SA-1 Pack v1.40 and MaxTile is here! But what things can still be done with SA-1 and SMW hacking?

The latest SA-1 Pack version with MaxTile is available here: https://github.com/VitorVilela7/SA1-Pack

If you have been looking on my Twitter, you probably saw the many things that SA-1 MaxTile made it possible to the Super Mario World ROM hacking scene, mostly the possibility of putting multiple giant enemies at the same time and sprites backgrounds (as you can see on the attached video), that mimics SNES regular layers!

Super Mario World has a great advantage: pretty much everything of the game is already known or documented. What is not documented, you can figure it out by inference though its disassembly and RAM map. This is different compared to Gradius III or Super R-Type where a huge path still needs to be build for complete understanding.

The SMW engine although it has some flaws, it's flexible enough to the point of you being able to take pieces of codes from Super Mario Bros 1 - 3, port to the game and get the exact behavior of it.

My SA-1 researchment started exactly because of Super Mario World. In 2010, I was tired of the slowdown when adding custom sprites and HDMA effects... and after hearing about the "special chips" and they could make the game run faster, my interest in learning programming has grown up to the point of learning just for the sake of eventually adding a co-processor to SMW and resolve the slowdown issues. I was 11 years old at that time.

Now after almost 10 years, SA-1 Pack is pretty stable and has tons of features, now introducing MaxTile that not just allows for more tiles but keeps compatibility with all previously released custom sprites.

The magic here is that the SMW's standard OAM table is constantly being checked and cleaned. Data gets moved to a much larger buffer, which at the end of the frame is compressed and distributed though the OAM table, allowing up to 2.5x more sprite tiles compared to before. And with having so many sprite tiles available, you can make huge bosses or even sprite backgrounds at this point.

This is all thanks to the SA-1 CPU effective speed. It's perfect for 2D SNES gaming. Okay, SA-1 can't do 3D well, it can't do crazy frame buffers but it's perfect for 2D. Pretty much anything 2D-related SA-1 can do it, without exceptions.

There is still a lot of things that can be done with SA-1 Pack. Sprite backgrounds, huge platforms like New Super Mario Bros. Wii: rotating and spinning platforms. Dynamic graphics changing, to the point of the user not figuring out that it's only possible to load 16 KB of sprite graphics to the SNES's VRAM at once.

Actually, the limit is the sky and certainly instant level changing can be a thing. Like "open world" Super Mario World. Imagine you hit the goal tape of Yoshi's Island 1 and immediately Mario walks to Yoshi's Island 2, which is just next to the goal point. You don't even notice, but you are now on a forest and there's monty moles nearby you. This is perfectly possible with SA-1.

SA-1's Super MMC controller also makes it possible to introduce the "Dual ROM system", a thing I'm been interested for some years. Imagine being able to merge two or four SMW ROM hacks into a single one. You can play four different games or you can fuse them and make it a single one. What's the advantage of doing that? You simply now have the double amount of overworld maps, the double amount of levels, the double amount of insertable custom music, etc.

Dual ROM System can also work with other games. Imagine being able to merge Super R-Type and Gradius III into a single ROM and select one of them at start up? It's possible. With enough patience and research, you could even make the Vic Viper enter the R-Type world after beating the final core and help R-9 though the challenge! 

Once again, SA-1 is extremely powerful and there's a loooot of things that can still be done to existing games.

What are your thoughts about using SA-1 for ROM hacking? Could SA-1 benefit more the ROM hacking scene than being used to reduce slowdown over existing games? Comment below your thoughts!