What would Super Mario Bros. look like on Atari?

by Candace Savino { Feb 20th 2008 at 10:30PM }

Ah, Atari 2600 -- where would we be without ye? But, now that you're older, we've moved on to newer, prettier models. We're sure you understand.

What's that? You don't understand? You think that games like Super Mario Bros. would look just fine on you?

Well, let's take a look. The video above will show us the truth ... huh.

Uh, what did we think? No, the game didn't look like a discolored, misshapen blob. What? That's so not code for "you're fat!"

Okay, you want the truth? You're ugly. Now go learn to make coffee.

See also:

[Via Geekstir]

Tags: atari, atari-2600, hack, super-mario-bros

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

AnOffday @ Feb 20th 2008 10:36PM

hmm. Still looks fun to me.

therpham @ Feb 20th 2008 10:52PM

It's a good idea, but the implementation isn't so good. For example, if the floating scores can have such definition, then the lack of definition in everything else doesn't make sense. There is inconsistent minimum pixel size, I suppose.

Sam @ Feb 21st 2008 9:10PM

also wouldn't the sound be of much lesser quality? this video wasn't very well thought out...

Jimbob @ Feb 20th 2008 10:52PM

actually, it looks like a sprite and tileset edit for the nes rom. the numbers stood out as they are still in their old resolution. im sure if this was running on a real atari, it would still be an ugly, unplayable mess.

Shadow31 @ Feb 20th 2008 11:00PM

This seriously just crashed my browser everytime I started watching it. No... frickin'... joke...

Ah well, I saw the first 5 seconds or so and it looked like crap...

Geoff @ Feb 20th 2008 11:13PM

Nice tribute video, maybe, but not possible on the 2600.

Crazylink @ Feb 20th 2008 11:24PM

Could the 2600 even do scrolling screens?

Covarr @ Feb 20th 2008 11:27PM

It would look like a rom hack that's been available since the early 2000s? I doubt it.

On the 2600, the proportions would be way off; some things would be too fat, some would be too skinny, nothing would be the same height, etc. Jumping physics would reek, allowing only three jumps (straight up, up left, and up right) with no finer control mid-jump. The music would be a clunky mess. The boxes and coins would not have the smooth palette changes visible here. I could go on and on.

fco. @ Feb 20th 2008 11:27PM

I actually remember playing a version of Super Mario on my Atari 800XL, but it looked (and played) way uglier than that. I'll see if I can find some pictures.

DomoBraden @ Feb 20th 2008 11:58PM

Not Super Mario...just Mario Bros., or maybe Donkey Kong.

Anyway, that's definitely a ROM hack, but even if the game looked like that IRL...I'd still play. There's no way this could be done on the 2600, for instance the music and sound effects. I'll stop there as I don't feel I need to go further.

Still, if the original looked like that, I'd still be all over it.

Skippy @ Feb 21st 2008 11:40AM

Original Mario Bros. for the 2600:
http://www.videogamecritic.net/images/2600/mario_bros_.png

And Donkey Kong:
http://www.consoleclassix.com/info_img/Donkey_Kong_2600_ScreenShot1.jpg

fco. @ Feb 21st 2008 9:21PM

Here!! I found it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4shac02_ks

Patius @ Feb 21st 2008 12:34AM

fake. the music's too good.

Oh, and the fact that i'm sure that its a hack.

But still kind of funny.

I wonder what Mario Bros looked like on it?

Roto13 @ Feb 21st 2008 12:46AM

Mario Bros. on Atari? Looked pretty awful. I had it. :P

http://www.videogamecritic.net/images/2600/mario_bros_.png

Feigr @ Feb 21st 2008 6:44AM

Fake? Really? And where does it say that it is supposed to be running on an Atari? It's a what-if!

This pathological need people have of calling out things as fake is really starting to annoy me.

JDavis @ Feb 21st 2008 1:41AM

Yeah, as others have said, this is just an old rom hack. It was a cute idea, but by no means accurate of how it would really look/run on an Atari.

mykie @ Feb 21st 2008 2:26AM

Mario Bros. on the Atari in no way stretched the abilities of what 2600 could do. Since it was programmed by Nintendo, it was made for the Japanese version of the 2600, which only allowed for 8 simultaneous colors on screen.
The NTSC 2600 allowed for all 128 colors in the its pallette on screen at once, (more than twice the colors on the NES!) but only 4 different colors per line.
So while smooth pallette changes would have been possible with the coins, the max resolution of 160x192 would have made the scoreboard illegible. Any more than 4 sprites onscreen would have resulted in massive flicker (think Pac-Man). Limited and very jerky side scrolling would have been possible, too.
And the sound would have been limited to two very simple channels, unlike the NES's five channels of sweet transistor audio.
So while this hacked rom is cute, it's a very far cry from what SMB would REALLY look like on the 2600.

Although, if you're interested in seeing what SMB might look like on the Commodore 64, look no further than the Great Giana Sisters:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giana_sisters

Microswirl @ Feb 21st 2008 2:52AM

Didn't the Atari 2600 only have 1 button? Sure, you can jump, but how would you sprint?

EmOneGarand @ Feb 21st 2008 6:15PM

theirs a way to make the system read a controller state for a momentary push and a prolonged push.. while it kinda sucked.. try playing Predator for the C64.. half the time it would do the opposite of what it was suppose to do..

gamewiz010 @ Feb 21st 2008 8:20AM

It would be cool to see what an Atari Smash Bros. would look like.

BrianHonaker @ Feb 21st 2008 2:02PM

The score is original resolution. Also the sound is far better than would have been available on the Atari. Someone should actually port the game over to an emulator. Hell I'd like to see it done in ASCII like the old centipede games. That would rock.

Patrick Yoness @ Feb 21st 2008 2:37PM

On Atari It probably have only 1 actual level which would become a new level by changing colors. The koopas and other bad guys would flicker if more than 2 were on the screen at the same time. The obsticles would be a repeating pattern of pipes and holes...

The sound track would be the 1st 6 notes played at the beginning of the level and then a strange hissing sound.

podcast411 @ Feb 21st 2008 2:39PM

Wow - looks great - I still use my 2600. Is this cartridge available? Would love to get a hold of this.

This looks better than most of what activision put out.

Rob W

Candace Savino @ Feb 21st 2008 2:48PM

It's not an actual game, just a hack. So, unfortunately, there's no cartridge for this :(. Like most people have said, an actual Atari rendering of SMB would probably look/sound a lot worse.

1uk3 @ Feb 21st 2008 3:26PM

Is the point of this story that the graphics are very poor?

If that's the case, then why be a Wii fanboy? The other two consoles have better graphics.

Games are all about playability in my book.

Candace Savino @ Feb 21st 2008 3:56PM

Nope, the point of the post is "look at this cool video," with a bit of "hey, we've come a long way since the Atari" thrown in for good measure.

If we weren't impressed by this hack and didn't enjoy it, we wouldn't have posted it here.

:)

Dandy @ Feb 21st 2008 5:33PM

That's a fun video! In theory the 2600 could render any of those images... but it's a bit optimistic to say it could do them all, at once, so smoothly.

The flicker issue the 2600 had for multiple moving objects on the same horizontal line would make an accurate SMB very tough.

Plenty of 2600 games had scrolling environments-- notably Jungle Hunt, Vanguard, and River Raid. But the big issue is that the memory was insufficient to hold that much unique, "specified" landscape. River Raid and Jungle Hunt repeated their landscapes, and River Raid's was completely randomized (although it randomized the same way each time you played). 2600 Donkey Kong could only fit 2 of 4 levels, and those weren't even scrolling. You could do better by loading each level from cassette (via Starpath Supercharger or similar).

Take a look at 2600 Mario Bros, add a little bit of scrolling to the platforms, and that's probably about what you could get out of a real 2600 ROM (or a bit like like the SMB Game N Watch.)

Dandy @ Feb 21st 2008 5:35PM

That is, "Jungle Hunt and Vanguard" repeated their landscapes, and "River Raid" was randomized, sorry.

userr @ Feb 21st 2008 6:43PM

It looks like super-long Flash animation judging by the blurriness of everything...

Tim @ Feb 21st 2008 6:47PM

as others have pointed out, the atari 2600's hardware wouldn't be able to support a game as complicated as SMB.

with only 128 bytes of RAM (and only 4 KB of ROM, although some later games used bank-switching hardware on their cartridges to get more) just keeping the map of the level in memory would be tough.

Drawing sprites would be hard.. the 2600 could only draw 5 monochrome sprites at a time.. two bitmapped "players", two one-line "missiles", and a single pixel "ball". (Can you tell this was made by the Pong people?) The (unreleased) 2600 version of Mario Bros had only a single enemy on screen at a time because of this. You can get multicolored sprites only by modifying the sprite color register during the horizontal blanking interval (so you could get a red hat on a flesh head on a red body.. but forget about hands being colored, for example) .. having more sprites involves either reusing the same sprite multiple times on the screen (watch out for flicker, like you get in 2600 port of pac-man when you get multiple ghosts in the same row) or drawing them in software by making them part of the background (good luck)

The background (including any score display, and any software-generated sprites) is drawn by setting a bitmap for a single scanline during the horizontal blanking interval.. tricky to draw anything complicated when a 1 MHz CPU has to calculate the background while it's being drawn.

the game logic shouldn't be too hard to do during the vertical blanking interval. the main constraint will be the lack of RAM for storing state.

the control would suck. Those joysticks were awful. You'd probably want to use the button for jump, and forget about shooting fireballs.

The 2600 was a cool piece of hardware, but the NES is so much better.

forceinfinity @ Feb 21st 2008 7:32PM

There's also the issue of the letter counts on each scan line. In the Atari, you could only realistically have 6 letters on a given line at once. Someone would say Space Invaders had 8? Well i fyou look closely on that game, the scores for player 1 and player 2 had blank lines through them...and even closer look shows that the visible lines for player 1 were on different scanlines than player two. That would make displaying "World 1-2" impossible unless World was itself a single sprite.

I also think for sprites you can't have more than one color on the same sprite on the same scanline (which would make the Mario graphic depicted impossible)

Btw...you can have more than 4 sprites on the screen without flicker, but they would have to be on different scanlines that do not overlap. (Think about how Activision pulled off feats like that with Pitfall)

Again, we can go on and on like this

Tom @ Feb 21st 2008 8:25PM

Looks fine to me, because it's patently inaccurate. Now stop addressing defunct videogame systems in the second person, it's creepy/lame/supremely nerdy.

Leandro Correa @ Feb 21st 2008 8:40PM

Really cool, but the question is: how would Mario jump and shot fire at the same time on Atari? It only had 1 button... :)

fco. @ Feb 21st 2008 9:23PM

Here! This is what I was talking about!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4shac02_ks

Chris @ Feb 21st 2008 10:10PM

Some corrections:

The actual maximum number of colours that can be displayed per scanline is at least 15. However, for practical purposes (ie: outside of making a demo just to prove 15 is possible) you can do something useful with maybe half that many colours (This really depends what you want to do if you just want a static screen like a title screen you could use more than if you want a scrolling playfield, etc).

Doing the scores and text like "World 1-2" would be not be that big a deal. There's no law that says letters have to be 8 pixels wide. Or you could make them out of background graphics, or use alternate scanlines.

The biggest problem on the 2600 would be the horizontal scroll. It's very difficult to do a smooth 1-pixel vertical background scroll on the 2600. If you look at games that do a horiz scroll you'll notice that they either don't really scroll the whole background (ie: Barnstorming) just a single large object that's actually a sprite(s) or they do a 4 pixel hard scroll like Vanguard. This is why there are so many vertical scrollers like River Raid, it's very easy to do them nice and smoothly.

The other big problem is there are several examples of Mario and 2 or more enemies on screen at the same time and they're not paired or in threes using the multi sprite feature of the 2600. This would be really difficult to do well without flicker (though they may be blocky enough to render with the two missiles and ball) particularly since Mario uses 2 colours on the same scanline.