Flippin' Fireballs!

So, I was digging around Deku Deals, debating with myself on whether Hamster's old-as-dirt arcade games were worth eight dollars a pop (they're not, really, but it didn't stop me from buying Donkey Kong and Moon Patrol earlier...), and came across this image from Vs. Super Mario Bros.

image from Deku Deals

Two things stand out. The first is that they dialed up the saturation levels to HyperDeath™ in the needlessly difficult arcade version of Super Mario Bros. Bowser is suddenly greener than all of Ireland, and the reds are bright enough to permanently burn images of Mario's overalls into your retinas.

The second thing is that, well, the fireball is facing the wrong way. It looks like Mario is firing it at Bowser, but no, Mario's fireballs are tiny rolling balls of flame. That's actually the Koopa King's projectile, and it's headed right for Mario... even though this screen shot suggests otherwise.

I'm sure others had figured this out a long time ago, and even I probably had a suspicion that something was amiss when I first tangled with Bowser back in the 1980s. Someone may even have already fixed it, but with nearly four hundred different hacks for this game listed on ROMhacking, I thought it would be easier for me to make the change myself rather than dig through that massive pile of edits for the right one.

There, that's more like it. No more moonwalking fireballs! I'm not going to share the IPS file for this hack because I'm certain someone else has already done this a long time ago, and because Nintendo has been so remarkably paranoid about its copyrights lately. You're seriously going after some guys for making controller shells in honor of the late YouTube celebrity Etika, hoping to sell them to make money for suicide prevention charities?! Wow, who dropped their pants and dumped a homemade lump of coal in your stocking?

Anyway. All you need to know is that the hack is pretty easy to do... you just load Super Mario Bros. into a tile editor, find three tiles that look like a fireball, flip them horizontally, and swap the positions of the first and third tile. Clamp clamp kabam, the fireball is fixed. Speaking of flipping, if you were wondering how Nintendo managed to animate the fireball with just three tiles, they flipped the sprite vertically on every other frame to give the flame a burning comet tail. You tend to lean on ROM-saving shortcuts like this when your game is only 41K in size.