was made by a pirate company, their logo is hidden in the ROM) with something like Mario Adventure (which was an SMB3 hack by a guy named DahrkDaiz).
I'm pretty sure I never read an article on Mario Adventure...although I guess I was proved wrong w/ that logo thing. Then what the hell was that article on!?