Super Mario 64 DS

Super Mario 64 DS is a remake of the N64 game of the same name for the DS, most notable for adding minigames, new playable characters, and improved graphics.

Languages
The Japanese and North American versions share the same text file. Though the Japanese version does not use the English text, even if the console is set to English and vice versa.

King Boo
You can normally only fight Big 'King' Boo, the crowned ghost boss, with Mario, Luigi or Wario. However, through Action Replay codes to access the course as Yoshi, the boss has different dialogue in the Japanese version:

 - Before Fight 

 - After Fight 

All European languages are blank.

Chief Chilly
You can normally only fight Chief Chilly, the giant ice boss, with Luigi as either himself or disguised as Mario or Wario. However, either through Action Replay codes or a glitch to get through the mirror to access the course with Yoshi, the boss has different dialogue:

 - Before Fight 

 - After Fight  He says basically the same thing in other European languages.

Boo
Eh he he... You're mine, now, hee hee! I'll pass right through this wall. Can you do that? Heh, heh, heh!

This text is also unused in the original game.

It is blank in the French and Spanish text, has the same basic meaning in the Japanese and German text, and written in English in the Italian text.

Miscellaneous
100-Coins Star

CLEAR!

LINKING STARTS. OK?

LINKING ERROR! GET CLOSER AND FACE THE LINK PARTNER AND TRY AGAIN. PLEASE PRESS ANY BUTTON.

DOWNLOAD FAILED! GET CLOSER AND FACE THE LINK PARTNER AND TRY AGAIN. PLEASE PRESS ANY BUTTON.

TOUCH TO START

One moment please...

Build Date
Within the ROM there is a text file called BUILDTIME that contains the following build date:

Unused Areas
There are two test levels in the game. Action Replay codes are listed on the Notes Page. To access the levels, input the codes, then hold Select when loading a used save file. The levels don't have proper star select screens, so they just display text from other parts of the game.

Test Map (test_map)


This is where the real meat is. Lots of stuff used for terrain and object testing, as well as general level testing stuff.

There are some tiles in the top-right corner of the map with Japanese characters. Each one exhibits the coresponding ground type's behavior when stepped upon:
 * Top Row - 雪 (Snow), 花 (Flower), 氷 (Ice)
 * Middle Row - 水 (Water), 土 (Ground), 木 (Tree)
 * Bottom Row - 岩 (Rock), 砂 (Sand), 草 (Grass), 無 (Nothing)

Onimasu Test Map (test_map_b)


This level mostly consists of a flat checkerboard plain with a bunch of Tox Boxes trundling around. This map was presumably used for testing them.

Original Peach's Castle Room


In the original game, the room containing The Princess' Secret Slide is a small hexagonal room with a sign and three stained-glass windows of Peach. The DS remake replaced this with a much larger room with the sign, two stained-glass windows, doors that allow you to swap characters, and a door going to Peach's Rec Room.

Despite this, the original room is still a part of the castle model, complete with the sign and Secret Slide warp, albeit the entire thing has messed-up textures.

With some hacking, the door leading to the current room can be changed to lead to the old room. However, it seems that the room is lacking collision data, as you'll fall through the floor when entering. Aside from this, the room should be pretty much functional.

The sign is assigned to the same message as the sign in the final room and has exactly the same settings.

Unseeable Chunk


There's a weird grey chunk floating just outside the entrance to the Big Boo Battle room. It is made from three triangles and serves no purpose. There's no collision mapped where it's positioned.

Player (aka Object 0)
Object 0 is hooked to the Player actor, and creates a Mario character that mimics the player's actions. Video showing object 0 in action.

This object is unused in the final game, but it may have been used during development to test multiplayer character interaction.

Cap Blocks
The game contains three M/L/W blocks that give the corresponding character's cap when hit. These objects work perfectly, but are unused in the final game. However, they can be found in the Test Map. They won't release anything unless the character is already unlocked, or the cap object exists in the level via object 254.

Chances are they were scrapped because they would make it too easy to get the caps, or they were simply just designed for testing the use of the caps.

Multiplayer Stairs and Barrier
The multiplayer Peach's Castle features direct reproductions of the stair and barrier objects as part of the level model, therefore the separate objects are unused.

Fire Ring
There is an object called FIRERING that crashes the game. There are no objects that fit this description in either the original or the remake.

This object's actor code is contained in an overlay that isn't loaded via the regular system. Maybe it was meant to be loaded and used as a sub-object by something?

Red Koopa
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This Koopa shows different behavior than the standard green version. He runs into the player rather than fleeing from them, though he doesn't hurt the player. When knocked out of his shell, he will try to re-enter it. When defeated while shell-less, he gives a blue coin, just like green Koopas.

The shell obtained from knocking a Red Koopa cannot be ridden or picked up. The player can kick it to launch it in one direction; it then continues following a straight line, knocking out enemies in its path, until it crashes into a wall and disappears in "a puff of smoke". If Yoshi eats a red shell, he can spit fire.

Red Koopa Troopas can be added to a level by changing a Koopa's Parameter1 to

Unused Object Parameters

 * Tox Boxes are able to follow regular paths, and that's what they do in the second test map (Onimasu Test Map). However, in Shifting Sand Land, the only used level where they appear, this ability isn't used. They follow hardcoded paths instead.


 * If the Power Flower object has Parameter1 set to 1, it acts like the Wing. At some point in development, the Wing Cap may have been obtained from a Power Flower instead of causing Mario to float.


 * Some enemies have a behavior for touching the character when they are huge, even if you cannot become huge in that level. Sometimes it is just how they react to metal characters, but sometimes they have a unique behavior for the powerup (mostly just being destroyed).


 * Princess Peach, as she appears in the ending, has a behavior for being talked to; you can do this by placing Peach in a map with a level editor and going up to her and pressing A or B. When talked to she goes into her default pose of standing completely still and upright, which looks quite awkward, and says the same lines Bowser says at the start of the final boss battle. This does not necessarily mean that you could have talked to Peach at some point in development; the behavior could just have been put there for some technical reason.

Unused Entrances
Most levels have four entrances grouped around their starting point, out of which only one entrance is used for single-player levels, leaving the other three unused. The exceptions are the character painting levels and the Play Room, which suggests that they were created late in development.

Early footage saw multiple players in Bob-omb Battlefield.

The presence of the unused entrances indicates that the full 4-player mode was scrapped after most of the levels were already made, which is actually not that early in the game's development cycle. Since Super Mario 64 DS was one of the console's launch titles, it is quite probable that the cooperative mode was scrapped due to lack of time to finish it. Or simply due to technical constraints; note that Super Mario 64 DS is one of the rare games that includes Download Play but not multi-card play.

In the final game, it was replaced by a competitive game limited to scaled-down versions of four small courses.

It's worth noting that a full-game multiplayer mode was, according to some interviews, planned for the original Nintendo 64 game (and its cancelled 64DD expansion), using the split-screen variation. It appears that they originally intended to revive the concept in this remake.

Goomba Low-Model


An unused low-polygon model for a Goomba. It's possible that the game was meant to switch out the normal model with this one at a certain distance from the camera, as is common in many 3D games, but the low draw distance for objects rendered it useless. Although coins do use a low-model when viewed from a distance, this may be because there are often many on screen at once.

Battle Fort Painting


Its filename (for_vs_cross.bmd) implies that it was made for the Battle Fort level. It goes unused since the only entrances to the Battle Fort are a hole in the Courtyard and through VS Mode (which uses a generic sky painting). The painting object can be set to display this graphic.

It appears to depict an early design of the course, most notably the sides are multicolored and there are no squares on each edge.

5 Star Door


Star graphics for a door that would require five Stars to unlock...except the door object has no such variation.

The only Star door in the DS game which does not also exist in the original N64 version is the 8-Star one that leads to the Mario painting, although its graphics file is obj_door0_star10.

This would seem to indicate the 8-Star door went through some adjustments during development.

Powerup Item
The name for the Power Flower actor is obj_powerup_item, so it is likely that this was a placeholder graphic for the Power Flower.

Coincentration Graphics


Coincentration's sprite set contains some Super Mario Advance 4 ones, which obviously aren't used in the final game.

Also, Coincentration's internal name is "wrecking_crew", a reference to the NES game. It uses this name in New Super Mario Bros. as well.

Crash Debugger
This game has a crash debugger triggered similarly to the one in Ocarina of Time. This one is a bit less technical and more informative, but a lot less in-depth.

To access the crash dump screen, crash the game (such as ejecting the game card). After doing so... Hold L + R + A + Left, then release. Hold Down + B, then release. Hold Start + Select.

This screen also exists in Animal Crossing: Wild World and New Super Mario Bros. It was used by the developers to debug crashes and other errors in the game, since it helps pinpoint exactly where an issue occurred in the code.

Here's an explanation of some of the info on it:
 * The BUILDTIME text file is printed on the top of the screen.
 * StageNo - Internal name of the stage.
 * PlayerID - The character that was being used at the time.
 * LayerNo - Unknown.
 * RoomNo - Unknown.
 * LoopProc - Which part of the main loop was running at the time of the crash; corresponds to a specific virtual function on the problem actor.
 * ProfName - Identifies which actor type caused the problem. The first number is the type ID (in the above screenshot it is 3, which corresponds to STAGE). The second number is unknown.
 * file-id - Unknown, may be the last file ID that was read from the ROM's file system.

Unused VS Files
The VS Mode archive contains some files which are not used in VS but are used in the main game.


 * ARCHIVE/arc0.narc/data/normal_obj/obj_hatena_switch/hatena_red_switch_start.kcl - This is a leftover of the ? Switch
 * ARCHIVE/arc0.narc/data/enemy/water_bomb/abuku - This is the water bomb from Bob-omb Battlefield; early footage showed Bob-omb Battlefield being played with multiple players.
 * ARCHIVE/arc0.narc/data/normal_obj/star/ - There are leftover files for Silver Stars, Collected Stars and animations only used in single-player (such as underwater star collection).

Regional Differences
The Japanese logo features metal around the text and a more emphasized "DS" with a black outline around the letters. The Korean logo has slighty darker colors. The logo used in international versions is closer to the original design of the Super Mario 64 logo, with wood around the letters and gold around the "64". The "DS" is also less emphasized. Strangely, the word "Super" is all cyan rather than multicolored. The background gradient was also changed to match this cyan, whereas the Japanese version uses a deeper blue that matches the bottom screen colors. The Chinese version breaks tradition by rendering the majority of the title in Chinese, rather than using a subtitle.

For unknown reasons, the Rec Room in the Korean version was removed. It also lacks a backlight setting.

VS Painting Room
The model data for the room where the Yoshies jump into a painting in Vs. mode is named e3_start_map_r00.bmd. E3 likely stands for Electronic Entertainment Expo; presumably, the room was originally created for the demo version of the game shown at E3, and then kept around and reused in the final version.