“JUSTIN BAILEY —— ——” was the famous password that allowed you to play as Samus without her armor suit in Metroid, a reward normally reserved for those who can finish the game in under three hours.
To the disappointment of many, there was no armorless Samus in Super Metroid. But this patch restores that feature- each sprite, and every graphic of Samus has been redrawn by hand to make armorless Samus playable once again.
NOTE: You need the HEADERED version of the ROM.
Super Metroid "JUSTIN BAILEY" edit v0.99b
By Auximines 12/12/07
12/11/07 Best ending redone, opening graphics drawn, changed permissions
6/28/02 Grappling beam "hanging" sprite fixed
6/24/02 First release
Thanks to SnowBro, for Tile Layer.
Thanks to Jathys, who's SABS program and information helped with palettes.
Thanks to Yousei, for his palette editor.
Thanks to FuSoYa, for help with compressed graphics.
Thanks to Cartoon Network for keeping me company during all this.
Thanks to Nintendo for Metroid, and years of fun.
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INTRO
When Super Metroid came out in 1994, I really loved it... but like many people, I was a bit disappointed to learn that while
the game had the same ending as Metroid, you couldn't play a second go-around with armorless Samus. So, I thought it would be fun to do it myself. After about a year of work, (Samus' sprites are an immense trainwreck of scattered 8x8 tiles) I can finally play Super Metroid with armorless Samus.
Who is Justin Bailey anyway?
This hack is a throwback to the original Metroid. In the first game, if you finished the game within a certain time you got
to see the surprise ending, the shocking revelation that Samus was actually a *girl*. (Unheard of in 1986) And furthermore,
you actually got to play as Samus without armor in the second loop. Now, you can enter a password (000000 000020 000000
000020; the "20/20" password) to achieve the same effect, but that particular code wasn't well known back then. The claim to
fame for all loyal Nintendo junkies was "JUSTIN BAILEY ______ ______." The Justin Bailey code let you play as armorless
Samus, and gave you a few other things as well.
Her outfit was sort of a "space swimsuit" kind of thing, and I've read that a "bailey" is an old Australian slang word for
"swimsuit'. So, "Just-in bailey = "Just in a swimsuit", get it? As much sense as that seems to make, lots of people speculate that it's just a coincidence, and "Justin Bailey" is one of many random things you can enter to get various effects; it wasn't anything special the programmers worked in. Regardless of it's origin, the JUSTIN BAILEY code is a well known legend in the world of Nintendo, and it was, and still is often thought of as the defacto "armorless Samus" code. Hence the name of this ROMhack.
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HOW DO I USE IT?
This is NOT a ROM, it's an IPS file; a patch for a ROM. You must already have an NTSC Super Metroid ROM. (I'm not sure if it
will work with a PAL ROM.) I don't know where to get one, search the internet. Shouldn't be that hard to find.
To apply the patch, go to any website with ROM hacking utilities (www.zophar.net , www.romhacking.net, etc.) and grab an IPS
patcher. (My favorite is Lunar IPS) Just follow the directions that come with the program.
Lunar IPS
http://fusoya.eludevisibility.org/lips/index.html
If you still need more information, go to
http://www.zophar.net/trans/ipsfaq.html
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NOTES ABOUT THE SPRITES
You'll probably notice that Samus here doesn't look much like the way you know her nowadays, when I started making the
graphics in late 2001 there wasn't any modern version of Samus to model the sprites after, and I didn't like the outfit she
had in the Super Metroid ending. If I was going to do all the work of drawing and arranging thousands of tiles, I was going
to make my own design. And since the theme is "swimsuit" (see above) I used a design I liked, and took some liberties deviating from the original armorless Samus. (Space-sneakers, for example).
And my anatomy is a little better than it looks; each sprite was made with limited space, and an odd shaped tile formation.
The upper body and the lower body are different sprites, the tiles are arranged in the shape of a suit of space armor rather
than a human body, so it's hard to fit an accurate human body in there.
Also, many sprites are used in combinations with other sprites in different frames. the "aiming upward" sprites were made to
look good when standing, but those same sprites are used when ducking, and it makes her waist look very short. The ducking
sprite itself is the same one for left and right, but the upper body sprites are also the standing left/right sprites, and
since one has her back facing you it was hard to make a lower body ducking sprite that looked good with all the different
sprites it's combined with in various frames. There are many other sprites like this, too.
So if her arms look too short sometimes, or her upper body too small, waist too short, legs too short, or anything looks "wrong" at all, I know about it. And I can't fix it as it would screw up something else. Every sprite is as good as I can get
it, under all these bizarre circumstances. The swinging sprites (Grappling beam) in particular were extremely hard to put
together, and they still came out looking rather choppy.
Oh, and I did not draw Samus' face in the opening, I copied graphics from an old PC98 game and modified it a bit. I drew everything else, though.
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FAQ
Q- Those tiles look perplexing. How did you make sense of it all?
A- Using Snowbro's Tile Layer Pro, I created 8x8 grids, numbered 0-99 in different color combinations. So I replaced every
tile with a numbered box of a particular color, and took in-game screenshots of the strangely shaped stack of blocks that now
made up each of Samus' sprites. I then drew a human body inside that shape, (By hand, with a mouse!) in a paint program and
used the numbers on the original screenshot to figure out where to put the new tiles. For example if two tiles that made up
Samus' head were tiles 83 and 87, red box, yellow numbers, I knew just where to put the new tiles- #83 and #87 in the red grid with yellow numbers.
Q- How many tiles does Samus have?
A- Over 4,200. Not counting the opening and ending graphics.
Q- She looks like Mai Shiranui!
A- NO!! She had her hair up in the ending, so I gave her a ponytail.. and just a one-piece thing looked a little boring, so I
gave her a little vest. With white trim... Seriously, I had no intention of making her look like Mai.
Q- When I enter the hot part of Norfair without the Varia suit, the colors are messed up.
A- I know, and going in, locating all those palette addresses and creating new palettes to match them is much more trouble
than it's worth. You aren't supposed to be that far into Norfair without the Varia suit anyway!
Q- Will my speedrun movies still work?
A- Unfortunately, no. For some reason emulator recordings made with the original Super Metroid ROM always go out of sync near
the beginning. I'm hoping someone will make a new one with this patched ROM!
Q- Can I upload this patch to my website?
A- Yes, go ahead. Just be sure to include this README file.
Q- Can I use these sprites in my Super Metroid ROMhack?
A- Yes, you can. I'd prefer if you didn't alter them unless you have some cool idea that demands they be altered. And it'd
be nice if you throw me some credit.
But do not make a "nude patch". I don't want my work contributing to that, and most people who do nude sprites don't tend to
draw them very well. ^_^;
Q- Can I commission you to do some sprite art for me?
A- No, I won't do it. Sorry.
Q- Do you do that "electronic mail" thing?
A- Sometimes.
Contact-
[email protected]
NO-HEADER
Super Metroid (Japan, USA) (En,Ja).smc
Length: 3145728 Bytes (24 Mbit)
CRC32: D63ED5F8
MD5: 21F3E98DF4780EE1C667B84E57D88675
SHA-1: DA957F0D63D14CB441D215462904C4FA8519C613
SHA-256: 12B77C4BC9C1832CEE8881244659065EE1D84C70C3D29E6EAF92E6798CC2CA72
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HEADER
Length: 3146240 Bytes (24 Mbit)
CRC32: F1D7B32B
MD5: 24863A97 24699489 2C138A4C 3D6B8749
SHA1: 2086BEE0 5FF8CD66 B81B95BB F0AD01C6 94156961
