THE ORIGINAL SUPER MARIO BROTHERS GAME SOFTWARE
Thanks to some bold risks by the business side of Nintendo, the NES was set to be sold in North America in 1985, but it still needed killer software to make sure it was the hit that could justify those risks. To overcome this, Nintendo rebranded its video game console as an “entertainment system,” and the NES was born. When the company tried to release it in the U.S., toy stores (the primary sellers of video games at the time) had all but written off the medium as a fad that had ended, and were resistant to stocking games. Negotiations with Atari to help bring the Famicom to the United States as the “Nintendo Enhanced Video System” fell apart as Atari took a massive financial hit in the crash, and Nintendo was forced to attempt the jump to the West alone. That’s not to say that Nintendo was unaffected by the crash. With the console releasing in Japan at the start of the North American crash, Nintendo was able to navigate through the storm that took down so many of its competitors. Despite this downturn in the industry, Nintendo was able to survive while many of its competitors faltered thanks to the success of its 1983 game console, the Famicom. Industry-wide sales dropped as low as $100 million in 1985 (down from over $3 billion just three years before), sending many developers and publishers to their demise. Turmoil permeated gaming as the North American industry crashed in 1983. Dapps are another one - helps a lot to think like a Nintendo dev in the 80s about what the reusable parts of your data are.In the early 1980s, the video game industry’s push into the home-console market was at a pivotal stage. NLP is one place I see this a lot - it's often very easy to make aws happy when I go through GBs of data, for something where 95% of the value to the end user could be reached with a 50kB file on the S3. There are often times I'll come up with an overly hefty solution in a generic case, instead of thinking like Nintendo did about focusing on making something cool to look at with a fun experience, though with a much narrower scope. It's good to look back and appreciate the fundamentals, since there was a lot of clever thinking in this we can learn from today.
THE ORIGINAL SUPER MARIO BROTHERS GAME PC
PC games with contents spread over several floppy disks, taking MEGABYTES of space and slowly crunch-crunch-crunching whenever I'd go to a different screen in Quest for Glory, but you could play in the immersive game of Zelda seamlessly. It was fascinating back then how my big, expensive, PC/XT would struggle to make anything run half as smoothly as a Game Boy.
Great write-up! Pondering this question is the thing that brought my into software development in the first place. are actually designed, and graphics were drawn by an artist, they aren't using some arbitrarily picked mathematical function chosen because it looked cool. The way demoscene works is that most things are using procedural generation, meanwhile the levels in Super Mario Bros. Some tricks are used to reduce the number of necessary tiles - for instance, clouds are the same thing as bushes, just with a different palette applied.Ĥ. Palettes are used to not restrict the entire game to 2bpp - note that 16x16 blocks have different color palettes. However, as the graphics are 2bpp, they don't use as much space. Graphics aren't compressed as they are stored in CHR ROM, and are directly accessed by the PPU (PPU cannot access RAM). Y positions bigger than 0b1011 are used for special commands (as such parameters would be rendered out of bounds).ģ.
uses two bytes per object, representing the following information: XXXXYYYY PSSSVVVV, where X is horizontal position within the page, Y is vertical position within the page, P moves to the next page, S is a command, and V is its parameter (length or number of an extended object). Rather, the game uses commands like "from now on, use this ground fill pattern", "draw pipe here", "put a staircase", "put a goal". Levels don't use RLE or LZ77, that would use too much space. That said, I suppose if you were to compress the ROM, you probably would end up with value like 31KB.Ģ. is 40KB (PRG ROM is 32KB, and CHR ROM is 8KB).
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