Super Mario All-Stars Famicom MMC5 Hack Cart

[Tanooki | 4,952]

Recently I had a trade with a member, one of the items was this mystery cart I had never heard of that got me curious, Super Mario All-Stars for the NES.   I was thinking weird old multicart, and yeah, it's not.  Seems in 2015 Infidelity (a person, not a group) did this insane MMC5 hack created a cart that houses a 1MB PRG ROM and 1MB CHR ROM and it stores SMB1+SMB2j+SMB2+SMB3 all on there, MMC5 upgraded.  You can load/save your game from within whatever stage your on, so not just at the castles or high scores.  Has a really long demo/intro screen before hitting menu with sampled cheering, and various other stuff going on.

 

The cart is a mystery to me, took a couple pics, wondered if someone could figure out what's going on here as this is all new parts such as the Altera chip seen in the center image.  Battery I guess is dead, wasn't saving for me when I tried or I did it wrong having read up on it, but easily swapped.  I have the kind of final release from 2017 here, a 2020 version was made for some minor CRT/emulator bug issues.  Seems to work fine for me on my FC handheld, as capable as it is, so a little off on audio in spots, probably fine on my real console I haven't tried yet.

 

Anyone up on chip specs or the rest here, got some ideas?  I'm just surprised to see this as it stands, and I know only the everdrive N8 PRO can run this due to size issues.

[Dr. Morbis | 2,092]

Does the wind work in SMB2J?  If so, I'm impressed...

[fcgamer | 4,754]

A guy named Tomasz from Poland hand makes some of these, no idea if this is one he did or not.

[fcgamer | 4,754]

3 hours ago, Dr. Morbis said:

Does the wind work in SMB2J?  If so, I'm impressed...

The bigger question is regarding the piranha plants. I spent one night playing dozens of versions and trying to trace the origins.

That was the same night it was discovered that BunnyBoy just stole the Kaiser port while making up stories how he had developed some accurate port, yet he forgot to change the flags the Kaiser had graphics hacked, oops, um yeah.

[Tanooki | 4,952]

I wish I had an answer for either of you @Dr. Morbis @fcgamer.  I've not had a chance to play it more, let alone try and dig up more info either.  From what I did see from the actual creator was a comment trail about things.  SMB3 was the root ROM for this, expanded largely to hold the other 3 smaller games, the new menu and its perks, etc, later adding Mario Bros.

Below I'm pasting from a thread where this guy released it with all the info, future updates, etc keeping it rolling along as more bug fixes etc were added.  It did start as the crap old 20 year old hack, but he saw all that was wrong, studied the original and seemingly made it right.

 

The "L" in the example stands for (Luigi Game)
This game was originally an .fds to .nes conversion I found online. It lacked the proper title screen construction, and various other functions. I've studied the .fds version thoroughly, to get my version running identical to the .fds version. The flashing stars on the SMB2 logo are there & save. World 9 is here as well, AND, I've made it so you can save on World 9-1 through 9-4, and when you reload, you WILL start where you left off. Luigi's skidding physics have been restored, (thanks to ShaneM for informing me) and the red piranha plants & green spring boards have been restored, (again, thanks to ShaneM for informing me)
 

 

Here's the thread about it: http://acmlm.kafuka.org/board/thread.php?id=8211  This was posted March 2015, last updated March 2020 that's some dedication.  Check out all the notes, covers what all 5 of the games have been made capable of and accuracy of the conversion where notes are needed like the one above.

He really seemed to care a lot about making this right, went back to it off and on I guess over a period of about 5 years to tweak every bit out of it possible to be right.  Hell honestly, it's more right than what Nintendo did on SNES which says a lot to me.  I'm thankful to have had this fall into my hands in trade.  It'll be staying in my little desk drawer with my portable famicom and the multicart that usually sits in it.

 

I have no idea who made the cart, would be interesting to find out.

Edited March 17, 2021 by Tanooki

[0xDEAFC0DE | 1,277]

Yeah looks like this hack: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/2422/

Romhacking.net is my goto for info about hacks, although it doesn't have a whole lot of information on that page.

Also infidelity is the same person who made the popular Legend of Link hack.

[Lincoln | 230]

the altera chip is a cpld, a programmable logic chip like an fpga but less complex. i'm guessing that's implementing whatever subset of mmc5 functionality is needed to run the rom. (it can't do the whole feature set on its own)

the top left chip looks like flash rom. the 628512 bottom right is a 512K ram chip if i'm googling it right. the 24512 is a 64K ram chip. i would guess the flash rom has all the data, and the 512K ram chip serves as chr. the skinny ram is probably for saves. small chips might be multiplexers, cic clones, ram protection, or whatever.

[Tanooki | 4,952]

Good call there Lincoln.  I did start to dig after the post trying to match the etchings on the chips to specs I could scrape up using google.  I think that sounds much like what I was starting to find.  The game is just huge, never seen a NES game that big before coming in at 2 megabytes.  It uses that space very well that's for sure.

 

And yes that is from the same person who did Legend of Link which I've heard is fantastic.  Still can't figure out who made the actual cart though, nice piece of work as it seems to be well assembled.  It would be nice to be able to make stuff on this level of quality, if someone wanted a one off car to enjoy this shows some level of expertise in pulling it off.  I'd get them since it's MMC5 based too, to make me a Sim City NES cart from that prototype.

[guitarzombie | 927]

I could be wrong but NES games can really be ANY size because of mappers located on the bard.  The NES can only read 40KBs at a time, but since the mapper keeps switching the 40KBs that need to be read, there really shouldn't be a limit, correct?

[Sumez | 2,995]

Wow, that's really interesting.
I'm curious why it needs MMC5 where MMC3 should be suffecient?

Though I'm going to assume it's a hacker default of "let's just target the most versatile one and not worry about it again" since most hacks are only ever expected to run on emulators.

[Tanooki | 4,952]

I don't know all the creeping little details, but from my vague memories of working on the iNES header doc in the later 90s and working with some people on various stuff on emulators way back, that does actually sound right, theoretically speaking.  I don't think in theory the NES/FC or even later systems quite had a true hard limit, you can bypass them due to the open architecture of the system as long as you compensated for the shortcomings with added chips/tech on the carts put into the slot.  The SNES had games go oversize with the SDD1, and the non-hardware(to this point?) MSU-1 too so you can get laserdisc style games and full CD scores on top of the old game code on there which far out stretches the 2MB title Mario here is on NES/FC.

My guess the MMC5 has the larger memory footprint, higher detail allowed to sprites, color, audio, the MMC5 lacks.  I remember the old NP article in the day showing the MMC5 allowed for like 4x the sprite detail, added colors, more audio etc they detailed it out in basically kid speak.  I imagine with the menu system, the hot saving, and other tricks going on to run those 5 games on the cart, it needed the added power.

[Lincoln | 230]

4 hours ago, Sumez said:

Wow, that's really interesting.
I'm curious why it needs MMC5 where MMC3 should be suffecient?

Though I'm going to assume it's a hacker default of "let's just target the most versatile one and not worry about it again" since most hacks are only ever expected to run on emulators.

Stock Mmc3 supports a max of 512K prg and 256K chr. A 1MB rom would be too much data, even if you broke it down to prg/chr chunks. MMC5 can do 1MB of each. Metal slader glory uses all of that iirc, or at least the translation does. 

Theoretically you can have any max size you want, if you can design a mapper to support it. That ff7 demake is 2MB i think, on a custom mapper. What ends up being practical is a different story.

[Sumez | 2,995]

13 hours ago, Lincoln said:

Theoretically you can have any max size you want, if you can design a mapper to support it. That ff7 demake is 2MB i think, on a custom mapper. What ends up being practical is a different story.

If all you need is 1MB data, MMC5 is absolutely the least practical way to go about it.
But I guess if physical production runs are never something you'd consider, it doesn't make a difference.  

I was just curious if that was the only reason, or if it actually needs any of MMC5's crazy features.

[Lincoln | 230]

7 hours ago, Sumez said:

If all you need is 1MB data, MMC5 is absolutely the least practical way to go about it.
But I guess if physical production runs are never something you'd consider, it doesn't make a difference.  

I was just curious if that was the only reason, or if it actually needs any of MMC5's crazy features.

MMC5 is also super flexible with banking, there are no fixed banks that other advanced mappers have. Without looking at the rom I'd bet that figures in. Mmc3 has two fixed banks that both smb2/3 would expect to use themselves. That's less of an issue if you can swap banks with no restrictions.

[Tanooki | 4,952]

Makes you wonder what the MMC5 clone in that hardware in the picture was needed to run these games in this hack, or if it really was solely just for the space needed to house all the data.