Well, since it's mentioned in the official FCE Ultra FAQ and no workaround is given, I thought it seemed very appropriate to mention it in the FCE Ultra forum.
Phil wrote:
Seriously, we don't care :P
Apparently FractalFusion cared. I guess no one told him you'd been given the right to speak for everyone who might read this board :rolleyes:
Though we should only use good ROMs when they exist.
I agree that in most circumstances, a confirmed good ROM will be best, but there are some hacks that were based on ROMs affected by this problem. For example, I have a personal fondness for "Super Mario 4 (SMB1 Hack)" (as named by GoodNES), and it suffers from the problem.
I discovered this only this morning, and I apologize if it's already common knowledge, but I've never seen it mentioned elsewhere, and I really thought I should share it.
Quoting the FCE Ultra FAQ:
Why does Super Mario Bros. start off on level 0?
This happens if you're using a hacked copy of the Super Mario Bros. ROM image. The hacked version is reading from uninitialized RAM, apparently to get the starting level number. This bad copy of SMB was likely extracted from a bootleg multicart, which would have had a menu run before the game started, initializing RAM and setting the starting level.
Even though that's technically the "correct" way of handling things, I recall some other emulators included hacks that fixed this problem. As it stands, a large percentage of SMB hacks suffer from this problem and are therefore unplayable. Ever since I switched to FCE Ultra several years ago (migrated from Nesticle), I'd pretty much given up on being able to play the affected SMB hacks. This morning, I found a work-around.
As it turns out, SMB's continue feature (A + Start) seems to be enabled all the time, but unless you've gotten game over on same later world, it defaults to World 1-1.
So simply put, the workaround is to press A + Start instead of just Start at the title screen. If you do that, you'll start on 1-1 instead of 0-1.
Again, sorry if this was already common knowledge, but I'd never heard it before.