The Super Mario 2.5D used Game Maker I think
What I did was try to recreate SMB's tile engine by looking at tech notes of the NES rom.
I was able to reproduce the tile capabilities of SMB correctly (no palette support though)
http://sanik.hacking-cult.org/MarioEngine.png
There's one thing I didn't do which I should have - drawn the tile data to a buffer in which Mario can destroy certain background blocks. The way the engine does it now, the border/floor tiles can't be moved/destroyed.