Amiga Super Mario Bros. ?

[Rebel-CD32]

Thanks for the awesome music, adrdesign! I've used the main tune in the first level of my Backbone Mario game now. Unfortunately Backbone doesn't let you choose a position in the music, so I was wondering if it would be too much effort to make a separate mod for each level's music for us to use in our Backbone productions?

I'm sure eventually someone will code the full game properly so we can use a single mod more efficiently. Maybe since it's both the Amiga's and Super Mario Bros' 30th anniversary this year, it simply needs to happen.

I've updated my Backbone Mario game a bit since last time. I'm experimenting with a dithered background over the top of a Copper gradient to give the illusion of more colours while still sticking with 16. I'd love it if someone could try this out and let me know if it works, I've even made a (hopefully) bootable ADF to try on A500s and UAE. It'll probably run pretty slowly on an A500 though!

LHA - http://home.exetel.com.au/~amiga/SuperMario.lha
ADF - http://home.exetel.com.au/~amiga/SuperMarioBros.adf

Also I notice the source code for Super Mario Bros converted from 6502 to 68000 in the Zone at the moment...

[Superman]

Originally Posted by Rebel-CD32

Thanks for the awesome music, adrdesign! I've used the main tune in the first level of my Backbone Mario game now. Unfortunately Backbone doesn't let you choose a position in the music, so I was wondering if it would be too much effort to make a separate mod for each level's music for us to use in our Backbone productions?

I'm sure eventually someone will code the full game properly so we can use a single mod more efficiently. Maybe since it's both the Amiga's and Super Mario Bros' 30th anniversary this year, it simply needs to happen.

I've updated my Backbone Mario game a bit since last time. I'm experimenting with a dithered background over the top of a Copper gradient to give the illusion of more colours while still sticking with 16. I'd love it if someone could try this out and let me know if it works, I've even made a (hopefully) bootable ADF to try on A500s and UAE. It'll probably run pretty slowly on an A500 though!

LHA - http://home.exetel.com.au/~amiga/SuperMario.lha
ADF - http://home.exetel.com.au/~amiga/SuperMarioBros.adf

Also I notice the source code for Super Mario Bros converted from 6502 to 68000 in the Zone at the moment...

Its very impressive Here is a video of it on my A500 http://vidmg.photobucket.com/albums/...psxt2l58xo.mp4

[john1979]

It highlights the usual problem with scrolling games in Backbone though. Slooooowww. It seems a bit silly that a powerful Amiga is needed to play a game like Super Mario.

[adrdesign]

Originally Posted by Rebel-CD32

Thanks for the awesome music, adrdesign! I've used the main tune in the first level of my Backbone Mario game now. Unfortunately Backbone doesn't let you choose a position in the music, so I was wondering if it would be too much effort to make a separate mod for each level's music for us to use in our Backbone productions?

I'm sure eventually someone will code the full game properly so we can use a single mod more efficiently. Maybe since it's both the Amiga's and Super Mario Bros' 30th anniversary this year, it simply needs to happen.

I've updated my Backbone Mario game a bit since last time. I'm experimenting with a dithered background over the top of a Copper gradient to give the illusion of more colours while still sticking with 16. I'd love it if someone could try this out and let me know if it works, I've even made a (hopefully) bootable ADF to try on A500s and UAE. It'll probably run pretty slowly on an A500 though!

LHA - http://home.exetel.com.au/~amiga/SuperMario.lha
ADF - http://home.exetel.com.au/~amiga/SuperMarioBros.adf

Also I notice the source code for Super Mario Bros converted from 6502 to 68000 in the Zone at the moment...

Awesome, here are the songs. Good luck!

[Retro1234]

Originally Posted by adrdesign

Awesome, here are the songs. Good luck!
Attached Files
marioMODS.zip 19.1 KB

Can I use these?


[ Show youtube player ]

[adrdesign]

Yes of course. Credit, please!

[s2325]

[ Show youtube player ]

[Amiga1992]

Was Mario Is Missing ever really planned for Amiga?

[s2325]

These are scans from AMR, not some dodgy site.

[Amiga1992]

That doesn't mean anything, that Amiga magazines had it on them doesn't mean it was ever really planned. At the end of the Amiga days (and obviously the end of these magazines), they would fill pages with a load of unconfirmed bullshit non-news (like Rebel Assault/Day of the Tentacle for the CD32).

[Retro1234]

Originally Posted by adrdesign

Yes of course. Credit, please!

Thank you sir, If I do use will of course ill credit you.

[oRBIT]

I am still waiting for someone to make some kind of "framework" for porting NES-games to Amiga, that would have been cool.
But still a very difficult task:
1) The graphics on the NES works very different compared to the Amiga. It's bitplanes-based, yes, but the graphics are tilebased. The NES could animate the entire screen within just a few CPU-cycles, this would require lots of more work on the Amiga.
2) The CPU. How would you translate the 6502 to 68k? Manual conversion would take alot of time. There are conversiontools but the one I've seen still requires a disassembled ROM, not the ROM itself.
Perhaps somekind of JIT-"emulation" would do the trick. But at the same time you'd loose alot of speed, because something the 680x0 can do with a single instruction, might require a few more on the 6502. The 68k code generated would be very inefficient unless there are some clever optimizations builtin.

Anyway, a very interesting subject to discuss. Anyone with some bright ideas?

[Retro1234]

What size are the tiles? 8*8? Can they be ripped is there a tile sheet?

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by oRBIT

There are conversiontools but the one I've seen still requires a disassembled ROM, not the ROM itself.

As said before, SMB sources are available and someone even ported them to the MEgadrive.
Quote:

I used an automatic conversor to "translate" from the 6502 asm (NES processor) into the M68K asm[...]
Of course, I nedeed to create from scrath the I/O function, which emulates "on the fly" the NES I/O function, since ALL THE ORIGINAL DATA IS STILL HERE. Also, if you check the memory usage, only $800 bytes are used (000-7FF, like in the original NES!!)

http://devster.proboards.com/thread/613

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by Akira

As said before, SMB sources are available and someone even ported them to the MEgadrive.
Quote: [...]

http://devster.proboards.com/thread/613

Wow, pretty cool.
From what I understand the code was converted from 6502 to 68k using a tool he wrote. This is definitely an approach I would consider since as he states, disassembling an entire game is a lot of effort.
Kind of an intermediate between a full conversion and an emulation.

Obviously that will work for the Amiga as well, the biggest problem being these damn tiles.

[Amiga1992]

Yeah the tile-based display is the main hurdle to overcome to port a lot of console games to the Amiga, but if someone figures out a proper way that can be scaled to be used in other projects, there's a TON of stuff that can be converted.
Like these things: http://shrigley.com/source_code_archive/ (were posted on EAB before)

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by Akira

Yeah the tile-based display is the main hurdle to overcome to port a lot of console games to the Amiga, but if someone figures out a proper way that can be scaled to be used in other projects, there's a TON of stuff that can be converted.
Like these things: http://shrigley.com/source_code_archive/ (were posted on EAB before)

Although this would definitely be an interesting project I would rather see a JIT based NES/SMS emulator for the stock OCS kittens. No need to port anything and also a very challenging technical feat, especially regarding the handling of tiles.

Why port when you can emulate?

[saimon69]

about the tiles problem, i remember reading in a technical blog that Hybris used an interesting approach for map making: graphic pieces were stored as 8x8 pixel sub- tiles and recomposed as 32x32 tiles made of those sub- tiles; since the base map element for a mario game is a 16x16 tile it could then be done in a similar way...

[Retro1234]

I dont understand 99% of all Amiga games use tiles? at least platformers.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by Boo Boo

I dont understand 99% of all Amiga games use tiles? at least platformers.

Decomposing the levels into tiles so as to simplify edition is 100% fine on the Amiga.

The problem lies with the NES having tile-based graphics mode (cell-based graphics would be more appropriate though): the NES screen cannot have individual pixels switched on or off at will just like with the Amiga bitmap based graphics. Cf this blog post which explains it (relatively) well: http://www.dustmop.io/blog/2015/04/2...aphics-part-1/

This means that you can for example:
- update the whole screen with a new image by simply replacing the character map (256 bytes) or changing simply 960 bytes
- scroll entire sections of the screen composed of repeated 8x8 pixels blocks by simply scrolling the pixels of the corresponding tiles, without constraints on where these blocks are placed (to be fair, this actually simulates scrolling, but still, it works )

Metal Storm is a great example of the great parallax effects which can be achieved with cell-based graphics:

• First, simple horizontal parallax: [ Show youtube player ] (the blue background "layer").
• Then, triple "weird" parallax: [ Show youtube player ] (the green background with red horizontal tubes moving up and down depending on the player's movement).
• And the section where Joe Redifer mentions these and explains the trick: [ Show youtube player ]

These two effects require changing at most a few dozen bytes in memory each frame. Neat and effective.
Manfred Trenz uses the same technique on Turrican and Armalyte on the C64.

Things like that simply cannot be done easily on the Amiga: reproducing the same visual result can require copying entire regions of the screen using the blitter and sometimes it is simply not fast enough for to do it under one frame. This issue surfaces at times during the "Conversion Capers" threads initiated by CodeTapper: even a C64 game can be really tough to port on the Amiga because of the advantages brought forth by cell-based graphic modes.

Sometimes, it is possible to replicate the effect by multiplexing sprites horizontally (cf CodeTapper's excellent article on Risky Woods and the one on Jim Power) but even then, these Amiga tricks cost _much_ more in terms of DMA resources than they cost on the NES.