Mario Adventure 3 - Keeping it proper this time

[tepples]

If all of a particular chapter's event flags are needed to pass each chapter, then you can compress the progress into 12 bits: 4 bits for the chapter and 8 bits for the chapter's remaining event flags. You only need to store individual event flags for the whole game if you plan to make players able to come back and get the flags they missed.

Including checksum data, you can fit about 4 bits per character into a password with a 32-character alphabet. (This uses digits 0-9, symbols * and #, and the Latin alphabet minus vowels and S.) This means 72 bytes would make an unusably long password.

Table: Letters in a 32-character password alphabet

Code: Select all

1 2 3 B C D F G
4 5 6 H J K L M
7 8 9 N P Q R T
* 0 # V W X Y Z

[dahrkdaiz]

The thing is, while there is sequential game play, there isn't much that the player is guaranteed to be in, here's the data represented in bytes:

Player_Experience: 3
Player_Coins: 2
HammerBros_Coins: 1
Player_Level: 1
Player_Ability: 1
Game_Coins: 3
Odometer: 3
Game_Timer: 3
Current_PowerUp: 1
PowerUp_Reserved: 1
World_Number: 1
Map_X: 1
Map_XHi: 1
Map_Y: 1
Inventory_Items: 28 - there will be more than 16 available items to purchase
World_Complete_Tiles: 8
HammerBros_Coins_Collected: 16

By combining some data (hi/low nibbles), I get a total of 75 bytes (miscounted for 72). World_Complete_Tiles
are bit flags, as are HammerBros_Coins_Collected. The player isn't ever guaranteed to be in a specific area at any time since the game can be back tracked to the beginning at any time. The save data will allow the player to start where they left off on the same map, same x/y position with all stats listed.

[infiniteneslives]

Yeah just do whatever you can manage, in any event we'll all just be thrilled to see another game reguardless of how the saves work

If your limited by SRAM or other things, and have interest/need in more we could probably brew you up some solutions. This is really the only homebrew/hack project that actually exercises and nearly maxes out its capabilities, sounds like this new version will even more so. Work would be needed on both the emu and hardware side, but there's enough people around here who'd be interested in contributing.