While not necessarily a hacking tool per se, SM64 Star Display is nonetheless a handy tool for the community.
To use it, simply run the tool, labeled "StarManager.exe", at the same time as your emulator, and fire up your ROM. The tool scans the ROM and shows you how many stars are in the game, as well as how they're arranged, with the graphics generally matching how Stars appear in the hack (i.e., green stars for Super Mario 64: The Green Stars, rainbow stars for Star Revenge 3: Mario on an Saoire, white stars for SM64 Shining Stars Repainted, and so on). The tool also uses a yellow dot to show you what level you're currently on, and highlights the names of boss key/Cap switch levels in green when you've gotten their key/switch.
The program is written primarily in C#. It runs on all operating systems; however, non-Windows users will have to run the program through Wine.
The program is not perfect: it may not recognize some hacks at all, and when you load them, the Star Display will instead present you with the original game's Star layout shown at the top. For other hacks, it may not simply show all Stars. This behavior is especially noticeable for hacks that had revisions that added or took away Stars; for example, it does not recognize the "Peach's New Castle" Star in Star Revenge 6: Luigi's Adventure. To compensate, the program allows you to make and edit layouts yourself.
According to aglab, parts of this program is used in Parallel Launcher's star display, the latter despite being larger has way less features, and it is still recommended to use this over PL's star display.
Default Display[]
The default display shown when a hack does not have a custom Star layout shows 26 courses, all with seven Stars each. Fifteen of them are numbered from one to 15, and directly correlate with the area IDs for vanilla SM64's main courses. The other eleven are represented by letters from A to K, so it is not as clear which course they represent.
- A - Overworld Stars, including Stars from Toad (Stars 1, 2 and 3) and MIPs (Stars 4 and 5).
- B -
- C -
- D -
- E -
- F - Cavern of the Metal Cap
- G - Tower of the Wing Cap
- H -
- I -
- J - Secret Aquarium
- K -