Smash Brothers Ultimate: playing as Boss Characters.

[Zm1231]

I figured I would make a thread to discuss the research into getting boss characters playable in smash bros ultimate..

Smash has always had a history of having a GameShark/action replay code or glitch allowing you to play as a boss character such as giga Bowser, master hand etc.

I wanted to try this out in smash ultimate and discuss my findings/ get help with this goal.

As far as I can tell from previous posts I was the first to get a boss character playable in smash back when it was released and again after update 2.0. I had been away for a long and recently updated my code findings and got it working again on the current version of the game.

In this title and build of the game

TID:01006A800016E000
BID: B9B166DF1DB90BAF

You can modify your character to become giga Bowser by editing the following locations to the below values

Main +0x00052c3730 with a Value of 0xC1005D0F93DBBF13
Main +0x00052CA630 with a Value of 0xC1005D0F93DBBF13
Main +0x00053067A8 with a Value of 0xC1005D0F93DBBF13
Main +0x00053067B0 with a Value of 0xC1005D0F93DBBF13
Main +0x0005307648 with a Value of 0xC1005D0F93DBBF13
Main +0x0005307650 with a Value of 0xC1005D0F93DBBF13


The last 2 memory locations seem to correspond to the announcer voice clip it will play on the results screen. So playing as a character such as giga Bowser will cause the game to crash on the results screen when the game attempts to play the announcer audio for "The winner is x" so changing these last two values to a actual playable character value keeps the game from crashing.

All of the game characters including bosses values can be located in the file
ui_chara_db.prc

Based on the character DB below should be the values that correspond to The Boss/NPC characters these are in little endian in the DB so codes or memory editor you have to reverse them.

E6 2D 06 22 12 4f Generall
1E DF 46 CE 14 50 GeneralMii
BF 2C 10 89 13 51 Master Hand
30 2D F8 CE 12 52 Crazy
A6 29 ED 4A 14 53 Master and Crazy
2E D3 39 0A 10 54 Galloem
D1 B8 EF E9 10 55 Lioleus
D0 E3 AA F6 0D 56 Marx
3A C6 F0 9C 0E 57 Marx 2
F9 D1 DD 20 10 58 Dracula
64 29 94 DE 11 59 Dracula 2
12 C6 2F 0F 12 5a ganonboss
FF 80 BB 1A 0E 5b Galeem
76 CD AC 65 0D 5c darz (dharkon)
13 BF DB 93 0F 5d Giga Bowser
BB 8E E3 90 13 5e killa_darz
8F 77 F2 72 13 5f koopa_koopag
4A A3 4E D2 15 60 Ganon_ganonBoss
50 4A DC B4 18 61 Mewtwo_Masterhand
31 90 AF A4 1A 62 Sandbag
69 C2 C5 5D 10 63 bcdefghig
67 AA B9 24 12 64 kaaaaaaaa
90 19 8D 1D 16 65 aaaaaaaa
8C 4E 64 49 12 66 aaaaaaaa
7B FD 50 70 16 67 baaaaaaa
F1 9A BE 53 12 68 ????????
06 29 8A 6A 16 69 ????????
E6 23 B1 E4 11 6a ????????
45 A5 9A 2D 1C 6b ????????
F7 EA 39 56 12 6c ????????
B0 26 41 CA 14 6d ????????
2B 4F 3B A9 28 6e ????????
38 0B 61 A0 2C 6f ????????
84 DB A4 3F 20 70 ????????
35 2C C9 E9 24 71 ????????
70 AE 9F 6E 16 72 ????????


So far the only character I can seem to get to load into anything is giga Bowser

And that's using this value
0xC1005D0F93DBBF13

if I use any other boss value and enter the character select screen the game will show the boss character as the selected character such as master hand it has icon data and everything. When loading the match the vs screen will show my selected boss character and when entering gameplay the game will load icon data and name data for the boss character but the loaded playable character will always be Mario.

We do know that master hand is playable in the story mode so in theory it should be possible to get him loaded and playable in other game modes but I've yet to figure out how to load him


The above memory location seem to correspond to the player slots if you search lower in memory you will see whoever the second character is loaded into the match. However during the WOL match where you play as master hand the above posted memory values that should be for player one are blank but the rest of the slots contain the 50x characters you fight as master hand.

I was hoping other people in the community might be able to help poke at this to find a flag or something that might get these characters loaded and playable.

 

[Zm1231]

Ok so I did a little digging and found this out

Main + 0x00052C3730 is the icon data for the character you want to load will also be the icon data on the character select and in battle

Main + 0x00053067A8 is the victory screen icon picture you are loading

Main + 0x00053067B0 is the actual character that will load into a match and also the character image shown on the character select screen if the value is frozen before going to the character select screen. (using any boss value here other than giga Bowser results in Mario loading into a match if this value is set to any NPC other than giga Bowser when the WOL map loads of will get stuck infinite loading most likely because the WOL doesn't have a model for these characters I would assume master hand and crazy hand would since they have models that appear on the map. giga Bowser or any other character value will cause that character to load in)

I haven't been able to figure out what setting Main + 0x00051CA630 does yet. As I haven't noticed a change anywhere when this is set to anything.

The only thing I can assume is the game has some kind of check on these characters and prevents them from loading and will load Mario as a failsafe so there must be a way to find this check and possibly patch it with a code but I'm not even sure where to look to find this.

Edit:
There is definitely some kind of boss character check in the game.

If I go to classic mode with the
Main + 0x00053067B0 value frozen to a boss character and hit continue on the character select screen it kicks me back to the character select screen. If I freeze the value after the select screen and select an intensity it will give me a error you have been disconnected message (possibly an anti cheat mechanism) so there must be fiction that is preventing these characters from loading on purpose.

 

[blujay]

Hello. Figured I would help answer your question.

First of all, the reason that you are able to play as Giga Bowser is because he is actually considered a fighter. If you open the game's archive (data.arc) and navigate to the "fighter" folder, you'll encounter that there is a folder for "koopa" and "koopag". He has actual fighter code, and if you open the "lua2cpp_koopa.nro" fighter module, you will find that Giga Bowser can be instantiated as both a fighter and a weapon.

Beyond that, the playable masterhand match at the end of the World of Light is actually a custom match mode (match mode 0x19 iirc) that you can force the game to launch if you hook the function that starts the match. This will allow you to play as Master Hand outside of the game. There is proof of this, as I wrote the mod and you can find it in a mod on GhostsPumpkinSoup's youtube channel from over a year ago (new account so I can't post links).

Even beyond that, bosses are considered items by the game, so there is not really a way to play as the bosses without recreating them over a fighter or attaching one to a fighter. There is someone working on a mod for this, however it is a lot of work and you can find it on GameBanana or on his twitter (@Claude1308). They do good work.

Anyways, TL;DR: No, you cannot just play as bosses, you have to go through a decent amount of work to get that functionality outside of Giga Bowser and the WOL Masterhand match mode (most of which is not feasible with just memory editing or cheats)

 

[Zm1231]

Ah that is a good explanation. I did not think they would be considered items since they appeared in the character DB.

As far as loading master hand outside of the world of light level if it just a match type value that might be able to be set with a pointer. If the match mode value is 0x19. I'm not Sure where in memory the match mode is stored at this point. But either finding the main pointer to force the value to be 0x19 should force the match to load into the custom game type with master hand correct? I could attempt to get back to that fight in world of light so I can search the value in memory and play around to I find the function that sets it then create a code to force the correct type.

I think I found the video that seems to show 2 characters in various matches fighting master hand. I found a link that went to gamebanana for the mod but it leads to a page saying it has been trashed.
But if the game treats him as an item vs a fighter I wonder how it loads icon data onto a player slot with a stamina type for him

 

[Claude1308]

Ah that is a good explanation. I did not think they would be considered items since they appeared in the character DB.

As far as loading master hand outside of the world of light level if it just a match type value that might be able to be set with a pointer. If the match mode value is 0x19. I'm not Sure where in memory the match mode is stored at this point. But either finding the main pointer to force the value to be 0x19 should force the match to load into the custom game type with master hand correct? I could attempt to get back to that fight in world of light so I can search the value in memory and play around to I find the function that sets it then create a code to force the correct type.

I think I found the video that seems to show 2 characters in various matches fighting master hand. I found a link that went to gamebanana for the mod but it leads to a page saying it has been trashed.
But if the game treats him as an item vs a fighter I wonder how it loads icon data onto a player slot with a stamina type for him

Hey there, you can find mod from here :-

 

[Zm1231]

Hey there, you can find mod from here :-

Thanks for that I did find and join your discord too. I saw from your discord that it only seems to work on FD/BF or BF form stages. If that's the case I might be able to create a code that will force FD/BF or just force what ever stage is being loaded to be in it's BF form. So the stage loads correctly you might be able to take it into other modes such as world of light or classic mode etc.

 

[Claude1308]

Thanks for that I did find and join your discord too. I saw from your discord that it only seems to work on FD/BF or BF form stages. If that's the case I might be able to create a code that will force FD/BF or just force what ever stage is being loaded to be in it's BF form. So the stage loads correctly you might be able to take it into other modes such as world of light or classic mode etc.

The idea, as lovely as it sounds, I intend to make this mod online safe. Of course the mod is not safe itself from online but that if you don't select a boss, you are good to go. So it needs to be up to people's discretion of where they use it, and if they crash and report issues, then it's on them. Going so far as to make them work on player's inputs needed me to tackle the game's inconsistencies itself, so I really don't want to handle any other issues by blocking away stages forms.