I'm making Super Mario World about Princess Peach for my daughter, who isn't born yet
My daughter, Daziel, isn't born yet. But I already made her a game. Where the idea came from A while ago, I read about Mike Mika, who hacked Donkey Kong so his daughter could play as Pauline and save Mario in
My daughter, Daziel, isn't born yet. But I already made her a game.
Where the idea came from
A while ago, I read about Mike Mika, who hacked Donkey Kong so his daughter could play as Pauline and save Mario instead of waiting to be saved. I never forgot it. I wanted to do the same thing for my own child, with the game I grew up on: Super Mario World.
I want Daziel to know a princess can have adventures too. She can be brave. She can grow up to be strong. So I made Super Peach World.
What changed
- Peach replaces Mario, small and big, with her own palette.
- Fire Peach gets a white dress.
- The title reads SUPER PEACH WORLD.
- Every "MARIO" in the status bar and course-clear screens now says "PEACH".
No game code was touched. It is graphics, palettes and text tiles only.
How I built it
I started from SuperMarioWorldRecomp, a static recompilation of the game that runs natively on my Mac. That gave me a fast way to run, test, and capture frames after every change.
The rest was a conversation with Claude and the Superpowers plugin. I described what I wanted, and Claude helped me work it out:
- Find where Mario's tiles live in the ROM and repaint them with Peach sprites (SMW's LZ2 compression had to be decoded and re-encoded).
- Rewrite his palette.
- Find the text tiles and redraw the title logo.
It was not smooth, and I want to be honest about that:
- The title logo broke the water in levels. The logo used tiles that the water layer shares (now it is fixed). Claude found and rebuilt the logo using only tiles that nothing else needed.
- Picking up a Fire Flower turned Peach into garbled colours, because I had forgotten that Fire Mario has his own palette.
- Yoshi disappeared for a while because my sprite data was larger than the space it was written into (Claude did it).
A few poses still use Mario's art in Peach colours (slope running, the cape, the star flash), because I don't have SMW-style Peach frames for them yet.
The "MARIO START !" screen is still unchanged.
From Mac to 2DS XL
- Patch my own copy of the stock ROM with the Peach changes.
Use the Ultimate SNES VC Injector to turn the patched ROM into a
.cia, with a custom icon.Install it on my Nintendo 2DS XL.
That is it. A game about a princess, on a console, waiting for her.
Try it yourself
The repo has the build scripts and an IPS patch: https://github.com/irvin373/SPW
It does not include any Nintendo ROM. You need your own legally obtained copy of Super Mario World ;).
Credits
- Peach sprites by WizToad and GatetcVerde, made for Mario Worlds Delta (Green Baron Games).
- mstan/SuperMarioWorldRecomp.
- Mike Mika, for the idea.
Daziel, one day you will pick this up.
Originally published by Dev.to AI. Aggregated on AIWithGhost for educational purposes β full credit and traffic to the original publisher.