bro I've been using vanced since 2018 and I don't even use it for the adblock. It just has a lot of useful features other than just adblock. This sucks.
Damn. Take as much time as you need fixing the issue though. If you get his "Mario Holiday" hack working, Star World should be playable by the time it is released.
It seems like its a whole new game. It's a lot more complex than any standard ROM hack and it might be "different" from SM64DS. I don't know how else to explain it. Skelux made a video a while back of his "anti-cheat" stuff he did to the game, not sure if that has anything to do with it