Always wondered why, when using Lakitus in your custom NSMB levels, they appear silently, and even throw Spinies silently?

The same problems can be noticed with Skelerex's.


The culprit of that silence is the 27th byte in the first block of the level header. This byte determines which additional sound set will be used along with the default sound set.
That makes sense. For a normal level without Lakitus, you wouldn't store the Lakitu sounds in memory, would you?

So here are the possible values I could find for this byte so far, as well as the extra sound sets they enable:
- 0x00: found in unused levels (none?)
- 0x07: none (found in most levels)
- 0x09: Tower/Castle sound set (Skelerex's, fire balls...)
- 0x20: Bowser sound set (W1 castle boss room)
- 0x22: Lakitu sound set

This byte isn't a bitfield, ie it isn't possible to use more than one extra sound set.
So if you want, for example, to use both Lakitus and Skelerex's, you must tolerate that one of them doesn't have the proper sounds

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Did you know that, in japanese, 'kinoko' means 'mushroom'?