Can Mario Kart Super Circuit handle more than 8 racers at a time?

[BM1467]

i have a quick question i was wondering if MKSC can handle more than 8 racers in a race? i want to see what the limit would be since i know MKSC does have a sprite limit just dont know what it is. How would i go about seeing how many racers can MKSC can handle?





Thank you

 

[FAST6191]

Compared to all the other Mario Kart hacking going on then nobody I have seen thus far is really even hacking this, save to extract the tracks to put into another game.
The answer is probably going to be the usual ROM hacking difficulty answer (anybody can learn in a weekend, some effort by moderately skilled, major effort by seriously skilled and outright impossible) as I could well see a path to some master assembly coder rocking up, spending two years and exceeding the limit by some means or another, even more so if link cable fun gets thrown into the mix and you can do some kind of distributed setup (and now I am imagining a GBA beowulf cluster) or you completely break out of things and go full enhanced emulator/external AI controls setup.

If the idea of redoing code, especially maths based location finding, to break a limit you might encounter in a conventional cheat ("255 ammo is cool, I want 4093 though") is enough to break you out into a cold sweat the go with whatever is there as.
Sounds like you are already thinking in terms of limits which is good, however sprite limits is probably the least of your concerns here -- simplification and fun with http://pineight.com/gba/managing-sprite-vram.txt and cool coding tricks will extend that beyond what is otherwise done, and if you want to do something like abuse a flash cart's RAM to expand things then bets are further off still.

 

[BM1467]

Compared to all the other Mario Kart hacking going on then nobody I have seen thus far is really even hacking this, save to extract the tracks to put into another game.
The answer is probably going to be the usual ROM hacking difficulty answer (anybody can learn in a weekend, some effort by moderately skilled, major effort by seriously skilled and outright impossible) as I could well see a path to some master assembly coder rocking up, spending two years and exceeding the limit by some means or another, even more so if link cable fun gets thrown into the mix and you can do some kind of distributed setup (and now I am imagining a GBA beowulf cluster) or you completely break out of things and go full enhanced emulator/external AI controls setup.

If the idea of redoing code, especially maths based location finding, to break a limit you might encounter in a conventional cheat ("255 ammo is cool, I want 4093 though") is enough to break you out into a cold sweat the go with whatever is there as.
Sounds like you are already thinking in terms of limits which is good, however sprite limits is probably the least of your concerns here -- simplification and fun with http://pineight.com/gba/managing-sprite-vram.txt and cool coding tricks will extend that beyond what is otherwise done, and if you want to do something like abuse a flash cart's RAM to expand things then bets are further off still.

thank you so much! so the good thing is we have found the track and Ai data for the game and currently working on a track editor as we speak. for me this was just a gee wiz thing for something i potentially want to work on. if i may ask you one more question. there is a gameshark code where the AI controls the driving however, unlike in MK64 where you can put the AI in the D0 state that allows the AI controls the driving still allows the player can control the items and when to use it(think of it a hybrid state) in super circuit this code does not allow that, how can i go with modifying this code 74000130 03BB 33003BE1 00A0 (this is the auto pilot code) where i can control when to use the item while the AI controls the driving? thank you

 

[FAST6191]

I would imagine the N64 version is more of an oversight on the part of the developers than an intentional feature (by all accounts/going by all the glitches people have fun with the game is held together by string, chewing gum and the hopes of the devs).
To that end you would either have to code the feature back in as an addition, code it back in by removing the restrictions or the main way the cheat making set would likely set about it is figuring out if the game has some kind of item use next frame*/section and tripping that with a button activator. The former two are going to take some not unreasonable amount of coding skills (though probably a small enough result you could still cram it into a longer cheat code), the latter might not even be a thing you can reasonably target with a basic cheat (I would start by finding the held item location and going from there, anything that removes it will necessarily have had the fire command do something in the past to get to it) if the decision to fire something instead lives in the registers/stack/CPU flags (compare which tends to trip a CPU flag and branch being the ASM equivalent of IF ELSE in higher level programming).

*see the classic vector thing for FPS games where they decide if you shot someone, no reason something similar would not be here for a green shell. Only problem is that might do green shells and nothing else, or maybe just weapons like it, mushrooms could be a whole other thing to consider).

 

[BM1467]

I would imagine the N64 version is more of an oversight on the part of the developers than an intentional feature (by all accounts/going by all the glitches people have fun with the game is held together by string, chewing gum and the hopes of the devs).
To that end you would either have to code the feature back in as an addition, code it back in by removing the restrictions or the main way the cheat making set would likely set about it is figuring out if the game has some kind of item use next frame*/section and tripping that with a button activator. The former two are going to take some not unreasonable amount of coding skills (though probably a small enough result you could still cram it into a longer cheat code), the latter might not even be a thing you can reasonably target with a basic cheat (I would start by finding the held item location and going from there, anything that removes it will necessarily have had the fire command do something in the past to get to it) if the decision to fire something instead lives in the registers/stack/CPU flags (compare which tends to trip a CPU flag and branch being the ASM equivalent of IF ELSE in higher level programming).

*see the classic vector thing for FPS games where they decide if you shot someone, no reason something similar would not be here for a green shell. Only problem is that might do green shells and nothing else, or maybe just weapons like it, mushrooms could be a whole other thing to consider).

If you don’t mind me what is a button activator I’ve never heard of it before

 

[FAST6191]

If you don’t mind me what is a button activator I’ve never heard of it before

Much as it sounds. A code that happens, activates if you will, as a result of a button press.

More advanced cheat systems gain the ability to read one area of memory and then do actions based upon it equalling something, less than/greater than and all the other fun things you get in programming classes.
The states of buttons then are mapped to memory somewhere* so your cheat engine can read these every time the cheat update aspect is run (usually once a frame) or lower level code if you do that. It then sees if the button (or combination thereof) matches a pattern and you can then say write full health in and in doing so dodge things like fights only get won when you get to low health/have to lose this fight/can keep some challenge in the game but have a get out of jail free/can find the potion counter and instead make a drink potion command by filling the health a potion worth and subtracting one from the counter rather than fiddling with menus.

*in best practices programming this is not ideal to use because of the switch bounce problem. If you have ever had a computer mouse start to die on you and double click accidentally then this is that taken to the failure point but as it is a mechanical device it happens at lower levels too (bit of spring, bit of oxidation to push through, bit of welding together...) from one millisecond to the next. Short version is every frame the state of the switches is copied to another area and all the code behaving properly should be using that instead, does not solve truly broken controllers but does mean code reading in the same frame but a few instructions apart will not have different results from the controller and cause unexpected behaviours.

Cheat documentation ( https://web.archive.org/web/20191123185758/https://doc.kodewerx.org/hacking_nds.html ) for systems that support this sort of thing (older systems tend to have far simpler cheat options that might only be able to just write things and not do anything fun, though some setups will have a button on the cheat cartridge to turn things on and off, or activate things) will usually make an effort of noting where the controller states are located in a given system, and you might even find programs that calculate certain combos for you rather than playing with sometimes arcane documentation http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#gbakeypadinput

If your button activator code can say write a bit in memory somewhere that the game will take as a signal to use its held item next frame regardless of what it might normally have done then you have a code. However for something as usually time sensitive as items like this then that is harder for as mentioned it probably all lives and happens in CPU registers and flags which is harder for conventional cheats to mess with (if you are making a cheat that edits the code the game runs on then different matter). Normally I would expect to see it more for something automatically happening that you might want to stop (don't drink all my nice potions automatically, just when I say sort of thing so you make it appear as zero for its purposes and restore later/when you want one drunk) but I can't rule it out, or a functional equivalent.

 

[BM1467]

Much as it sounds. A code that happens, activates if you will, as a result of a button press.

More advanced cheat systems gain the ability to read one area of memory and then do actions based upon it equalling something, less than/greater than and all the other fun things you get in programming classes.
The states of buttons then are mapped to memory somewhere* so your cheat engine can read these every time the cheat update aspect is run (usually once a frame) or lower level code if you do that. It then sees if the button (or combination thereof) matches a pattern and you can then say write full health in and in doing so dodge things like fights only get won when you get to low health/have to lose this fight/can keep some challenge in the game but have a get out of jail free/can find the potion counter and instead make a drink potion command by filling the health a potion worth and subtracting one from the counter rather than fiddling with menus.

*in best practices programming this is not ideal to use because of the switch bounce problem. If you have ever had a computer mouse start to die on you and double click accidentally then this is that taken to the failure point but as it is a mechanical device it happens at lower levels too (bit of spring, bit of oxidation to push through, bit of welding together...) from one millisecond to the next. Short version is every frame the state of the switches is copied to another area and all the code behaving properly should be using that instead, does not solve truly broken controllers but does mean code reading in the same frame but a few instructions apart will not have different results from the controller and cause unexpected behaviours.

Cheat documentation ( https://web.archive.org/web/20191123185758/https://doc.kodewerx.org/hacking_nds.html ) for systems that support this sort of thing (older systems tend to have far simpler cheat options that might only be able to just write things and not do anything fun, though some setups will have a button on the cheat cartridge to turn things on and off, or activate things) will usually make an effort of noting where the controller states are located in a given system, and you might even find programs that calculate certain combos for you rather than playing with sometimes arcane documentation http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#gbakeypadinput

If your button activator code can say write a bit in memory somewhere that the game will take as a signal to use its held item next frame regardless of what it might normally have done then you have a code. However for something as usually time sensitive as items like this then that is harder for as mentioned it probably all lives and happens in CPU registers and flags which is harder for conventional cheats to mess with (if you are making a cheat that edits the code the game runs on then different matter). Normally I would expect to see it more for something automatically happening that you might want to stop (don't drink all my nice potions automatically, just when I say sort of thing so you make it appear as zero for its purposes and restore later/when you want one drunk) but I can't rule it out, or a functional equivalent.

thank you so much for your help