A hacker has managed to fix a Super Mario 64 bug that’s been around for two decades -and that people hadn’t really realized was a bug in the first place - by changing one line of code.
Yesterday, said hacker - Ryan Bloom - tweeted out a pair of images comparing the before-and-after effects of changing that one line of code, saying the following:
Turns out, the black smoke effect you’re familiar with that emanates from Mario upon being scorched by fire has been bugged all along. According to the entry on ROMhacking.net, “it’s now known that this texture is displayed in the wrong format by the game, resulting in black garbage pixels,” but because older games tended to depict smoke like that anyway, no-one picked up on it.
“Thanks to the Super Mario 64 code disassembly it’s been discovered that the smoke Mario emits when he’s touched fire has been bugged for 20 years.”
There is a patch you can apply that fixes the bug by displaying the smoke texture correctly as proper puffs of transparent smoke. “It does not add any new art; the texture has been inside the ROM all along.” Alternatively, you can make the change manually by making a tiny code change in the game’s files.
However, even with this new info, some people are still saying they actually prefer the bugged version, and others think maybe Nintendo did too.
Source: Twitter
