3 ms·
Ben Fry, the creator of Processing, created a beautiful visualization of the disassembled machine code of Super Mario Bros with arrows representing jump instruc
by jzl 9y ago
Ben Fry, the creator of Processing, created a beautiful visualization of the disassembled machine code of Super Mario Bros with arrows representing jump instructions:
http://benfry.com/dismap/mario-large2.jpg http://benfry.com/dismap/mario-large2.jpg
via: http://benfry.com/dismap/ http://benfry.com/dismap/
I've always loved this as a visualization of machine code. It's simultaneously amazing how complex it is and yet how simple it is when you consider that it represents the entire game all in one graphic. This is from 2007 I believe. I love that 10 years later the machine code is now fully annotated and understood.
- retSava 9y agoWow, that is amazingly complex! It's beautiful, in a way. I tried to see if there was something very central, called from lots of places, but there doesn't seem to be any such place. There are a few, but not something singular that stands out as completely dominant. Long jumps get a more dominant visual appearance than short jumps. Would be interesting to see what it would look like with the address printed in size proportional to eg how many places call it, or how CPU intensive that subroutine is, etc.
- retSava 9y agoAlso check out the other example dismap shows: Excitebike! Much fewer and longer subroutines. Interesting, I wonder if that in turn is mostly a result of developer coding style differences, or a result of game mechanics being different.