How to Patch Retry System into Super Mario ROMs

By  on  

I find myself watching less TV lately and much more time enjoying gamers stream on Twitch. While I too much PUBG, and enjoy watching people like Shroud and ChocoTaco hit bangers, I get more enjoyment out of Grand Poo Bear, Barbarian, and others play ultra difficult Super Mario World ROM hacks.

I've written about how to patch ROM hacks to play the games, but I wanted to look at how ROM hack creators add features to their hack, like the super useful Retry system:

SMW Retry System

If you are creating a super difficult ROM hack, you want the player, who's probably already suffering, to quickly be able to retry without needing to go to the level select screen each time. Let's have a look at how you can add the features to your own ROM hacks!

Find Rom Hack Features

SMWCentral is a ROM player and hacker's paradise; download famous ROM hacks, feature patches, and more. For this example we'll be applying the Retry System patch.

Applying the Patch

There are a few different utilities available for patching features into your ROMS and each patch tells you which utility to use. The retry system requires Asar, so download that and unzip.

Next, copy your ROM's smc file and the Retry system's .asm files into Asar's directory:

SMW Retry System

Double click Asar's exe file and you'll be asked for the ROM's file name as well as the patch's file name:

SMW Retry System

And you're done! Check out the amazing list of feature patches available for your ROM hack!

ROM hacks have breathed new life into the decades old games that I enjoyed as a kid. While I've not created ROM hacks of my own, I do enjoy patching the Retry system into existing hacks to enhance my playing experience!

Recent Features

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

  • By
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Dynamically Load Stylesheets Using MooTools 1.2

    Theming has become a big part of the Web 2.0 revolution. Luckily, so too has a higher regard for semantics and CSS standards. If you build your pages using good XHTML code, changing a CSS file can make your website look completely different.

  • By
    Using jQuery and MooTools Together

    There's yet another reason to master more than one JavaScript library: you can use some of them together! Since MooTools is prototype-based and jQuery is not, jQuery and MooTools may be used together on the same page. The XHTML and JavaScript jQuery is namespaced so the...

Discussion

  1. wintermute

    Thank you so much for this easy to follow tutorial. I wanted to play Dram and Grand Poo World 1 but was bummed they didn’t have instant retry. Following your instructions I was able to patch in instant retry! This is a huge quality of life feature I wish all kaizo romhacks came with.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!