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Indeed, nothing in this article has anything to do with how the NES worked. If you want a real introduction to the hardware, "I Am Error" by Nathan Altice is a
by coldpie 7y ago
Indeed, nothing in this article has anything to do with how the NES worked. If you want a real introduction to the hardware, "I Am Error" by Nathan Altice is a great book about how the NES worked. It includes a chapter about how SMB1 in particular stored its level layouts.
- eutropia 7y agoI once did a project scripting AI for Mario on SMB1 on an emulator, and I watched the game's memory pages as I did so I could learn more. To my surprise, I saw the pages of arrays of hex bytes in the memory mirroring what I saw on the level, the layout was very literally transferred directly. When Mario moved, the current screen and the next one were clearly visible scrolling by in memory, which different hex bytes representing different tile types.
- conception 7y agoYou get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.
- neurostimulant 7y agoThey used that tiling system all the way up to NDS IIRC. I remember tinkering with gameboy advance homebrew programming back then trying to implement infinite scrolling and it works just like you described.
- mschaef 7y agoThanks for the reference. Hadn't heard of this book and just now ordered it.
- cableshaft 7y ago"I Am Error" is not the best name for that book. I wouldn't have thought it was an in-depth technical book for the NES based on that name.
- ASalazarMX 7y agoThe whole "Platform Studies" series is a guarantee of in-dept technical work. While all have deep knowledge, "Racing the beam" (Atari 2600) is amazing in its simplicity, while "The future was here" (Amiga) is borderline snobbish. YMMV.