Need advice on fully replacing Mario in a romhack

[Xirix]

I'm starting to put together my own romhack, and I wanted to have a go at making a spritesheet of my own character to replace Mario in the game, I thought I'd ask here since raocow did it in What the Hell, and naturally Demo was in ASMT too.

I've never made a sprite before, and I don't know what dimensions it will need to be to be a valid mario replacement, could you kind peeps point me in the direction of what programs I should use for this?

Also any decent sprite/pixel art resources might be helpful. I'd like to get cracking on it and then show it off for constructive critisism. :)

[yoshicookiezeus]

The only program you need to replace graphics (other than Lunar Magic, but that should be obvious) is YY-CHR or a similar tile editor. Press the red mushroom button in Lunar Magic to extract all the graphics from the game, open up GFX33 in YY-CHR, set the display mode to 4bpp SNES, and then you can start editing the player graphics as much as you want. And to get the correct palette to view the graphics with, you can make a save state in a level and then import it into YY-CHR. Once you're done, simply press the green mushroom button to reinsert your edited graphics into the ROM.