Presentation and Branding

Presentation and branding

Scope: This page is the canonical owner for the legal/boot screen presentation, title-screen art and branding layout, configurable edition text, boot phrase presentation, and visual acceptance evidence.

File 0x5E packaging/loading mechanics belong to Resource and overlay system. Literal ROM allocation ownership belongs to Memory and allocation map. Gameplay HUD/text/render-node behavior belongs to Native HUD and UI.

Current conclusion

The redesigned legal/boot screen and the earlier data-only Candidate-B title composition are Runtime-confirmed on their documented production routes. On 2026-09-29 the user visually accepted a precise vector/typeset revision of RANDOMIZER and a cleaner MORTAL KOMBAT MYTHOLOGIES plaque at 320x240, and requested production integration. The shared browser/CLI patch core now embeds the revised art in the native 16-color CI8 title path and retains configurable uppercase edition text. This exact new composition is Static/implementation-confirmed; runtime Pending.

The title implementation is data-only: no title executable wrapper or title-menu code hook is required. The new compressed image fits in the original file-0x5E slot. The earlier executable-wrapper composition is Rejected / failed because it overlapped production pickup-persistence ownership.

Legal / boot branding

The legal-screen text path is reused rather than replaced. The stock screen has 13 text submissions; production repoints those existing calls into one guarded packed text region at ROM 0xAF998..0xAFA23 plus the final license slot at 0xAFA98..0xAFABB.

The current MKMSZR layout is:

MORTAL KOMBAT® MYTHOLOGIES
R A N D O M I Z E R
<CHAR> EDITION
©2026 LA PAVADA INC.


<seeded joke line 1>
<seeded joke line 2>


BY SMEAG

NOT LICENSED BY NINTENDO

<CHAR> uses the same configured title-character value as the title screen, so the browser/CLI field drives both places. It remains uppercase and bounded to 12 name characters before EDITION is appended.

The stock legal font encodes the registered-sign glyph with ASCII ^ and the copyright glyph with ASCII ~; production preserves that stock encoding rather than introducing a new font path. The packed region is exactly bounded for the worst-case 12-character edition name and leaves two zero bytes before the adjacent BOX n OF 4 code allocation.

Evidence: the redesigned 2026 layout is Runtime-confirmed. The user confirmed the exact rearranged legal screen looks correct in-game, including the configurable edition line, seeded joke placement, BY SMEAG, and NOT LICENSED BY NINTENDO. The same layout is also full-pipeline Implementation/CI-confirmed, including a non-default SEKTOR EDITION build.

Boot phrase presentation

The seeded boot phrase occupies the two joke lines in the legal-screen layout above. This page owns its placement and visual presentation. Seed-domain selection and deterministic namespace behavior belong to Web patcher and product behavior; the browser intentionally does not reveal the selected boot phrase in its completion panel so it remains an in-game discovery.

Title-menu branding audit

The title-menu path is now decoded far enough to support the accepted MKMSZR rebrand.

Static-confirmed on the clean USA Rev. 0 ROM. The normal title controller is 0x80078C40. Its title artwork is a six-tile CI8 image submitted through the context-specific 0x80073CEC -> 0x8001E578 family. Earlier runtime instrumentation of that family visibly duplicated the title logo while leaving the START / OPTIONS menu text and cursor untouched.

The six title resources are:

Resource	Size	Screen origin	File-0x5E decoded record
0x3C6	120x120	(0,0)	+0x3B780
0x3C7	100x120	(120,0)	+0x3EFCC
0x3C8	100x120	(220,0)	+0x41EB8
0x3C9	120x120	(0,120)	+0x44DA4
0x3CA	100x120	(120,120)	+0x485F0
0x3CB	100x120	(220,120)	+0x4B4DC

Together they form one exact 320x240 indexed composite.

Palette correction

The palette descriptor begins at 0x800B2760 / ROM 0xB3360, but the earlier audit was four bytes early when interpreting palette entries. The word at 0xB3360 is the 0x100-entry descriptor/count; the 256 16-bit palette entries begin at ROM 0xB3364.

For offline title reconstruction and re-quantization, interpreting those entries as BGR555 reproduces the stock emulator appearance closely: dark maroon-black background, icy-blue upper plaque and blue SUB-ZERO. The older RGB interpretation is rejected for title-preview work because it produced misleading cyan/green/noisy previews.

File 0x5E packaging boundary

The title art lives in global file ID 0x5E. File-table/loading and compression/package mechanics are canonical in Resource and overlay system, while literal high-ROM allocation ownership is canonical in Memory and allocation map. This page owns the resulting branding design, generated art behavior, and visual acceptance rather than duplicating those mechanics.

Accepted Randomizer title proof

The accepted image direction is the icy-metallic MORTAL KOMBAT MYTHOLOGIES / RANDOMIZER Candidate B. The original production path used the exact native 320x240 CI8 image with the corrected stock BGR555 palette. The user runtime-tested that art and reported it looks awesome. The later 16-color proof keeps the native CI8 path but limits visible title art to one near-black background plus 15 icy-blue BGR555 entries; the user reported that this reduced-color version still looks very good and requested it for production.

The final standalone title proof is:

• MKMSZR_title-screen_candidate-b_with-edition_proof_v05.z64
• SHA-256 3f98e2d73fc66203a333d2b6a9f0861cc528201804e96349c2dce376f8f189d0
• edition text centered at x=160, y=114
• displayed string SUB-ZERO EDITION

This is Runtime-confirmed for the title-screen route shown by the user. The proof's title art and final edition placement are accepted visually.

The proof itself is not a production allocation. It used a raw file-0x5E relocation overlapping the production payload region and used the bootstrap cave beginning at ROM 0x9AD84, which production already owns. Those proof locations must not be copied into the browser/CLI pipeline.

Accepted 16-color title update (2026-09-27)

The bounded proof MKMSZR_title-16color_title-proof_v01.z64 is Runtime-confirmed for visual acceptance only: the user reported that the reduced-color title still looks very good. The proof preserved the native CI8 renderer and reduced the image to a 16-entry visual palette rather than changing the resource grammar to true packed CI4.

The production implementation keeps that conservative renderer contract:

• Candidate B is Floyd-Steinberg quantized at build time into exactly 16 CI8 indices;
• palette index 0xFF remains the stock near-black background;
• the existing 15 edition-text indices become the dark-to-light icy-blue art/text ramp, so configurable <NAME> EDITION shares the same palette instead of adding colors;
• no title code hook, renderer change, or CI4 record-format assumption is introduced;
• the default SUB-ZERO generated file-0x5E package is about 0x2E5D4 bytes with the shared implementation, versus 0x3017F for the earlier high-color production title: approximately 0x1BAB = 7,083 bytes smaller.

The earlier 16-color production path still reserved a full 0x31000 high-ROM title allocation despite its smaller package. The 2026-09-29 typeset update below replaces that allocation with an in-place package.

Approved vector/typeset title update (2026-09-29)

The 320x240 preview was user-accepted before integration. RANDOMIZER uses controlled glyph widths and literally reuses the same vector R for its first and last letters. The MORTAL KOMBAT MYTHOLOGIES text and simplified icy-blue plaque are also vector/typeset. The configurable SUB-ZERO EDITION preview line was left unchanged. The production pixel asset leaves the edition region blank so the existing build-selected <NAME> EDITION renderer can fill it for any configured name.

The art is mapped directly to the existing 16-color CI8 palette, without Floyd-Steinberg texture/dither. The static package comparison on the clean USA Rev. 0 ROM is:

Title configuration	Compressed file 0x5E	Free bytes within the 0x2F3E0 stock slot
Previous 16-color Candidate-B SUB-ZERO implementation	0x2E60E	0xDD2 if stored in place (previously relocated)
New typeset SUB-ZERO	0x2D52E	0x1EB2
New typeset SEKTOR	0x2D461	0x1F7F
New typeset 12-character WWWWWWWWWWWW	0x2D672	0x1D6E

Thus the approved default is 0x10E0 (4,320) bytes smaller than the previous implementation, while remaining native CI8. Its LZW package is written at ROM 0x4E3060, with file-table start and flag unchanged and the end pointer set to the actual compressed length. The bytes beyond that endpoint in the stock slot are preserved, not declared free. The former [0xF90000,0xFC1000) title reservation is no longer owned by title branding; other allocation claims require their own proof. The user subsequently confirmed the default title looks very good through the production webapp route on 2026-09-29.

Title color follows non-vanilla outfit selection (2026-09-29)

The title's 15 icy-blue BGR555 entries now follow the configured Sub-Zero outfit color while the near-black background stays stock. Vanilla leaves the accepted title and package byte-identical. Purple, orange, yellow, cyan, pink, explicit hue, RGB tint, and seed-based modes use the outfit color transform and seed; red and green use the corresponding target hues (0°/120°) to avoid a bronze/teal cast from swapping the title's brighter cyan source channels. The same 15 entries also color the configurable <NAME> EDITION line. This is a palette-only change for non-rainbow modes, so their compressed file-0x5E size is unchanged for the same edition name.

Rainbow mode receives a fixed five-hue title treatment across RANDOMIZER and the edition line, with two luminance levels per hue. The plaque keeps five restrained blue shades. It uses only the original 16 CI8 indices (including the background), adds no title-menu hook or animation, and does not synchronize to the 64-phase outfit cycle during gameplay. Static clean-ROM encoding gives 0x2CD78 compressed bytes for SUB-ZERO and 0x2CF75 for a 12-character WWWWWWWWWWWW edition, within the original 0x2F3E0 slot. All color variants are Static/implementation-confirmed; exact in-game color acceptance remains Pending.

Edition text

Immediately after the six image submissions, vanilla draws START at (160,160) and OPTIONS at (160,180) through frontend text renderer 0x8001CA88. The accepted proof inserts one centered line before those menu calls at y=114.

Runtime testing corrected one earlier static assumption: mixed/lowercase text is not reliable with the exact title-font/style configuration copied from START/OPTIONS. The lowercase Sub-Zero Edition proof rendered corrupted/missing glyphs. The accepted behavior therefore uses uppercase only.

The hyphen byte in SUB-ZERO renders more like a colon with this title-font configuration. That presentation quirk is accepted for the current temporary freeform edition field.

Earlier Candidate-B production integration (historical)

The Candidate-B image, final visual spacing, and configurable edition-name path were Runtime-confirmed on the tested earlier production route. The following relocation facts describe that historical implementation, not the current typeset in-place title.

The accepted production implementation is data-only:

• no title executable wrapper;
• no title-menu code hook; stock title START setup at ROM 0x00079C24..0x00079C2B / VA 0x80079024..0x8007902B remains unchanged;
• uppercase <NAME> EDITION is rasterized into the Candidate-B 320x240 CI8 title at patch time;
• the 15 Candidate-B-unused palette indices are repurposed as the shared icy-blue 16-color art/edition ramp, with guarded stock words before replacement;
• compressed file 0x5E is relocated from ROM 0xF90000 within a guarded 0x31000-byte high-ROM allocation;
• the temporary browser/CLI field defaults to SUB-ZERO, accepts at most 12 name characters, normalizes to uppercase, and supports A-Z, 0-9, spaces and hyphens before appending EDITION.

Runtime evidence:

• MKMSZR_title-branding_full-pipeline-proof_v02.z64, SHA-256 8f86e6f50fcc068c66986681a57b18f9882cf8f1779376222a46b76f10b56382, default SUB-ZERO; file 0x5E compressed length 0x3017F, end-exclusive ROM 0xFC017F. User confirmed title rendering and title -> gameplay transition.
• MKMSZR_title-branding_sektor-full-pipeline-proof_v03.z64, SHA-256 4401dc0ebfce1eb16e6c0b4eb1178dd2605e79a10c1a280cd7caa6307ca21c65, non-default SEKTOR; file 0x5E compressed length 0x3014F, end-exclusive ROM 0xFC014F. User confirmed the configurable subtitle and normal gameplay startup.

The old PR #41 wrapper at ROM 0x9ADE0 / VA 0x8009A1E0 remains Rejected / failed because the production pickup-persistence composition already owns that region. The browser's guard failure was the negative control that exposed the overlap. PR #42 merged the corrected no-cave implementation as cebfe39c92e96590efbf571ee338467e2b7dc368.

Visual acceptance evidence

Presentation	Evidence	Accepted observation / limit
Redesigned 2026 legal screen	Runtime-confirmed	Layout, configurable edition line, seeded joke placement, BY SMEAG, and NOT LICENSED BY NINTENDO were accepted in-game; non-default SEKTOR EDITION is also full-pipeline Implementation/CI-confirmed
Candidate-B standalone title proof v05	Runtime-confirmed	Icy-metallic MORTAL KOMBAT MYTHOLOGIES / RANDOMIZER art and centered SUB-ZERO EDITION placement were visually accepted; proof allocations were not production-safe
Full-pipeline title proof v02	Runtime-confirmed	Default SUB-ZERO title rendered correctly and transitioned normally into gameplay
Full-pipeline Sektor title proof v03	Runtime-confirmed	Non-default SEKTOR edition rendered correctly and normal gameplay startup continued
Lowercase/free-mixed title-font experiment	Rejected / failed	Mixed/lowercase glyph rendering was unreliable with the tested title font/style; current edition presentation is uppercase only
PR #41 executable title wrapper	Rejected / failed	Guard failure exposed overlap with production pickup-persistence ownership; the accepted PR #42 path removed the cave requirement

Related canonical owners

• Web patcher and product behavior — user-facing title-character configuration and deterministic boot-phrase namespace.
• Resource and overlay system — global file 0x5E package/loading mechanics.
• Memory and allocation map — production title-package and adjacent ROM allocation ownership.
• Address and patch-site registry — exact guarded presentation patch sites.
• Stage flow and selector — post-legal logo bypass and title/selector routing behavior.
• Native HUD and UI — gameplay HUD/text/render-node behavior.