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This rules.

This is impressive! Respect to you, Sumez for all your work on what i already consider one of the best looking donkey kong arcade "ports" available! I can confirm the rom supplied works on GBA hardware using a flashcart (M3 Perfect Lite) and the "pocketnes" nes emulator for GBA. My testing on the aforementioned hardware has led to an obvious hardware restriction which is when playing the rom on gba and turning the console on its side, it presents the issue of the d-pad not being mapped properly for the hardware. This has lit my fire so to speak on making an attempt to wrap my head around hex editing with no luck to this point on coming up with a fix (I have yet to find $4016,$4017 location in HxD so I haven't gone through the trail and error of modifying these locations.... im a hex newb). I then started to brainstorm on ideas that may further improve your homebrew, such as a possible settings menu giving the option of multiple screen rotation configurations with the buttons properly mapped and rotated according to the display option selected (possibly hidden, only accessible from title screen by multi button input, e.g. start+select simultaneously to keep genuine to the "arcadesque" presentation of your homebrew). There could be 4 modes, including upside down for the option of playing with your left or right hand controlling the d-pad/a&b buttons on a GBA. This would also give those playing on real nes hardware the option of which vertical direction they can chose to turn there display. Another nice touch to the idea would be the last configuration selected could possibly be saved in sram, which would help those who may like to have a dedicated hardware setup to your homebrew. I am a novice at best in regards to this stuff, so im not sure what your restrictions would be in implementation of any of these features. If proper "gba support" is far from the top list of project priorities, it would be completely understood as this is a NES project and i'd imagine im on the very short list of those trying to play this on the GBA, although the more versatile your project, the more eyes and hands will see and play it. Suggestions aside, Thanks for all your work on this, cool stuff indeed!

Thanks a lot

Adding an options screen would probably be a bit annoying, as the code is very closely based on the original arcade Z80 structure (with whatever overhead that might result in) - I did do something similar when testing the game, on the "push only 1player button" screen, where I replaced the text with two options (starting level and starting screen/board index) that could be changed by pressing up/down or left/right, coincidentally saved in the saveram similar to what you suggest.
As it is, it's a little hard to add any more code to the game without moving into bank switching, as I used as much space I could for the sound data - the PRG rom is completely packed

If you want to remap what buttons are checked for left, right, up and down in the game, I think it would be easier to just identify the areas where these directions are checked, as opposed to the controller reading routing - however it's worth noting that in Donkey Kong left/right isn't just used for controlling Mario, but the barrel AI and the jump detection (when jumping "over" an item) also check for the direction pushed.