Copying the levels? What the hell?
You do realize that even the oriiginal GBA cart had the levels, right?
The levels have been there all along, it was just a matter of unlocking them in game, which some .sav files provided previous to the VC release, and I highly doubt even a save file is copyrighted since those are being distributed even in GameFAQs. And I don't think the save files had the whole 30+ levels stored in there, so yeah.
Actually, No. The GBA Cart didn't have the levels in it, that's why the VC rom is 8MB and the original rom is only 4MB. and that's a known fact that can be proven conclusively. The GBA game has 128KB of FLASH where it stored up to 32 levels from Level Cards, it also of course had the save files, and other such stuff. The main reason this VC was so cool is because it allowed All
38 levels to be played without any save file manipulation because the levels were hardcoded into the rom itself, and the VC version no longer makes use of the portion of the Save Flash that contained the level card data.
I do agree that Romhacking.net should pull it's head out of it's own ass, and was just being a baby about the whole "lol well nintendo did the hacking" bs, but it's their site, they can do what they want. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What SMA4 really needs is a fork of the VC hack that re-implements all ecard functions into a sort of menu that replaces the Scanner option, and removes the sector of save data that used to contain level cards, as the VC version has the levels hardcoded into the rom, and doesn't even read them from the Save Flash.
As it stands the game has horrible bugs when played on a 3DS because of it's unbelievably picky save file setup. (which is something I and a lot of others would deeply appreciate if it could be fixed.)
I was proposing your friend look into making the game save a 64KB Save Flash with the level card data removed so that the save file doesn't corrupt all the time when it saves.
Doing those two things would basically make the "best" version of SMA4: SMB3, but the chances of that happening are rather slim I'd imagine.
If your friend has a passion for this game and knows ARM Assembly, make sure you pass this message along to him.
A "fixing the game" patch for SMA4 is something that is sorely needed.
afaik the dot codes contain the level, its just stored to the save once scanned.....so not so much "on disk dlc" as sideloaded dlc
but lets face it, most people using said patch would probably not have legally dumped their own rom making it all a bit silly anyway, the real official patch is out there, if people want it im sure they will find it
The patch isn't just out there, it's linked in the original post, this is basically the only host for it right now.