[SM] After reading the old FSMR blog I want to try it again — here's what I've got so far

FSMR, the First Super Metroid Remake, is the reason I'm here. It

got surprisingly far: working engine in Game Maker, nearly all

enemies done, only Torizo, Botwoon and Mother Brain Phase 2 left.

Then it lost its programmer twice and went on hiatus, and the

person behind it moved on to an original game. Reading that old

blog is what made me want to see it happen after all — and to

learn from how it stalled rather than repeat it.

Not a 1:1 port. Super Metroid as the backbone, with new items,

new rooms and new mechanics on top — the way AM2R added things

Metroid II never had. The original layout is the reference, not

the ceiling.

One note upfront: I put the scripting side together with a lot of

AI assistance. I did the direction, the sorting and the checking,

not the code. Saying that so nobody is surprised later.

REFERENCE MATERIAL I EXTRACTED

- All 261 rooms rendered to PNG from the disassembly: correct

tileset, correct palette per tile table, CRE merged at tile 640.

For 259 of 261 the level data length matches width x height

from the room header, which is what convinced me the model was

right rather than roughly right.

- All 29 tilesets as 16x16 metatiles in their real colours,

palette read from the tile table entries.

- Catalogue of all 253 Samus poses, 1869 frames, Power / Varia /

Gravity, with the pose names from bank $92. A completeness

checklist, not usable assets.

- 850 sprites cut from a Metroid: SR388-style fan sheet

(Infinity's End / Physix), backgrounds keyed out and sorted by

whether they need mirroring. I marked all 851 cells by hand for

that. Reference too — not mine, not final.

- A sprite assembler I use for putting split body parts together:

groups, per-part anchor points set on the pixel, onion skin of

the previous frame, reference overlay, index-based pairing

across numbered rows, batch export.

Two bugs in the sm disassembly repo turned up while getting a

byte-identical rebuild: rip_assets.py main() is stubbed out, and

bank_AA.asm:10476 has an "if" where the "endif" belongs. With

both fixed the rebuild matches CRC32 D63ED5F8 exactly. Happy to

pass on the fixes.

WHERE THE ART STANDS

One artist on board. Zero Mission tiles cover Brinstar, Crateria

and Norfair. Still missing:

- Maridia (in progress)

- Wrecked Ship (in progress)

- Lower Norfair, i.e. tileset 9 HeatedNorfair. The Zero Mission

Norfair tiles cover the unheated look, not the lava-heavy one.

- Red Brinstar — note that in SM this shares tileset 7 with

Kraid, so it's one job, not two

Room counts per area, so the workload is visible:

Norfair 76, Maridia 56, Brinstar 53, Crateria 34,

Tourian 19, Wrecked Ship 16, Ceres 6.

Maridia looks worse than it is: going through the room headers,

those 56 rooms only use two real tilesets, SandlessMaridia and

SandyMaridia, plus Draygon's room. The rest are save stations,

refills and map rooms shared with every other area.

Samus herself is next after the tilesets. The goal is every

sprite redone, or at least reworked to be more detailed than the

SNES originals. Borrowed sprites are a starting point to get

something moving, not the destination.

ENGINE

Prototype running in GameMaker. Samus walks, jumps and collides

in real Landing Site geometry, loaded straight from the level

data — the block types come out of bits 12-15 of each level data

word, and the solid/air mapping is the reaction table at

$94:94D5. The movement values are the originals from bank $90:

run speed 2.75 px/frame, run acceleration 0.1875, air gravity

0.109375, jump velocity 4.875, and the lower in-air cap of 1.25

that's the reason Samus needs a run-up in the original.

It feels right, which was the whole point of starting there.

WHAT'S STILL MISSING

- Bosses I couldn't find in GBA style anywhere: Draygon,

Crocomire, Spore Spawn, Botwoon, Golden Torizo. Phantoon,

Kraid and Torizo exist in Zero Mission style on Metroid

Customs.

- A programmer. Godot or GameMaker, whatever you know. This is

the role FSMR lost twice, so I'd rather name it than bury it.

SCOPE, HONESTLY

Private and non-commercial. No money involved, I can't pay

anyone, and after what happened to AM2R nobody should count on a

public release. A learning project with people who like the same

game.

If any of this sounds interesting to work on, my Discord is

geilodemato. Please mention this post in your first message —

I'll ignore DMs that don't, for safety reasons.

Either way, the renders and the catalogue are there if anyone can

use them.