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Mario Bros. Clone Released For Atari 2600
YokimaSun writes "The world of Homebrew Coding never ceases to amaze, even on an old system like the Atari 2600 a coder over at the Atariage forums has released a clone of the original Nes game Super Mario Bros with video, which has the first level from the classic game and eventually will have the first four worlds. Equally as impressive is this 3D Mario game written for the Sega Saturn."
The rule about Super Mario Bros is that you NEVER refer to it as "Mario Bros". They are two completely separate games. Mario Bros was even made for the Atari 2600 back in the day.
The Atari is not bitmapped in the same way as more-modern consoles. It can display any of 128 colors (by adjusting the chroma and luma values) and do it pixel-by-pixel. The only limitation is how fast the software executes.
I'd like to see someone clone Super Mario Bros for the C64. The closest we had was Great Giana Sisters (which was then forced off the market by Nintendo lawsuit).
Also: What's so impressive about SMB on the Sega Saturn? That's a 32 bit CPU and ought to be able to handle an 8 bit game easily.
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A side-scrolling game on a console that only has 128 bytes of RAM is impressive.
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Click the link, and you get a picture of a game that looks pretty crappy by Saturn standards. Click the other link and you get a picture of a game that looks amazing by 2600 standards.
Prevailing wisdom was that an SMB1 clone would not be possible on the 2600. Now it's been done. That's amazing. A 3d SMB is well within the capabilities of the Saturn, and is a worthy hobby project, but not in the same league at all. The Saturn game was written in BASIC, the 2600 game was written in assembly.
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I wouldn't proclaim the clone as being done. I watched the demo video and read some of the authors notes. There are some distinct differences that make it not quite a clone. Only one enemy on the screen at a time, automatically getting whatever is in the yellow blocks when they are hit (and they then disappear), no star power. The only enemy I saw was a goomba. It plays remarkably like SMB, but not enough that I would say SMB has been cloned to the 2600.
The closest we had was Great Giana Sisters...
Which you can celebrate by joining in at Kickstater for Project Giana, the grandchild of Giana Sisters (8 days to go). Sorry, I don't think they will be targetting the C64.
"Clone" is a pretty inclusive term in this context. When a game became popular, lots of companies would try to capitalize on the fad by making a similar game. Hence you get "pacman clones" like Ladybug or KC Munchkin, or "Doom clones" like Dark Forces or Duke 3d. In that context, this is clearly a SMB clone. It's worth noting that no other side scrolling platformers exist on the 2600.
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1. Invent Super Mario Bros for Atari 2600
2. Time travel to 1982
3. Profit!
Indeed. Side-scrolling on the 2600 is not easy.
What is so astonishing here is that the developer used batari Basic and not straight 6502 assembly.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Actually there was one. It was called Fatal Run (sort of a Road Blasters kind of game) but it was only released in Europe (http://www.atariprotos.com/2600/software/fatalrun/fatalrun.htm). There was even a 64K cartridge released in Brazil called MegaBoy but all the space was used by educational questions so it really wasn't a 'game'.
Mario Bros != Super Mario Bros != Super Mario World
Also, this is far from being a clone...
/* No Comment */
Programmed in BASIC.
Which also explains the end result:
Saturn is the latest of the "old generation" of 32bits console with really weird architecture.
It's got dual main RISC CPUs (two Hitachi SH-2. Something like a souped-up 32x (dual SH-1))
It's got extra CPU (Motorola 68k)
It's got weird coprocessors (the graphic engine: Some mixed monstruosity between a souped-up tile engine and an early polygon engine with blitter, all this split across 2 chips, and not using triangle as basic poly shape. And a few DSPs trown in the mix)
And all of this are connected in weird ways, have timing issue to access shared resources, don't all access the same resources, etc.
And a firmware which was basically what was needed to load a the game.
It's simply the logical extension of previous generations of console (16 bit consoles which had an extra 8bit chip to handle sound and some specific IO and which didn't have access to all resources. Or like the MegaCD which connected an extra 68k, which could help render advanced graphics effects, but had to pipe them through the main CPU), they tried to cram as many interesting functions in this hardware.
Contrast this with the first "new gen" 32bits console : the PlayStation.
Simple "PC-like" design.
A main CPU (a MIPS), a 3D GPU outputing to a simple framebuffer (although the geometry acceleration is inside the CPU package), a hardware MPEG decoder.
And that's it.
Not that much different conceptually, from a PC machine with a Pentium and 3Dfx GPU + Sigma Designs video decoder + Soundblaster PCI cards.
On the paper, Saturn was fucking incredibly powerful.
But that requires deep knowledge of the hardware, precise timing and modelling of everything, writing tons of code in assembler, etc.
Its "dev environment" consisted in reading tons of hardware documentation, and crafting your own stuff in assembler.
Creating amazing stuff on this machine was more of an art.
Meanwhile, on the Playstation, all what the devs needed is to fire up a C compiler and use the nice libraries and API that sony provided. (Similar to just writing a regular PC application relying on OpenGL and the like). Its dev environment wasn't that remote to what can be seen in Visual Studio and the like. Just use a standard compiler and the official API. Porting games is a breeze.
Programming Saturn games required extensive experience and culture in the old-school consoles. Without console know-how, hard to use it to its full potential.
Programming Playstation games could tap into the small studios which were used to program PC games.
End result:
- SEGA's own studios (composed of dev teams used on console and arcade machines) did put some impressive games.
- Some japanese studios which had a long tradition of console development and were used to "go the assembly way" developped quite a few "japanese-market-only, sorry no ports for you" successes ont the Saturn.
- Most of the other studios decided to "just say fuck it", they ditched most of the docs, and run the machine as simply as possible: Use only one SH-2, etc.
- Meanwhile developing on the Playstation was a breeze. Lots of studios which weren't heard in the console world before got suddenly quite some success. Specially lots of north american and european developers.
- The Playstation also got lots of ports thank to its easy structure.
Lots of ports of PC games (because the concepts of the sony dev environment map nicely)
Even ports of japanese RPG which were successes on the Saturn in their home country. (Just because the PS was more popular in foreign market and was easy to port to).
(what helped the Playstation a lot and worked against the Saturn, is that instead of creating several games for each different console like in the past, studio now preferred to make 1 single game and port it to as much machines as possible. Machine with a standard easy to develop-for architecture were strongly favored above mach
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Interesting note: the shield was formed by reading the game code as data (for perceived randomness). So when you look at the shield, in some sense you're looking at the source assembly code. Matrix-style.