Lab46 Wiki

The goal here is to actually manipulate and change the sprites in Super Mario Bros (or any other game) to whatever you want within reason. Within reason meaning the sprites are only so big and you cannot go beyond that block they give you.. unless you did something really crazy and advanced. There is a seperate tool that will be used in this case. It reads the code of the game and does its best to display all of the sprites. sprites are not as easy to work with and manipulate as a normal jpeg you could open in paint. For instance the flag that pops out of the castle and the end of the stages of the game is 4 separate sprites. Each sprite must be manually altered in order to get the desired look you're going for.

The name of the new fancy tool is tlp. When you first run tlp and open the rom you will notice a lot of jibberish. This is because the program does not know exactl where the sprites are so it is displaying more than just the sprites. But since this other machine code it's displaying are not actual intended sprites the program force converts them in to sprites and its just jibberish code that makes no sense. So let's do the obvious and scroll down till we find something that looks like Mario or coins or anything for that matter. Even when You get down here it may still look like jibberish. This is because they are all seperately stored even if they appear as single images (as I mentioned above.) When you see all the pieces to one sprite (usually straight in one row) you can click them and edit them in the side window. Or simply drag one sprite over to another one and over write it. Heck you could change every enemy in the game into a turtle if you wanted to.

Editing the sprites in my own opinion is the hardest part as I am no artist. But if you're feeling artistic then go have some fun with it. When you're all done you simply save it and then open it in your favorite emulator.

Sprites are what are read in to the game to give graphics. Compared to modern graphics these are very simple and somewhat easy to work with if you have some kind of artistic skills. With these three tools it is very possible to have lots of fun with old NES games. Editing entire levels however requires a lot of manual decomposition.