I've made a couple of SMB3 hacks that follow the same general concept as Kaizo Mario World. I discourage the use of savestates while playing, but a finite number of lives presents a problem, as there isn't a save function in SMB3 like there is in SMW. My initial solution was to put a 1-up at the beginning of every stage, but that's a bit contrived and seems kind of sloppy. Then I tried to find out how to include an infinite lives cheat in an ips patch, but then I came up with a more fun idea: infinite lives with a death counter.
My idea on how to implement this is to start the player off with 0 lives, and instead of the lives counter decrementing by 1 when the player dies, it increments by 1, effectively acting as a death counter while never allowing for a game over. The problem is that I have no idea how to do this, and I haven't been able to find any resources on any aspect of what I want to do.
Here are my hacks:
http://thepowerofsneeze.com/marioisdead.html
http://thepowerofsneeze.com/marioisstilldead.html
If anyone can give me a hand in either implementing this idea or pointing out resources that may help me, I'd really appreciate it.