5 ms·
Automatic Mapping of NES Games with Mappy
- tclancy 9y agoA stark reminder of how old I am was my initial confusion as to how someone used that crappy arcade game featuring a mouse to map Nintendo levels.
- radarsat1 9y agoHahaha thanks.. I forgot about that game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mappy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mappy Man now I'm kinda missing all those old arcade-style games, it's been a while. Centipede, mario bros, galaga.. they were pretty damn fun. Totally different game play to what you see now. No hesitation to make it next-to-impossible to win.
- Bluecobra 9y agoSee if there are any beercades in your area, if not start one!
- tclancy 9y agoYeah, my next project is hopefully to make a retro machine out of the Raspberry Pi I've never done anything with so I can raise my young daughter on "real" video games: 4 directions, one action button, that sort of thing.
- acomjean 9y agoI made a "retropi" Linux pi box for my brother and nieces. It works remarkably well and wasn't hard at all. Though I needed to include a keyboard and instructions on how to exit(we had an intellivision growing up, but most controllers lack a number pad ). The intellivision games don't hold up that well,the mame games are much better. A good controller though helps. I feel an arcade cabinet makes those games better. The kids kinda like them, but arcade games are designed to be hard and short and lack nostalgic appeal https://retropie.org.uk https://retropie.org.uk
- eridius 9y agoNow I want to see Mappy used to map out Mappy-Land (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mappy-Land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mappy-Land).
- dpcx 9y agoI'm curious how well this would work on games like the original Legend of Zelda and the Lost Woods (and Lost Hills) section.
- bluedino 9y agoIt's discussed, with images, on page 6 There are also instances with more complex mechanics at play: in Zelda’s “Lost Woods”, the player moves through a sequence of identical-looking rooms and must use the correct door in each of those rooms or return to the first room in the sequence. We do not expect to be able to automat- ically cover all such cases since in the end room connections are defined in opaque game programs and we cannot hope to address every possibility. We therefore leave it up to a human analyst to select which rooms should or should not be merged.
- bluedino 9y agoAnyone have the details on how game magazines used to create their maps? I read somewhere that Nintendo Power used a Mac IIfx with a TV capture card, someone grabbing screens as another person played through the levels.
- Bluecobra 9y agoI'm pretty sure that they just took photos of a TV (like a good PVM monitor, not a wood-grain cabinet Zenith), at least in the beginning. There's no doubt that these are photographs of a CRT: http://www.superluigibros.com/images/media/nintendopower/1_smb2/nintendopower001_pg18-19.jpg http://www.superluigibros.com/images/media/nintendopower/1_s...
- goialoq 9y agoReading that magazine was sometimes almost/more fun than playing the game -- you get all the art and logic without the frustration and sisyphean replay
- nobodyorother 9y agoIf you look at the old player guides (the Super Mario World guide comes to mind) you'll actually find a couple mis-pastes where the image was laid out or cut badly before being photographed for the magazine. It took a fair amount of work to only get pictures of the level's relevant features (and to always crop out the actual player).
- alanfalcon 9y agoLink to a couple good sources in this recent HN comment branch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14929835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14929835 Sounds like Nintendo Power had a dedicated machine in Japan while some other magazines were stuck photographing CRT monitors. If a IIfx was involved, that wasn't until many years down the road (given the release date of the NES and the IIfx).
- lathiat 9y agoThis reminds me of a project that turns 2D NES games into 3D in real time.. not joking! https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/9/11189002/3dnes-emulator-nintendo-games-3d-super-mario https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/9/11189002/3dnes-emulator-ni...
- and0 9y agoCurrently developing a different take on this same concept, but using hand-modeled voxel shapes in place of sprites. Haven't posted any significant updates in a while but progress is steady; just added cell-shading outlines to sprites that require it (can't translate black outlines into voxels otherwise) and improving the render pipeline to accommodate it. http://n3s.io http://n3s.io but more recent screenshots are at https://twitter.com/n3semu https://twitter.com/n3semu
- ericfrederich 9y agoGreat... now put the camera in Mario's head and let me play some FPS mario
- Raphmedia 9y agoThat would be pretty neat in VR !
- garaetjjte 9y agoseems similar to https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/zelda/zelda.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/zelda/zelda.pdf
- JoeOsborn 9y agoYes, this was an inspiration of ours! In fact we use Tom7's fork of the FCEUX emulator for Mappy and our other recent work in automatically learning game design elements from NES games.
- joebergeron 9y agoThis gave me a (stupid) idea. 2D to 3D seems possible to implement reasonably well with enough time and effort, given that it involves taking data and extrapolating it into another dimension -- for example, giving depth to sprites, etc. But what about the other way around? Taking 3D games (to keep things simple-ish, say from one particular platform) and automatically mapping them to 2D games. This sounds kind of absurd. Instead of instrumenting 2D game data with a little something extra, you'd have to compress/project the 3D data down into two dimensions -- in a way, stripping down the information contained in the original game. This is almost definitely impossible to pull off automatically for all games on a particular (3D) platform, at least in a way that isn't 100% awful to play. It's an interesting thought experiment to think of how it might be done, though.
- slipstream- 9y agoI thought at first that this was to do with memory mapping/banking...
- Mateon1 9y agoIs this project open source? Googling is ineffective due to an NES game called Mappy.
- maxerickson 9y agoAt least partly: https://github.com/JoeOsborn/mechlearn https://github.com/JoeOsborn/mechlearn Researchware though.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- petters 9y agoBright Man should be Flash Man, right?
- muterad_murilax 9y agoYep.
- JoeOsborn 9y agoAck, an embarrassing error! Thanks for pointing it out.
- nerpderp83 9y agoThere was a similar project that was able to extract the background matte painting for animations. Their example was a reproduction of a 15-30 foot painting for the Scooby-Do universe. I haven't be able to find it in years.