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Super Mario Bros. has been released for the Commodore 64
- muterad_murilax 8y agoGameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIwlhQpC0-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIwlhQpC0-k
- koala_man 8y agoImpressive. Without the intro and careful scrutiny, I would not have realized that this is not a NES
- jacobush 8y agoEven the colors look almost right - I wonder how that can be...
- tenebrisalietum 8y agoThere's a technique called "IFLI" that leverages the analog characteristics of 60/50fps CRTs - it's basically switching between two colors each alternating frame to "mix" two colors. However the colors look like C64 colors. The Goombas and skin of the turtles are pink. Except possibly the Mario sprite.
- Narishma 8y agoExcept for the slow-downs.
- taspeotis 8y agoNice touch: the clock has an extra pixel on it when it’s running slow.
- asciimov 8y agoThis is more like off/store brand soda than anything. While not Dr Pepper, it's like Mr Pibb or Dr Thunder, still tastes good, but it's not quite the same.
- muterad_murilax 8y agoIt's based on the reverse-engineered source code of the NES original, though.
- frosted-flakes 8y agoI'd bet Mr Pibb and Dr Thunder are based on the reverse-engineered ingredients analysis of Dr Pepper.
- BEEdwards 8y agoYou take that back, Mr Pibb is clearly the best. It doesn't put on airs like some other sodas.
- asciimov 8y agoReal Mr Pibb was awesome, although wasn't available in my region growing up. When they moved over to Pibb Extra, that stuff was just nasty.
- tclancy 8y agoWell, the version of Tapper I used to play on the C64 used root beer rather than so it works.
- vidarh 8y agoNot that surprising, given the CPU in the NES is a second sourced near-6502 (Ricoh 2A03) though running a bit faster apparently. But there's nothing in there that's hard to do on a C64 (and in fact before this there was The Great Giana Sisters, released in '87, that was so similar - including a near identical first level - that Nintendo threatened to sue and it was taken out of the stores; but of course "everyone" had copies soon enough anyway) EDIT: Here's a video of the C64 version of Giana Sisters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8teXm6723-g&t=1309s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8teXm6723-g&t=1309s
- ddtaylor 8y agoI think the NES's PPU is a lot more powerful in some ways than the C64 VIC-II chip. The NES's PPU supports multiple background layers, priority, pixel collision detection and has up to 64 sprites on screen at once - albeit with some limitations on how many are on each scanline. The VIC-II can only do 8 sprites at a time without scanline raster tricks (and if we count those the NES can do more than 64 too)
- phoboslab 8y agoIIRC the NES PPU only supports one background layer. You can just change the scroll position mid-frame to give it the illusion of multiple background layers. See here for some clever examples of this technique. Everything that's overlapping is done with sprites: https://youtu.be/ZGyFQ9aRp_U?t=579 https://youtu.be/ZGyFQ9aRp_U?t=579
- ddtaylor 8y agoYou're right, I was thinking of the SNES which had multiple background layers.
- djmips 8y agoIt's not near-6502 it's an exact 6502. Die-shots show the exact same transistor layout; even the decimal section is there but disabled.
- ido 8y agoI find the music/audio artefacts give it away.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- phito 8y agoWhat's up with the sound? It can't play two sounds simultaneously?
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoThe C64 has three audio channels, the NES has four. Native C64 games were designed with that in mind, but this port has to double up the NES' triangle and noise channels on one C64 voice, so sometimes a sound effect gets overwritten. The article discusses it.
- mrspeaker 8y agoI loved my C64 as a kid and played if for about billion hours. I loved the music - some of my all-time favorite "songs" are from C64 games (Ghost 'n' Goblins, Commando themes are sooo good!). When I revisited the C64 as an adult the first thing that immediately jumped out at me was the dropped/stuck notes that happen in a theme song when you get a powerup or trigger some sound effect. I can't believe I never even noticed it as a kid, and my brain just filled in the missing sounds!
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoThe C64 only had three audio voices (compared to four on the NES), so it was difficult to play decent music and multiple sound effects at the same time. A lot of games let you switch between music or SFX, but not both. Even so, its musical capabilities were years ahead of anything on the market. I usually played in music mode, if it was available. :) There's a netradio station that exclusively streams remixes of C64 game music. It's been broadcasting for at least 20 years. It's my favorite thing to listen to while coding. https://www.slayradio.org/ https://www.slayradio.org/
- gattilorenz 8y ago> Since the NES-processor is clocked (roughly 70%) faster than a stock C64 there can be slowdowns during gameplay Well, it's impressive that it works without being always painfully slow, then. How is this done?
- jacobush 8y agoMaybe the original game didn't always use all available cycles. But I imagine there is more to this story, I think it takes some great wizardry to make this at all. The NES and the C64 have very different graphics and sound chips.
- Waterluvian 8y agoThe original had bad slowdown too at times if I recall.
- recursive 8y agoNot this bad.
- tenebrisalietum 8y agoThe more significant advantage of the NES over the C64 is the way hardware scrolling works. The NES supports a 4-screen screen memory or "nametable", and the PPU, or graphics chip, can be programmed with one or two register writes to basically display any position within that 4 screens. Scrolling is just updates to the scroll registers and populating new video data on the incoming edge (which has to happen during VBLANK). Whereas the C64's VIC-II can only select a few fixed places to start reading video memory to render the screen (2k boundaries for text mode). It can finely shift the screen left or right up to 8 pixels, but scrolling past that requires a many, many cycle recopy of RAM to video memory. Throw in the need to recopy color memory as well and that puts the C64 at a serious disadvantage. Looks like this game on the C64 used some really advanced technique called VSP, which tells the VIC to I guess read from arbitrary memory addresses instead of the fixed ones it normally supports. This apparently exposed a VIC-II hardware bug that can corrupt RAM (since VIC-II is responsible for DRAM refresh). Really interesting. Seems some systems are more susceptible to this hardware bug than others, and there's difficult software workarounds for it.
- themodelplumber 8y agoI just barely learned about the (not exactly new) Star Wars RPG REUP and now I see this. Some of these fan-created projects are amazing.
- jonathankoren 8y agoThis is interesting, because I used to have a bootleg “Super Mario Bros” for the C64 back in the day. The gameplay was similar, and it certainly had characters that looked like SMB, but after about world 1-1, the game got progressively different. Like one novel element the game had were these walkways that would disappear as you walked over them. It wasn’t a bad game. Just a different game. I think this it[0]. Apparently it’s a resedited version of the SMB knockoff The Great Giana Sisters [1], which I had never heard of until now. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgFzyM3my7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgFzyM3my7M [1] https://www.retrogamer.net/retro_games80/the-making-of-the-great-giana-sisters/ https://www.retrogamer.net/retro_games80/the-making-of-the-g...
- Sharlin 8y agoOh, the memories. Giana Sisters was the first video game I ever seriously played.
- Kurtz79 8y agoYup, the first thing I thought when I read the title was "well, we already had our own Mario". To be fair, it was a decent ripoff, but controls and levels were nowhere as good as NES Super Mario.
- jonathankoren 8y agoControlwise they were limited by the 4-way digital joystick with one fire button. They are fine what they had to work with.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- anonlastname 8y agoThank god. Now I can finally sleep at night.
- politician 8y agoThe real question now is whether 4:55 is still the fastest time the game can be finished.
- LocalH 8y agoIt's so close to the original, that I think it's probably possible, especially if running on a turbo system.
- gaogao 8y agoThe smooth scrolling is pretty hard. One of my favorite bits of Masters of Doom about id Software was when they hacked a port of Super Mario Bros 3 to the PC, but as history can tell, Nintendo didn't bite on that one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YWD6Y9FUuw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YWD6Y9FUuw
- NeoBasilisk 8y agoBut we got Commander Keen, which will always have a special place in my heart.
- thatoneuser 8y agoI read that book as a teenager and it made me want to start my own gaming company just so I could throw keyboards at my coworkers :D
- carmate383 8y agoWhich book is that?
- akovaski 8y ago"Masters of Doom"
- benj111 8y agoDo you tell that story at job interviews?
- thatoneuser 8y agoHaha no but that's actually a solid idea. I've been freelancing lately but if I ever go back Ima need some material so thanks!
- BurningCycles 8y agoWell this is on the Commodore 64, and smooth scrolling was quite easy on this machine as it had hardware support for scrolling and raster interrupts.
- loser777 8y agoWished they had taken the opportunity to show off the C64's solid sound chip hardware advantage over the NES ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_cbQh8og70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_cbQh8og70
- lux 8y agoIs there a list of SMB ports online somewhere? I was searching the other day and found some scattered info but didn't find quite what I was looking for.
- lux 8y agoAlso, this is awesome.
- LocalH 8y agoAs far as actual ports of the NES code go, I think there was one back in the day on the TG16/PCE, there was one a few years back for the Genesis/MD, and this. I also want to say I think someone ported it to the SNES?
- muterad_murilax 8y agoI don't know if it qualifies as a port, but Hudson Soft's Super Mario Bros. Special for Japanese home computers comes to mind. (It completely lacks scrolling and takes some liberties with the level design and includes extra power-ups, though.) Also there is of course Super Mario Bros. Deluxe for the Game Boy Color, ported by Nintendo themselves.
- jimrhods23 8y agoThis is amazing! When I was a kid, this is exactly what I wanted. We had a Commodore 64, but my parents wouldn't get an NES. They eventually got me one, but it was when all of my friends already had the SNES.
- gnarbarian 8y agoLOL your parents were sadistic.
- benj111 8y agoNo they aren't https://xkcd.com/606/ https://xkcd.com/606/
- Insanity 8y agoDoes not hold up nowadays, at least not for multiplayer games which is why a majority of people play. If you get the game after 5 years, most of the online games will be dead. On the other hand, here I am, playing Counter-Strike:Source every weekend with a group of friends. But I'd say CS:S (and the older games in general) are not following the modern trend of multiplayer games. I doubt the latest CoD (whichever one it is) will be playable online in 5 years.
- jimrhods23 8y agocheap, not sadistic. The end result is me being the most successful in my family with first a career and now multiple technology businesses. I spent all that time learning C64 basic and some assembly. I used to type in games that I found in C64 magazines at the library. I had no way to save it, so sometimes it would take me multiple days. A few times, the power was cut :-( and I had to start over.
- tibbon 8y agoWhat are the biggest differences between a C64 and NES really? They both use a 6502 right? What prevents you from just overclocking the C64 to match the speed of the NES? Different memory layout?
- fooblitzky 8y agoCompletely different graphics hardware, the C64 used the VIC-II, and the NES had a custom Picture Processing Unit (PPU) developed by Ricoh, among other things. The CPU is only a small part of a larger design, and 8-bit computers were created before any kind of standardization arrived.
- throwaway2048 8y ago8 bit micros of the era are much more dependent on their graphics hardware, what makes this demo impressive is that the c64 had a much more limited graphics chip than the NES (fewer sprites, fewer colors, and no support for tile based scrolling)
- vidarh 8y ago> no support for tile based scrolling Pretty every scrolling game on the C64 uses the character mode as "tiles". It may well have been more limited than the NES - I have no idea what the NES hardware was like, but it reduced the amount of copying enough that it was rarely a major problem. The low number of hardware sprites usable per raster line was sometimes a limitation, but not very often - people got around it by using characters and/or careful level design. While this is cool, I'm surprised people find this impressive - it's nothing special for C64 games. E.g. compare the Mario clone Giana Sisters (1987): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8teXm6723-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8teXm6723-g To a more technically impressive C64 scrolling game like R-Type: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bft5BhWIzTU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bft5BhWIzTU Or Shadow of the Beast (though a shadow - sorry - of the Amiga version) with its many parallax layers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_GdJiEjSho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_GdJiEjSho Both have heavy use of a mix of raster interrupts to scroll independent parts of the screen separately, and sprites, coupled with updating the bitmap of some custom characters.
- jphalimi 8y agoI am sorry if this is off-topic, but is this board running phpBB2 from 15 years ago? I have used most versions of phpBB until 2015, they all came with so many security holes, I have been hacked so many times because of it, how is this board still up and running!?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- altitudinous 8y agoSurely Nintendo are going to be all over this and get it removed?
- daniel_iversen 8y agoYes they probably will, which would be such s shame really, better download it for safekeeping while you all can! What an amazing project!
- viraptor 8y agoI'm not sure. Given all the romhacks of SMW produced in the last couple of years and nobody getting sued (even though the authors are known/popular), I don't think they'd bother with suing for the C64 port. Just search for "romhack" on twitch.tv if you haven't seen those yet.
- throwaway2048 8y agoThey don't sue, but they aggressively take down and demonetize any Nintendo related content on YouTube (even if only extremely tangential)
- citrusui 8y agoWhen it comes to SMW ROM hacks, nobody distributes ROMs. Instead, people release _patches_ which have to be applied to the base ROM (this is done through an IPS/BPS patching program). There's actually a JavaScript version available: https://media.smwcentral.net/Alcaro/bps/ https://media.smwcentral.net/Alcaro/bps/
- voltagex_ 8y agoIt's been pulled down from one filehoster and is "under review" on the other.
- CM30 8y agoEh, it depends. They're pretty random when it comes to taking down fan works, though it's nowhere near as common an occurrence as the media would have you believe (as people have mentioned, sites like SMW Central and Mario Fan Games Galaxy have been going for years with no issues). The general rule from what I've noticed is that a game tends to be taken down if most of these boxes are checked: 1. The game is a direct remake of a Nintendo title 2. It's of a certain professional quality that it can be confused with a Nintendo title 3. Said project has received heavy marketing/lots of press online 4. Money is involved in distributing the game 5. It's in direct competition with a Nintendo product coming out around this time 6. It's being distributed in a format that makes a takedown not legally risky for the company The fact this is a direct clone of Super Mario Bros 1 and has received some free press probably won't help it much though.
- sys_64738 8y agoIs this a reskinned Great Gianna Sisters?
- prvc 8y agoNo.
- jffster 8y agoAbout. Damn. Time. This is awesome.
- zeristor 8y agoWhat next? Manic Miner for the ZX Spectrum?
- ddingus 8y agoThat is amazing work! So nice to see that hardware continue to see development and people pushing the boundaries.
- mproud 8y agoC&D any time now…
- codesushi42 8y agoWow, very impressive. I have been meaning to check out this book on C64 game programming, for anyone interested: https://www.amazon.com/Retro-Game-Dev-Derek-Morris/dp/0692980652/ https://www.amazon.com/Retro-Game-Dev-Derek-Morris/dp/069298...
- jwr 8y agoCool clone, but we all know that Giana Sisters is the original game.
- weinzierl 8y agoIt is embarrassing but I really only learned more than a decade later that Giana Sisters was not the original. In Germany, and I guess in many other European countries, Giana Sisters on C64 was really the Jump and Run game (that's what we called that kind of game back then) of the 8-bit era. Super Mario was not heard of. This all changed when the Game Boy came out because it had Super Mario, but this was of course a few years after the 8-bit home computer wave peaked here. So many of my generation learned about Super Mario years after they knew Giana Sisters. For those that have never heard about Giana Sisters. It is essentially a Super Mario clone with Mario and Luigi replaced by two girls - Giana and Maria. The levels and the game-play are not 100% identical by very similar. It was sold only for a very short period of time because Nintendo intervened. It was still hugely popular and most copies were just pirated.
- nurettin 8y agothat was my exact experience, except the germany part.
- zapzupnz 8y agoSome company later released Great Giana Sisters games for the Nintendo DS (and presumably some other platforms, maybe PC) with updated graphics. Roughly the same gameplay but very different look and feel.
- tinus_hn 8y agoThere also is a hacked version that swaps the sprites and graphics to Mario and the characters and backgrounds in that game.
- perakojotgenije 8y agoYeah, they could just have replaced the sprites in Giana Sisters to Mario and there you have it :-D
- zamadatix 8y agoFor an extremely limited port check out SMB ported to the Atari 2600 https://youtu.be/8fSO-UTdCI8 https://youtu.be/8fSO-UTdCI8
- colordrops 8y agoWow, this would have been the #1 seller on the platform if it came out during the 2600's heyday. Quality is much better than most other 2600 games.
- guidedlight 8y agoUnfortunately that port uses a 32kb ROM which likely would have never get published, due to the huge expense of doing so. That’s why the quality is so much higher. It’s a great example of what can be achieved when these limitations no longer apply. My favourite modern day Atari 2600 port is Pac-Man 4k. https://youtu.be/dAYuBcuvIww https://youtu.be/dAYuBcuvIww
- aidenn0 8y agoMeh, pitfall fit in 1/8 the rom size and actually did come out during 2600's heyday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doX3BmuoXVw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doX3BmuoXVw
- bitwize 8y agoWow. This is the real deal, not a spritehack of Giana Sisters. Modulo a bit of slowdown, it's faithful to the original. Absolutely bananas. How did they get that high resolution with all the sprite colors?
- riq_ 8y agoBest possible combination: Super Mario Bros for the C64 using NES bluetooth gamepads: https://youtu.be/G77mDe3NuBs https://youtu.be/G77mDe3NuBs
- Criper1Tookus 8y agoThe title screen and the loading presentation are AMAZING. The system detection too. It almost feels like another computer. I can't say enough positives.
- piokoch 8y agoAside from the main topic (amazing stuff, undoubtedly). It was sooo good to visit normal forum, not Twitter, not Facebook, not Reddit, just a forum run by passionate people. Sadly, European Union is working very hard to make maintenance of such forums almost impossible. First we got GDPR and "right to be forgotten", so anyone can demand ones posts to be deleted. Then came infamous article 11 and 13, with obligatory content filtering. Now, there is TERREG regulation being accepted, which requires removal of "terrorists content" in 1 hour, otherwise there are huge fines. This will not stop spreading terrorist content, obviously, but a malicious person can post something "terroristic" in the middle of the night and report forum owner, who would have 1 hour to delete such content...
- axilmar 8y agoWhat is so special about this? was the C64 supposed to be not powerful enough for SMB? The game 'Great Gianna Sisters', which exists for C64, is very similar to SMB.
- rpiguy 8y agoNES is more powerful. 70% faster CPU, GPU is much more powerful. Commodore 64 was engineered in 1981 and released in 1982. NES is almost five years newer. C64 had a RAM advantage, but later NES carts had mapper chips.
- muterad_murilax 8y agoActually, the Famicom (Japanese NES) came out in 1983. Super Mario Bros. was released in 1985.
- reneberlin 8y ago<3 Time to resurrect my C64 from the cellar. <3
- huxflux 8y agoSeven years of dev, true heroes!