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IIRC Mario 1 works by drawing "sprites" of tiles. The level data says "pipe at 73,30" where pipe is a 2x3 array of the tile ids that make a pipe or "cloud at 34

IIRC Mario 1 works by drawing "sprites" of tiles. The level data says "pipe at 73,30" where pipe is a 2x3 array of the tile ids that make a pipe or "cloud at 34,3" where cloud is a 3x2 array of tile ids. I don't know what percentage of NES games used a technique like that. AFAIK the majority of NES games with scrolling levels used a simple 2D tile map but Mario 1 does not. I shipped a NES game, ours had an MMC3 chip which if I recall gave us +8k ram for a total of 10k. We decompressed the current level's tile map into a portion of that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management_controller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management_controller

coldpie 7y ago
> I shipped a NES game One of my favorite games of all time. You signed a copy of it via mail for me around 2006/2007 ;) Cheers. > We decompressed the current level's tile map into a portion of that. I reverse engineered it to dump PNG format maps of both it and the leaked prototype. Pretty straightforward RLE but it was fun learning about 6502, NES programming, and bank switching. Level dumper source: https://gitlab.com/mcmapper/mcmapper/blob/master/main.c https://gitlab.com/mcmapper/mcmapper/blob/master/main.c Generated images: https://tcrf.net/Proto:M.C._Kids https://tcrf.net/Proto:M.C._Kids Very different from how SMB1's level construction works. Like the OP comment said, it basically has a modal command structure. Something like "start drawing the ground two tiles up from the bottom. At x=18, draw a pipe." etc. This is why the level scrolls infinitely after the flagpole, it's just running the default "draw ground" command forever. M.C. Kids on the other hand actually stored the whole level tile grid, using RLE for compression.