Is this usable with the alternate stage loader? I'd love to have this as the main stage, and the thwomps one as an "hold L" stage, but I'm not sure how to go about that.
You'd need to learn to edit the code in the .gct file to add it as an alternate stage, but yes its very possible!
Here's a quick tutorial on how the alt stage codes work.
Start by looking for DEADBEEF BABEBEEF in the codeset, you’ll find it twice near the top and underneath each there’ll be a ton of coding, the first section below DEADBEEF BABEBEEF is for stage files, and the second one is for their module files (or RELs).
* DEADBEEF BABEBEEF
* 46000010 00000000
* 44000000 005A7CB0
* 662000
33 00000000
*
45415254 01000000
*
004000
19 00000000
Amount of Stages (33 = 51 stages since the code stores the number in hex)
First 4 letters of stage file name (45415254 = EART)
Amount of button combinations (01 = 1 combination, the next line is how the combination works)
Amount of Random stages to load (Order by letter, _A _B _C etc.)
Buttons to activate (0140 = L which means L must be held to load the combination)
File suffix loaded (19 stands for Z, so in the example above, pressing A+L (0140) would load _Z (19)
so lets say I wanted to have it so that a stage had 5 versions of the main file that would load randomly, but I also wanted to make it so that holding L will load the alt stage no matter what. The code would look like this (using FD as an example)
* 46494E41 01050000
* 00400019 00000000
Now, lets say I wanted to do the same thing but this time I wanted it so that I could load one alt stage by holding L, and another by holding A+L, it'd look like this.
* 46494E41 02050000
* 00400019 00000000
* 01400018 00000000
The first line had the 01 change to 02, which means there's two button combinations. A third line was added which is the second combination possible. Notice how I put 18 instead of 19, which means that the second combination loads STGFINAL_Y.pac instead of STGFINAL_Z.pac
Remember, you need to edt the line below * 44000000 005A7CB0 for each section of code so that it knows how many lines to read, if I were to add that button combination for final destination to both parts of the code, I'd need the line that says * 66200033 00000000 to say * 66200036 00000000 instead, because there's now 54 lines of code instead of 51.
The calculator program in windows has a nice programmer mode that can calculate hex and decimal back and forth, and HxD is good for finding out what the name of the stage in hex is.
as another note, my custom build will be having this as an alt