Streamer and speedrunner Sethbling has taken Super Mario World hacking to the next level. Using a save glitch discovered by Cooper Harasyn, he’s managed to create a “jailbroken” Super Mario World cartridge with a mod-enabling hex editor built right in.
Fooling around with Super Mario World code is usually a pretty complicated thing, as Sethbling demonstrated last year when he used glitches to code a version of Flappy Bird into the Nintendo classic in real-time. This latest hack makes it much easier, creating a hex editor for the game that can be saved to an unmodded cartridge.
Once the hex editor is loaded onto the cartridge it’s pretty simple to get in and tweak things. In the GIF above Sethbling is cycling through Mario’s power-up states, both valid and invalid ones, producing some strange results. In the GIF atop the post he’s running p4plus2's telekinesis mod via the hex editor, allowing Mario to pick up his enemies and move them about the screen.
Getting the hex editor loaded is a pretty compex process requiring a lot of Super Nintendo hardware, but once it’s all done you can transfer the editor between cartridges relatively quickly.
Check out Sethbling’s overview of the jailbreak mod below.
Want to learn more? Seth’s got the entire original livestream archived, along with notes detailing his process.