NEWER Super Mario Bros. Wii

Source Code Public Release

Preamble

Well, here it is, the thing you've been awaiting for... years. Yep. My original plans were to majorly clean up and reorganise the codebase and tools, because I really wasn't satisfied with the current state of them.

Unfortunately, this didn't quite pan out - as much as I'd like to have done this, getting everything into the state I wanted would require months upon months of work - something that's a bit difficult to do nowadays, since Newer is done and I don't wish to devote yet more of my life to projects related to NSMBW.

So... I've decided to dump the source code here so other people can do something with this. Much of it isn't really in a usable state - but I'm releasing it in case someone else wants to take up development and work on getting everything polished and ready.

-Ninji, 22nd November 2013

Licensing

The Newer SMBW source code and tools are released under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file in this repository for full details.

Copyright (c) 2010-2022 Newer Team

Requirements

• Windows or OS that runs Wine
• devkitPPC
• Python 3.x
• Python libraries: PyYAML, pyelftools
• NXP 'CodeWarrior Special Edition' for MPC55xx/MPC56xx v2.10
  • If this direct link doesn't work, the original page is available on the Internet Archive.
  • The installer does not work with Wine; you may use extractCW.sh from the root of the repo in the same directory as the installer to extract the necessary files instead (requires cabextract).
  • You only need the Command Line Tools component in the custom install configuration.
  • After installing it, you need license.dat from the installation root, and the DLL and EXE files inside PowerPC_EABI_Tools/Command_Line_Tools.

Full setup instructions are included at the bottom of this readme.

What's Here

Kamek

All the Newer hacks are inside the Kamek folder in this repository because that's how our files have always been organised, but technically, Kamek is really just a simple build system for calling the tools to compile/assemble each source file and putting together an output file you can inject into your game.

Unlike most typical build systems, though, there's a bunch of features specific to game hacks like Newer:

• Kamek is configured through a game-specific project file; each project pulls in various modules, which can each contain C++ and assembly source files, and hooks
• Hooks are different types of patches that are used to inject things into the game: patch static code/data in RAM, overwrite pointers with a reference to a symbol exported from Kamek code, inject branch instructions, ...
• Memory addresses in the linker script and used by hooks are automatically converted to match all supported game versions - Kamek uses the original version of the PAL/European NSMBW release as a reference.
• The compiled output is converted to a specific format expected by the Newer loader.

There's also a few things I'm not quite happy with...

• The projects/modules system turned out to be rather messy in Newer
• I think there's some features which just aren't used any more because the Newer loader changed over time.
• I wanted to add some NSMBW-specific features, like an easy way to inject new actors and sprites without having to modify the data structures using very-easy-to-mess-up Kamek hooks, but I never got round to this

Newer Hacks

The stuff that makes this game tick. Thousands of lines of C++ code, a smattering of assembly, tons of patches, and a lot of blood, sweat and tears. (No Ninjis or Chronometrics were harmed in the creation of these. Well. Not harmed THAT much, anyway.)

Kamek projects and the code for Newer and all of the specials are included.

Bootstrap

This is the in-game half of Kamek - it's a simple loader that links the custom code generated by Kamek into the game after the rels.

Unlike the rest, this hasn't been updated to build with modern dependencies, so it requires Python 2 and has only been finangled into working with WSL just so we could add support for a couple extra regions in an update. So the setup for building this is a complete disaster.

Thankfully, since it works perfectly fine (for the most part), and now supports every variation of NSMBW that was released for the Wii, there's not too much of a reason to deal with this. It's mostly here for posterity's sake.

So how DO I use this junk?

Good question.

I could probably write an entire book (or two) documenting how to set up the tools, the internals of the NSMBW game engine, and everything I added in Newer. But... do you have any idea how long that would take?

The setup procedures are included below this section.

As for the game engine APIs - I'd love to document these, but it would simply take way, way too long. Let us know if you have any technical questions involving these: you can send your query to the email [email protected]

Installation

Setup

• First install Python 3. If on Windows, ensure it is added to PATH upon installation. Next, run:

  • On Windows: py -3 -m pip install pyyaml pyelftools

  • On other OSs: python3 -m pip install pyyaml pyelftools

• Install DevkitPro's devkitPPC. Their official instructions for this are found here.

• The last dependency is NXP 'CodeWarrior Special Edition' for MPC55xx/MPC56xx v2.10. You will also need Wine if you are running an OS other than Windows.

  • NOTE: the installer is known to fail with Wine. You may extract the files from it with extractCW.sh on the root of the repo (which requires cabextract, available from most package managers).

  • CodeWarrior's tools are by default installed to:

  C:\Program Files (x86)\Freescale\CW for MPC55xx and MPC56xx 2.10\PowerPC_EABI_Tools\Command_Line_Tools

  • Copy the files inside to Kamek/tools/cw - Kamek assumes they are there.

  • Also make sure the following system variable is added to your environment variables, with the name LM_LICENSE_FILE:

  C:\Program Files (x86)\Freescale\CW for MPC55xx and MPC56xx 2.10\license.dat

  • The license.dat file may alternatively be copied to Kamek/tools/cw.

Usage

There is a set of scripts in the Kamek folder that invoke makeGame.py with different arguments - one for each separate mod:

• makeAnother (Another Super Mario Bros. Wii)
• makeHolidaySpecial (Newer Holiday Special)
• makeSummerSun (Newer Summer Sun)
• makeNewer (Newer Super Mario Bros. Wii)
• makeFL (Newer Falling Leaf)

On Windows, run the batch versions - you can just double-click them.

On macOS, Linux, or other Unix-like systems, use the bash versions. Open a terminal in the same directory and run them like:

./makeNewer

The resulting output is placed in a folder called Build_X (where X is the name of the Kamek project). These files go in /NewerRes on the game disc (all the Newer mods include this folder in the Riivolution patch).