sts_seed_search VS sm64

I checked the maps for paths that avoid all unnecessary combats so that each map only encounters a combat at the start and bosses. Empirically, this occurs 1 in 833 runs on non-Ascension mode and 1 in 1100 in Ascension mode per map, so roughly 1 in a half billion seeds meets this constraint. I used the C++ StS seed search for this filter. For later searches, I'd like to port the map node assignment code to CUDA for better filtering, but it's hard to debug :'(

Gamerpuppy's project is MUCH MUCH faster than this but isn't built into the game, so check that out if you're interested in finding seeds in a different but faster way. ForgottenArbiter's project will find more specific paths to find a seed that you want and it will tell you the path you should take for your chosen criteria and you can be much more specific with your filters.

seed searching: a C++ codebase which has basically everything in the game implemented

How? (1) labbing out how bypass combats without spending stacks of Neow's Lament, (2) programming a specialized seed search based off of GamerPuppy's code, (3) routing and manipulating the RNG, (4) executing the route.

Not exactly a tool yet, but some code I wrote here https://github.com/gamerpuppy/sts_seed_search

The SM64 is still going strong https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64

Nintendo won't allow any binaries floating around though.

Romhacks are typically modifying the compiled binary ROM image. Kaze' work is based on the painstakingly disassembled code from the n64decomp project[1]. He's working in C, modifying the game and compiling it again for the original hardware. Not sure I'd call that a "romhack".

Great videos though!

[1] https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64

A team or something reverse engineered super mario. I think that's the repo and it's mostly in C

From course_table.h and course_defines.h we can find that: COURSE_MIN == 0 and COURSE_MAX == 25 - so it looks like every secret stage is a full-fledged "course" for the purposes of counting stars, bringing us to 25 courses + castle stars (COURSE_NONE). So, the maximum possible value for starCount should be 7 * 26 = 182.

Multi-year decompilation project: https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64

The port source code of the decompilation is still up on github and Nintendo hasn't taken it down in years, cause they can't since everything has been done with legal methods

This is false, the source code never leaked; it was meticulously and painstakingly decompiled by hand.

It sounds like, rather than a ground-up rewrite, COBOL should be treated as an object-code language, and "hand-decompiled" (ala efforts like https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64) into an HLL that can, at every point, be losslessly transpiled back into the original COBOL.

I know the tooling for doing that doesn't currently exist... but paying someone to develop it would be cheaper than any one of these ground-up rewrite projects!