Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/19/super-mario-bros-released-for.html
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Psst, @beschizza, Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros are different games! Quick, before someone cranky comes along in the comments!
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Back in the day there are cases of people making bad games on purpose. Coleco got the rights to port Donkey Kong to consoles. So they made a full, pretty nicely made version for their Colecovision, but made half assed, non-complete version for the Atari and Intellivision. The hardware was capable of so much more, as later fan attempts proved.
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Yeah came to say the same thing. That 2nd game was Mario Bros (no Super). Different game altogether.
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That’s a pretty fast and loose definition of pixel-perfect. More like “tile perfect”.
(The C64 and the NES had very different resolutions, aspect ratios, color palettes, color depths, sprite sizes, etc. You’re never going to make one look exactly like the other.)
But holy shit did they get the sound perfect. The SID is a very capable chip… but to make it emulate the NES audio, right down to the glitches. I’m astounded.
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Looks like the lawyers are already on this…one of the download sites has the file already removed, and the other notes that there’s been a “reported violation”. Grab it while you can!
And that’s a decent version of Mario Bros!
lol
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I had that one! It was… a minimalist experience.
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All games for the 2600 are a minimalist experience, that’s all the machine could do. That game is actually pretty impressive for the 2600. The hardware was made just barely powerful enough to run Pong, and the fact that so many other games could be developed on it is still amazing to this day.
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True, but did you ever see the latter-day upgrade to Pac-Man that some folks created recently-ish?
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Here’s the arcade version of Mario Bros from 1983 (also non super)
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TOO LATE
but yeah, that’s a pretty dumb mistake
I was hoping the link would have more information about how the port was made. Did they use a lot of the original code?
Quite a few years ago saw the release of something called SMB4MD, which is in fact a meticulously re-coded version of SMB for the Sega Genesis (resulting in a rather interesting take on the game’s music).
once you get locked into a serious drug collection , the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
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Years later I recognized the Atari audio being used for sound effects in a Tom & Jerry Kids cartoon. It was half-assed all over again.
Fitting all of that onto a 4k Atari cartridge is straight up black magic.
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The Colecovision was easier to program (less bookkeeping to animate sprites with the VDP) and had a much more capable video chip (TMS9918, used in a bunch of stuff). Did Coleco push other platforms to their limits? No. Did they push their own platform to its limits? Also no.
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They didn’t need to push it to the limits for the Intellivision - they could have just, you know, made the other levels.
Donkey Kong was one of if not THE #1 arcade games at the time. Having such a popular game clearly look the best on the Colecovision was a selling point, and why it was bundled with the sytstem. Which was why they intentionally put out sub par ports for the other systems.
