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Tested as part of the ongoing Secret of Mana Turbo Project, by Queue (with various resources provided by zhaDe as part of Secret of Mana: New Game Improvement). Latest version used.

It's amazing what a small mechanical improvement can do to the playability of a game. Since real-time movement is so important to the battle system, it was a shame that a player had to walk almost to the screen edge to get it to scroll. Though I daresay those of us who played it as kids didn't realize that until later.

With this on, fighting stuff with weapons will actually start to feel more like fun, instead of the drag that the Vanilla game gave us. The increased visibility allows for tactical positioning to combat enemies. An observant player will notice map oddities while walking around with this patch applied, since Square got away with unseen map-tiling issues that were not corrected before release. A scroll-hack in and of itself does not fix this issue, nor should it.

However, in test-driving and analyzing the Secret of Mana Turbo Project, I have confirmed that Scroll Hack has been successfully integrated into the project's source code, as well as a selectable option by Queue ([Tidy_Map_Pieces]) that complements this patch. It is therefore advised that if you wish to use Scroll_Hack, check out the Turbo mod on its Project page. Although ongoing, the mod package is functional and provides the perfect companion piece to this one.

I refuse to play Secret of Mana SNES without this mod, since its playability is vastly improved with it. Sometimes the simple ideas in life are the best, as binarynova has proven.

This hack does a great job at eliminating the huge "deadzone" the original game had that you had to cross to make the screen move, which often led to you bumping into enemies you didn't see.

However, there are two problems you should be aware of:

1) As also mentioned in another review, this is to be applied to an unheadered rom, despite the description and

2) This hack introduces some major graphical glitches in certain cutscenes towards the end of the game. Here is a screenshot of the issue (SPOILER!!!) on imgur: https://imgur.com/a/TB7StEE

(again, this image has SPOILERS in it!)

The left screenshot shows how the game is supposed to look like and the right shows how it looks like with the scrolling patch on

It could be fixed by disabling the patch's effect only during the problematic cutscenes but then I don't see any way it would work in combination with other hacks.

Nevertheless, if you don't mind this issue this hack is perfect, but I hope this gets fixed somehow

I missed this title back in the day, and I figured now is the time to play it. I'm aware that there is a remake, but I am an old fart that grew up in the 80s and love pixel art. I really wanted to enjoy the original, but the screen scrolling was a deal breaker for me. This is fixed in the remake, but with this hack, it's now fixed in the original. Great job and thank you for this!

EDIT: I also wanted to add that this only works on a headerless ROM despite what the description says! I was trying to combine this with other hacks on this site, but I just couldn't seem to get it to work. After some research, I found the tool "NSRT" that can remove and add headers. I had to add a header to apply the "Variable Width Font" hack and the "Proper Caser" hack, then remove the header to apply this patch. After that, the game finally works.

Such a great mod, no more walking into random enemies!

I am playing the SNES Secret of Mana for the first time. As soon as I started playing the game I noticed a problem. The scrolling in the original game didn't allow enough room in front of the character when the character walked around.

I immediately came here to romhacking.net to see if there was a fix for this and to my surprise there was. I want to give a personal thank you to the author of this hack for fixing the scrolling.

Thank you.