Hey guys, last week I got the idea to mod SMB and add a frame counter. I thought some of the speedrunners out there might like it =)

Demo video here:

Just wanted to throw this up and get some feedback and see if anyone wants to try it or suggest some ideas that would make this (or something like it) most useful to you guys.

The frame counter is displayed above the coin total and starts counting when you hit start on the title screen.

It increments once per frame until you touch bowsers axe in the final castle.

This video demonstrates a little of 1-1, then skips to 1-4, then skips to 8-4.

The counter will roll over after 99,999 frames, which is around 27.7 minutes.

t2k emailed me about this and I included my thoughts in a reply which I'll include here: Hey, awesome work! Unfortunately we probably won't be able to accept runs done on a romhack, but the rest of the community may feel different. My suggestion would be to make a post on the Super Mario Bros. forums at speedrun.com, here: http://www.speedrun.com/smb1/forum . You'll get a lot of feedback there (I'll try to mention it to some people when your post is up). In my opinion, a more useful hack would be one that times each room by the frame (and shows the time when exiting the room or when grabbing a flagpole), this would let us test different tricks throughout the game to compare them and would make for a cool practice cart. Keep up the good work though - tools to assist with speedrunning are always appreciated!

Sounds like a nice idea, i'll also try to give some input. The timing usually starts when you gain control of Mario (i.e. the frame when the ingame timer "400" appears). I'm not familiar with these romhacks, but does your frame counter also include lag frames (e.g when loading a section after entering/exiting a pipe or starting a new level)? As darbian already mentioned, the most useful application would probably be if you're somehow able to time a section exactly to the frame, instead of a full run - so you could test things out on your console (using a PowerPak/Everdrive) without the need of any emulator.

Thanks for the suggestions guys. Eigensystem it does include lag frames.. the counter increases every time the NES NMI routine is run, whether the screen is black/blue/or whatever =)

Even with a wrong start, it would still be simple to get to the correct framecount from there, although starting from control or reset would be easier. But I suspect it will increase lag due to more stuff to render and be a slight disadvantage? Maybe have Peach say the final framecount in her rescue speech or sth.

But I can already see a use for this in making warpless practice savestates on console.