Lite: Super Mario Bros. 3 Hack Marriage Proposal Works a Treat

We’ve seen Chrono Trigger and The Legend of Zelda being used to propose marriage before but now it’s time for Super Mario Bros. 3 to pop the question.

Reader Mathew ‘Woodsy’ Woods sent us in a video of the hack which involved not only a message to his girlfriend but also messed around with her favourite game Super Mario Bros. 3.

Mat tells us how it went down.

[quote]I proposed by modifying a NES ROM of Super Mario Bros 3, one of her favourite games, putting it on a USB drive along with a small launcher application, I then retrofitted the drive into an original NES cartridge. Then asked her to “try the drive”.[/quote]

To see what happens next, watch the video below. We won’t spoil it for you, but it does have a happy ending. Well alright we just spoiled it and we did in the title. Sue me.

Mat explains how he did the hack to us in an email, it’s very hardcore.

[quote]Once I finished off Bowser for the first time and saw the original end message text and knew I could make an unforgettable proposal. I hacked the displayed text via looking up the memory addresses for each character of the message in a debugger picture processing unit viewer, then I searched though the PPU memory to find the string of hex values that related to the first few words of the original message displayed. I did a ‘hello world’ test over the start of the original messages memory, played the game and it worked, I then saved the ROM and tested it separately.[/quote]

[quote]Next up was to set about making an extravagant spreadsheet to convert the whole memory hex string of the original message into English finding various bits that were rogue and had nothing to do with the message to leave alone. Then I extended the spreadsheet to convert a new message string into the memory lookup values for inserting into the PPU memory, which allowed me to check that each line of new message would still fit in the limited width of the dialog area and the total area limit. Working out the actual sentence took a lot of trial and error in the spreadsheet, but I think I only needed to enter it into the hex editor once.[/quote]

Mat if you put that much love and effort into a proposal as married life then you’re going to do very well. Best of Luck to you both!

Lite is a new series of posts on Vooks to explore the lighter side of the Nintendo community and fandom. We promise though, we’ll keep it relevant, unlike some other places. It’s named after the DS Lite, geddit?