Homebrew A strange thing happened when dumping my VC WAD of SMB2 into a ROM file

[WillIEvenUseThis]

The other day I tried dumping my legally bought Wii Virtual Console WADs of the first three Super Mario Bros. games for NES into ROM files that work with emulators. I achieved this by using the HxD Editor application on Windows, just in case anyone was wondering.

I was successfully able to extract the ROMs of all three games from the WAD files, and they worked perfectly. However, I noticed something odd in Super Mario Bros. 2 (the American version). Normally there were blue waterfalls in that game, but in this game they're now black for some reason. The blue blocks that Birdo and other bosses stand on when you fight them also appear black.

I'm not asking for a way to fix this, as it's a minor detail (other than that one level in world 3 where the waterfall takes up the whole background, making it kind of an eye sore with the black color). I just thought it might be interesting to some people. This is literally the only error that I came across out of all three games, which makes it even weirder.

Sent from my LG-LS777 using Tapatalk

 

[SaulFabre]

Try using @DarkMatterCore's NES ROM Extractor for extract the SMB2 ROM from the 00000001.app file of the original dumped WAD (but first you must dump your WAD in your Wii or using ShowMiiWads): https://mega.co.nz/#!YIYWAShT!nwElJwqBt5iaq_uSrSR62mHrVVbbbwlBvHeBdm9GiE0

Greetings

 

[SuperrSonic]

This is probably just another way to reduce photosensitive problems. Waterfall patterns are usually toned down in VC versions.

Spoiler: Sonic GG

Sonic DX (2003) vs. 3DS VC (2013)

I'm not very familiar with NES but the Wii NES VC palette has 9 0x000000 blacks (ripped from the Pac-Man VC) but the palette in SMB2 VC has in the first black a light purple shade. Dolphin screenshot is 0x7359DE.

Check this out:

The first shot is SMB2 "clean" rom in nestopia using the Wii-VC palette, second is SMB2 VC rom in nestopia with the modified palette, this is how the VC version looks like. Dolphin texture dump ref.

Nestopia has a custom palette option so I've added the palette here. The Wii versions might not support per-game palettes but you can make per-game settings anyway.
It's possible this isn't all Nintendo did so there may be something else missing. The ROM has many changes.

A similar thing was done in Kirby's Dream Land 2 for Wii, the game is presented in four shades but the Game Boy palette can use more so Nintendo used that to make some shades repeat to make flashing effects become slower. But if you use this palette for other games e.g. Kid Icarus II, you will notice missing graphics.


EDIT: OK, I've looked at the palette for SMB2 and besides the waterfall pattern there are at least 4 more of the black colors that are now unique colors, it's for the flashing sequence when you throw a bomb (maybe others) I've added the palette again with the missing colors, and have added a temp build of nestopia to my RA builds with the palette already implemented. These flashes are slowed down in the VC release and is done by the emulator so these moments in-game will not be identical. However, I also looked at the 3DS version, it's almost identical to Wii but without changing the palette, and it doesn't even do anything about the bomb flashes.