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This port of Super Mario Bros to the C64 is freaking amazing
- Thread starter Deleted member 12790
- Start date
Maybe this will make things make more sense, this is normally the C64 high resolution mode:
If you break the image up into 8x8 tiles, you'll notice no square ever uses more than 2 colors:
By contrast, the NES can display 3 colors + transparency in every 8x8 tile. In order to display multiple colors like this on the C64, you have to use a fat pixel mode, which sacrifices half the resolution. Additionally, this high resolution mode has no real ability to scroll left or right.
Thanks for this beauti thread and these background explainings. Really appreciating Krejlooc.
The also homebrew Super Cassette Vision port is pretty impressive too. I played it in Japan in 2017 and it looks even better than the latest video.
This is fascinating and seriously impressive. I want to learn more about it, though my knowledge of the C64 is pretty limited.
This has to be some eldritch magic.
This has to be some eldritch magic.
It's a really cool-looking effect, but it's actually pretty simple to explain what's going on there. Since the screen is only scrolling vertically and you can store roughly two TV screens' worth of tilemap in the NES rom, you can just read a line of screen data at a time starting from the top and skip over every X lines at first, then every X-Y lines, then start reading it like a normal map. Offsetting lines up and down like this is a pretty common technique (and you can do similar things if you have a copier or scanner by moving your hand in sync with the scanner beam) to try to move big objects in NES games, like you see in Contra or some Mega Man games; this is just a slightly more elaborate form of that.
Your usual hint for what's going on is that the background over which the big thing is moving is all a single color.
That's fucking bonkers.
EDIT: Holy shit, the level ends. I'm guessing it just locks up at that point or something?
Incredible to me how dedicated some groups are to optimize and squeeze better performance out of these old restrictive machines. I'm going to see if I can get this running on my Mister later on.
Impressive, but not that surprising for me, as I've seen the high res video mode used in some newer game demo examples.
Krejlooc, check these:
- Beep Boy 64: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXLLFOBonfk
- Block Man 64: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMNxlYMcmbs
- Cave Wizard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZauZ8stUpWk
All of these look better than the SMB port in terms of visuals, but somehow to me, these games still look worse than the best of C64 "fat pixel" mode like Mayhem in Monsterlad, Creatures, or the new Sam's Journey.
There are many completely crazy new video modes for C64 that have been figured out over the years, that were never intended to be possible originally - done by using some vblank and scanline interrupt tricks. As for the sprites, there are some incredible sprite multiplexers availabe on C64 now, which provide pretty much flawless, flicker-free numerous sprites.
Krejlooc, check these:
- Beep Boy 64: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXLLFOBonfk
- Block Man 64: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMNxlYMcmbs
- Cave Wizard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZauZ8stUpWk
All of these look better than the SMB port in terms of visuals, but somehow to me, these games still look worse than the best of C64 "fat pixel" mode like Mayhem in Monsterlad, Creatures, or the new Sam's Journey.
There are many completely crazy new video modes for C64 that have been figured out over the years, that were never intended to be possible originally - done by using some vblank and scanline interrupt tricks. As for the sprites, there are some incredible sprite multiplexers availabe on C64 now, which provide pretty much flawless, flicker-free numerous sprites.
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What about this ? I'm not sure what it's using but it's pretty damn impressive
Wow never heard of Mayhem in Monsterland (from 1993).
SMB port looks like it's doing a fantastic job at recreating SMB, but this game is lovely looking and looks like it's doing everything visually that the SMB port is doing and more.
There are advantages to the PAL C64 (some games require it) but having always had an NTSC C64, I would hate to have to use PAL speed for so many games.
Except for top row of text(which does look hi-res) - every visible pixel on rest of the screen is 'fat'. I thought at first Mario might be hi-res (hi-res main sprite wasn't that uncommon) but even that doesn't seem to be the case.Though the video feed itself has some sort of upscaling/distortion on it (no idea how this was captured), so without seeing it in a pixel-perfect capture it's hard to be 100%.
Looking at it in the emulator now - clouds are high res too, but the rest of the graphics are 'fat'.
Yeah, I think so too - both games actually have multicolor 'fat' pixel for graphics, but Mayhem has high res main character sprite for example.
Forgot about that one! Yes, I played it, and it looks really good. I read posts on the forum where the authors of the game post, and there were people saying at first that it probably just uses static screens with 2-color per block high res mode - but the game actually has scrolling sections too.
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Mayhem seems to freely mix 'fat' tiles and high res tiles, is that a normal C64 thing? Some levels use 2 colour animated tiles for a parallax background effect, and they're HD. other levels have 2 colour clouds and other background shading in HD.
edit: I really like how they have opted for square 2x2 pixels for all the enemies instead of the weird fat pixel look. The SMB port is doing this in a few places (like the mountain slopes) but not always, maybe Krejilooc got confused by those square 2x2 pixels?
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I don't think anything Mayhem does is 'normal' or usual :) It was a highly impressive release late in C64 shelf life from one of the most talented teams on the platform.
What's notable about the scrolling in this? To my untrained eye it looks like any other sidescrolling game. And as others have pointed out it looks like everything is multicolor. Sure, SMB has better graphical design and more refined gameplay than Giana Sisters but what's the technical achievement here?
Mayhem was available on the Wii VC. Unfortunately that's no longer available.
Mayhem was available on the Wii VC. Unfortunately that's no longer available.
That's a bitmap though. In character mode individual characters can be set to either multi-color (wide pixels) or high-res on a per character basis.Maybe this will make things make more sense, this is normally the C64 high resolution mode:
If you break the image up into 8x8 tiles, you'll notice no square ever uses more than 2 colors:
By contrast, the NES can display 3 colors + transparency in every 8x8 tile. In order to display multiple colors like this on the C64, you have to use a fat pixel mode, which sacrifices half the resolution. Additionally, this high resolution mode has no real ability to scroll left or right.
The first thing I thought watching the video was "how is it possible for a C64 to scroll like that?", and I admit I was expecting you to explain the magic like you usually do, hahah.
Edit: From Popstar's link above:
Holy freaking shitballs: it's exploiting the physical / voltage level (and leaving specific memory addresses untouched to avoid crashing due to that). I'm assuming in the case of emulators, this particular quirk must be known beforehand and explicitly coded in to work like in real hardware.
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Sadly it used a bad emulator and they didn't remap the jump function to a button, leaving it as the UP direction as it would be on a joystick... on a D-Pad. It was pretty much unplayable.
I would have played the hell out of this in the late 80s. My C64 died in 1990 and I didn't own an NES for another year or so.
A lot of C64 games have smooth scrolling like this btw. It's not anything new - but yes the technique is somewhat insane. I don't think this is the only technique for the smooth scroll on C64, but this particular one has been invented back in the machine's heyday, and used on some games (and would cause some of the machines to crash!)
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Another cool recent C64 development has been the port of LIMBO to C64. There's a short playable demo, about a year old, and it's nothing short of astonishing,:
and the author (who works at Playdead) has released a new short video recently:
and the author (who works at Playdead) has released a new short video recently:
I wonder if how impressed you are with this video depends on the games you played, I had a lot of scrolling games back in the day.
Fun fact: So does the NES and sprites on that are 8x8 pixels, the C64's sprites are 24x21 pixels (because that's 63 bytes at one bit per pixel). The NES has to do heavy multiplexing which means swapping out the sprites after each line has been drawn (since moving the sprite after it's been drawn doesn't change the drawn pixels), hence the flickering it's known for: When more than 8 sprites are in a line then it cannot render them all. I dunno how common multiplexing was on the C64 when it was still a common platform (people come up with new tricks for exiting machines long after they stop being commercially relevant) but the larger sprites mean most characters are only one or two sprites total whereas even a 16x16 NES character is 4 sprites already.
Most post-black-box NES games use memory mappers (additional chips on the cartridge akin to the Super FX chip on the SNES) or the Famicom Disk System to make the NES more powerful, the stock NES can only scroll in one direction at a time (hence the weirdness in Karnov), for example. A Game Boy is more powerful than a stock NES, only the memory mapper chips make the NES more capable.
Amazing! I wad aldo surprised to hear how the music is identical. Is there any information on how they did the music? One channel for basd and drums combined and the two others for the main melody?
Yu
Yup, that is amazing.
Eye of the Beholder is also looking good.
Yup, that is amazing.
Eye of the Beholder is also looking good.