I knew you would give in eventually and hack Yoshi in, even if the RAM operating system that the Nintendo DS's dylithium Unix CPU uses prevented you putting him in more than level.

The hacks looks reasonably good. I'm quite interested in how you removed the sprite limitations and kept the Big Stars - if I knew this I might be able to get one of the scrapped star battle levels back in the game.

I still don't fully understand the gameplay - I guess I'll have to wait. But it definitely sounds interesting.

But I think some areas looked a bit crowded with enemies (and there were few quite low ceilings) in the demos/footage/images you've released so far. I hope you will fix that.

I turned on this filesystem access logging feature in desmume (go into the Slot 1 config and choose the debug thing then look at desmume's command line window - you may have to increase the window scrolling buffer thing in cmd window properties) and it seems that NSMB loads files for unnecessary things at the start of different scenes. e.g. "Bullet Bill" model at the title screen and "Blockhopper - ? Block" model at the World Map. Though strangely after replacing the bullet bill file with a random bytes file with Every File Explorer, the desmume log thing says that different files are loaded at the title screen. Maybe an issue with Every File Explorer or desmume tool?

Could somebody who is familiar with looking at NSMB's code (e.g. someone who is working on Newer DS ASM) have a look at the code for these scenes to see if they actually try and load these files, and if so - in what context.

I appreciate that the file offsets/IDs/whatevers might have changed, so the developers may not have intended for the Bullet Bill to load on the title screen, but rather something else that use to be in its place, but it is still interesting.

Can't remember the details, but anyway hardcoded doesn't meaning "non-changeable". It basically means it is embedded into the code, especially in such a way that it is difficult to change.

Arceus
Rather than having the other toad houses crash the game, you should make it so you just enter the level to a black background (with mario under the view), and it warp you out using the toad house "entrance to world map" configuration. Or disable those toad houses using the first world map editor.

I think you should concentrate on getting the gameplay right and either find a workaround or ask someone to make a code hack for the sound/music problems.

You can see in the screenshot that its remoddeled and the paths were moved, so he probably did use goombatlas for the latter.

Maybe this is as silly comment, but 0x207420 is the offset for the (USA) ROM itself, as its quicker just to hex edit that.