I looked into this game recently and was able to figure out how to disable the notorious flashing that occurs when starting the game, defeating a boss, or warping. Considering it's one of the worst cases of flashing on the NES and does not affect anything else timing wise, was wondering if it could possibly be accepted for use in speedruns.

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/7869/

Making another new thread to discuss ideas for a potential 100% category for SMB2.

Since SMB2's progression is based on levels completed, I feel that for a potential 100% category it should simply complete everything the game keeps track of in each level. Reviewing Xkeeper's disassembly this would mainly include these three things:

• Powerup Mushrooms
• 1up Mushrooms
• Whether the key has been used in levels with a key and lock

Other considerations I would not include:

• Character contribution (it's a simple statistic, nothing more)
• P4 lives (for obvious reasons)
• Any collectables that respawn (cherries, stars, plants, stopwatches, etc.)
• Visiting all rooms (the game does not keep track of this)

So yeah, ultimately my proposal would combine two categories we already have and also include unlocking all doors with the key. Thoughts? Anything I may have missed?

I know several others are on board with this idea, but to make it formal (and to bring some activity here), here it is...As the name describes the goal is to complete all levels without making use of any warps, glitches or major shortcuts commonly seen in the other categories.

Obviously the exact rules will need to be determined and finalized by the moderators, but to get some discussion started I'm going to mainly leverage the rules CurtsNewBrand came up with (with some additions) as I feel it's a good starting point for what would be allowed/banned.

Banned Glitches:

• Double jumps (can go back if you perform one by accident)
• Glitched grabs (veggie glitch, pow glitch, etc.)
• Floor clips (1-1, 1-3, etc.)
• Walking on the ceiling (3-2, 7-2, etc.)
• Zombie rocket
• Wrong warps (3-3 star kill, 2-3 door glitch, etc.)
• Elevator glitch
• Fast carpet
• Wart 7th hit glitch

Allowed 'Glitches':

• Vine/chain/ladder jumping
• Abusing bounce mechanic of blocks/keys
• Skipping digs by walking on an enemy
• Kill code when not in a rocket
• Abusing pick up animation invincibility frames
• Clipping into ledges
• Picking up enemies/objects from below or the side

Banned Shortcuts (not covered implicitly by the banned glitches above):

• 1-1 shortcut door behind the bombable wall
• 1-2 using the carpet/Ninji to bypass key/underground area
• 3-2 skipping sections with Princess/Luigi
• 3-3 skipping the intended route with a Ninji (must go through locked door)
• 4-3 jumping the large gap with Princess/Luigi/Mario
• 5-3 ducking past the small jars in the tree section
• 6-3 shortcut door to the left of the first ladder (must go right)
• 7-1 jumping over the tall pillar in the second area with Luigi/Princess

Allowed Shortcuts:

• 6-2 jumping across the Albatosses/Beezos
• 7-1 jumping to the left toward the rocket right away

This request is similar to one I've made here two years ago, but since moderators have changed since then I feel it's time to bring this up for discussion again.

On SRC you can specify custom columns (variables) on the leaderboard in order to keep track of various things for statistical purposes (the All Forts category currently uses one for whether the player used the Wrong Warp there). I feel the following columns would be great to have in Warpless specifically due to how much of a factor RNG has on the category:

Early Hammer (Was the W2 hammer acquired before 2-3/2-quicksand? Could be a simple No or Yes, or more specific, such as 1 death, post 2-3, etc.)

Hands (How many times was the player grabbed on the World 8 hand bridge?)

Obviously the main issue would be having to go through all the runs and fill in this information. I know Teex has a spreadsheet he is maintaining with this info (and more) for the top times, but I would be more than willing to assist with filling in the gaps if needed, maybe starting with top 50/top 100 for now. I feel these columns would be just enough to paint a better Warpless picture directly on the leaderboard though without it being too cluttered.

Hi there. Just discovered there was a SRC leaderboard for this game recently. I haven't attempted a run yet myself, but it's game I've played a lot growing up and I wanted to bring your attention to a glitch I used to mess with that can be used to skip straight to the final tournament. This trick is not valid for the current Any% since you have to reset and reload your save, but I was thinking maybe this could be the new Any% run (since you reach the credits much faster, only needing to complete one tournament) and the current category can be possibly renamed to either 'Glitchless' or 'All Tournaments'. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

1. Start a new file like normal and when you have control of the boat, immediately return to weigh-in (do not take the guide)

2. Progress like normal and when the game asks if you want to Save your Record, press B once to repeat the message

3. This time, press A to save. The game will glitch out a bit, but the trick is complete. Simply reset and reload your save and you will appear in the next tournament despite not qualifying

4. Repeat for tournaments 2 and 3, then complete the final tournament like normal (if you do the glitch on the final tournament, you will simply go back to the starting tournament with the game thinking you beat the game, but you don't see the credits or anything)

For those who run Frog%, the Frog Patch in Resources has been updated to version 1.1.

This is an optional update that fixes the softlock that occurs if you do not enter the final door right away after defeating Bowser. Most people hold up at the door to enter as soon as possible anyway, but for those who don't want to risk the softlock (and invalidating their run) I would recommend updating.

Instructions: Patch the original SMB3 game with Speedrunner's Edition first, then apply the Frog Patch on top.

Patch download: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/5050/

Changes since 1.5:

-The Star/Music Box is no longer required to traverse the World 8 hand traps without getting grabbed. Now the grabbing mechanic is always disabled.

(While I personally prefer the item requirement from a design perspective, for SE it's all about going fast and this was one of those inevitable changes that was needed for that goal, especially for the No WW category)

-Added the following hammer brother tile restrictions: Panel 3, Panel 4, Panel 9, Panel 10, World 5 Blue Fortress, World 2 Pyramid -Moved the World 2 Music Box Bro in the 'loop' above 2-3 -Moved the World 2 Whistle Bro slightly and added a boulder in that area to limit their movement to the two highest places -Moved the World 4 Cloud Bro between 4-2 and 4-3

I have this category up for Speedrunner's Edition currently, but wanted to mention it here to see if anyone would be interested in making it a category extension for vanilla SMB3 as well. The goal is to complete the game while finding and activating all the giant question blocks in the game (there are 18 total). Warp whistles are allowed, but no wrong warps.

Here is a rough guide of the route I put together: https://pastebin.com/CfuyQr3D And here is the guide I added to SE showing how to get to every giant question block: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m84_mj0OpU4FRpiZKST5OeNKPQZGKTHbKgnQOLbb1Qw/

I think it's a fun and unique category that isn't too elaborate with secrets, but still allows you to branch out and see some of the extra areas you don't see in other categories. Definitely give it a try if you want both the speedrunning experience and the thrill of finding secrets you get from casual play.

Patch download: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/5050/

Changes since 1.4.1

-Added mushroom houses and castles as restricted hammer bro tiles. This guarantees all movements of 1 in World 1 and the bro to always land on the space with the hidden fire flower in Warpless/100% (assuming no deaths) -Added an additional Spade game in world 4 at the 4-5/4-6 junction and moved the star bro to the lower half of the fork. This guarantees that the bro is avoidable without having to use a music box.

Hey all!

Just in case anyone here does not browse the SMB3 rom hacks section, I wanted to bring your attention to a relatively new hack that I created that is essentially the same game you know and love, but vastly improves the speedrunning experience. This is SMB3 - Speedrunner's Edition!

-All autoscrolling levels have their autoscrolling removed, allowing you to breeze through those levels at your own pace. No more 2 minute airships and excessively long world 8s. -The world 8 hands can be bypassed by using a star or music box on the world map. -Bad hammer bro RNG is no more. With minor map tweaks and movement restrictions you will no longer see excessive movements (greater than 2), marathons, or less than ideal scenarios.

You can check out the leaderboards, find the link to download the patch (under Game Rules), and a guide detailing every change all here: https://www.speedrun.com/smb3se

Feel free to request both new category ideas and modifications to Speedrunner's Edition in this forum.

With new categories, pretty much anything is fair game as long as there is a significant improvement when ran in SE compared to normal/vanilla SMB3 (so no Any%) and the category is popular enough to warrant addition.

With hack enhancements, ultimately I want this to be the community's hack for speedrunning SMB3, but at the same time during the design process I have made various decisions that I would prefer to retain unless there is overwhelming support for the changes. Among these include:

1. Disabling the hands entirely (I wanted to preserve the mechanic and instead provide an appropriate and satisfying counter to them)

2. Disabling hammer bro movement entirely (Again, it's part of the game that they move and it adds variety. That is why I decided to instead only address excessive movements (greater than 2), marathons, and other bad RNG)

With that said, please feel free to reach out with any and all ideas you may have, and happy speedrunning!

Hello all. I am the creator of this amazing hack, Macobra52, and so glad to finally have leaderboards established for it.

You may notice when viewing the initial submitted runs that there are some minor differences here and there. This is because there were several revisions during the testing phase of Speedrunner's Edition where various things needed to be addressed (primarily with the hammer bros). For now these previous version are allowed, but for future submissions please ensure you are using the latest version to keep the verification process easier for me and since the fixes are intended to make things even faster and less RNG dependent for you.

Thanks, and good luck!

"Please contact the smb3 moderators about this, if they're okay about that then we may consider it."

I've spoken with Aweglib, a moderator of both the SMB3 vanilla and category extension boards prior to submitting the game request and he personally felt that it should be on its own board rather than part of SMB3 category extension. I also mentioned that mitchflowerpower has played it and given his approval, who is also a moderator of SMB3 vanilla. Not sure what else is needed to give the 'okay' on this, but any advice would be appreciated.

The LttP leaderboards have a custom 'Blue Balls' column where submitters can specify how many blue balls they received in their run, which is also RNG dependent: https://www.speedrun.com/alttp

Since pretty much every SMB3 category (aside from Any% and Frog%) has to deal with hand RNG, I figured this would be an interesting statistic to show on these leaderboards similar to how LttP has it.

In addition to the icons representing 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place on leaderboards, I think it would be cool to have more icons that are easier to work towards. Maybe something like this:

Gold Star - Top 10% Silver Star - Top 25% Bronze Star - Top 50%

Apologies in advance if this is a duplicate request.

Using the SMB3 Randomizer, it is possible to generate a vanilla rom with the only difference being autoscrollers have their autoscrolling removed (all levels (except 5-9), airships, and military stages). The easiest way to do this is to enter the flags 2WA!. The seed does not matter, but for consistency I would recommend setting it to 0 to keep the hash on the title screen the same: Flower, 1000, Mushroom, Note Block, 1UP, Star.

I think these two main categories would see the most potential with this change and would make for great category extensions, since runs would be faster in general and it'd be interesting to see what new strategies people can come up with on the disabled autoscrollers.

Edit: An IPS patch was created by narfman0 so using the randomizer is no longer needed. You can get it here: https://github.com/narfman0/romhacks/raw/master/Super%20Mario%20Bros%203%20noauto.ips