Announcing the 'Return of Mario Bros.'

[Jess Ragan]

I'd just like to know how you did this. Where can I get this graphics editing software? I'd like to make an actual version of Kabul!, the game parody I have on my 2600 page.

 

JR

[liquid_sky]

Now THATS Mario! Great job on the fix.. I remmeber when I was a kid I wore the local Mario Bros. machine out (you gotta love the 80s.. slurpee machine 2 steps away from Double Dragon, Mario Bros, and Hogans Alley)

When I was givin the gift of Mario Bros. 2600 I was first off amazed, but tehn remembered how sad i was with the 2600 Double Dragon (alas, I was using a 7800 but someone bought the 2600 version and I had to suffer until we were able to exchange it for the SUPURB 7800 version) well I popped mario bros 2600 in and i loved it.. but I also thougt mario looked a tad odd, but now its mario and now im gonna play it again, the way it should have been all along.

 

Great job!

[moycon]

Wow!! I think it looks great. I too remember thinking as a kid that this was a great game...But something just wasnt right with the graphics. Thanks Rhindle!!

[Rhindle The Red]

Thanks everyone for the kind words.

 

Now, has anyone tried it on emulators/Cuttle Carts, etc. yet? I'd really like to know that it works universally.

 

Jess, the programs I used are actually SHOWGFX and EDITGFX (I mis-typed in the original message). SHOWGFX is used to dump a 2600 .bin file into a .txt file that allows you to see the graphics.

 

Here's what one of my Marios looks like in a SHOWGFX .txt dump:

code:

---

08e2 | XXX    |

08e3 |XXXXXXX |

08e4 | |

08e5 | XXX |

08e6 | X X |

08e7 |X X XX |

08e8 |X XX XX |

08e9 |X X |

08ea |XXX |

08eb | XXXX |

08ec | X|

08ed | XXXXXXX|

08ee |XXXXXXX |

08ef |X XX X |

08f0 |X XXXX |

08f1 |X XX|

08f2 | XXXXXX|

08f3 | XXXXX |

08f4 | XXX |

08f5 | XXX |

08f6 | XX |

08f7 |X XX|

08f8 | X XX|

---

 

You simply look through the text file for the graphic you want to change and change it. You then use EDITGFX to convert the .txt file back to a .bin.

 

Of course, this doesn't help you with figuring out how high each character can be, as compared to how tall it is. Nor does it tell you how many wacky tricks the programmers used to make things like the Fighterflies work. Also, unlike Mario Bros., most games have their graphics encoded upside-down, so it can be hard finding what you're looking for.

 

And as for the hack you wanted to do, these programs will work for reshaping the bomber to a certain extent, but you'd need to actually disassemble the .bin and change code in order to change the colors. SHOWGFX does nothing about that. (If I knew a good way to do it easily, I would have shifted Mario's head so it was one pixel shorter, allowing a three pixel tall hat that was more accurate.)

 

As for where to find the programs, I can't remember, it was so long ago. Drop me a line if you'd like me to send them to you. But be warned, they're DOS, so you need to be able to use a command line.

[Rhindle The Red]

For years, my favorite series of video games has been the Mario/Donkey Kong games. This dates way back to my early days, playing Donkey Kong in the arcade at the college where my father taught. If anything, I loved the sequel, Donkey Kong Junior, even more. And Mario Bros. was like nothing I had ever played before. (Like many, I had a thing for playing as Player Two. Go Luigi!)

 

My 2600 collecting originally began around 1983/84 (I can't quite remember when, but I know I paid $89.99 for my system). I never did buy Donkey Kong at the time, but many years later (around '91) I got a copy of the Atari release of Donkey Kong Junior at Child World's going out of business sale. Oh, the humanity. Nothing could save this piece of tripe.

 

It wouldn't be until my return to full time collecting (around '98) that I finally got Donkey Kong for my 2600. This was also a disappointment, although not nearly on the level of DK Jr. This was sad news, indeed. For I was distraught that none of my favorite games would play well on my favorite system.

 

However, it wasn't much later that I discovered something amazing to me: Mario Bros. for the 2600! I was stunned. How could they get the gameplay of Mario Bros. on a 2600 cart? Although it goes without saying that I bought the game, I was certain that this would be the greatest disappointment of all.

 

Upon playing the game at home I was amazed at how much of the gameplay they had crammed into that little cart. To be sure, there were compromises. No bumping of platforms, wafers instead of coins, indestructible fireballs. But overall it was a stellar port. Except for one thing.

 

Who were these people populating one of my favorite games? Some sort of red and blue Muppet running around pretending to be Mario. Some sort of lizard that I guess was meant to be a Shellcreeper. And what the heck are those red things pretending to be Sidesteppers?

 

It wasn't much later that I was introduced to emulation and, eventually, the 2600 graphics editing tools SHOWGRFX & EDITGRFX. Mostly, I had used these tools, like many I'm sure, to hack versions of favorite 2600 games for my friends. (Turning Mario into my friend Frank, for instance.) I also started to create a Space Invaders hack (who hasn't?); this one called Spice Invaders (it's the Spice Girls ).

 

Inevitably it hit me. These tools could be used, not just for fun, but to right one of the great wrongs. I was filled with new purpose. I was going to fix Mario Bros. As it turned out, this project was not for the faint of heart, I can assure you. I started around late '98 / early '99. Even considering it was never on the front burner, this project took a long, long time to complete. Still, countless reams of graph paper with little, blocky, 8x24 and 8x19 pictures on them abound. I did the shellcreepers. Then re-did them. I completely re-did the fireball, trying to make it bounce, but it was erratic, so I changed it again. I spent months trying to figure out how to fix the Fighterflies. And the funky ways they crammed the graphics in caused me numerous headaches.

 

Even the name was a tough call. I couldn't call it "Super" Mario Bros. , so I settled long ago on the title "The New Mario Bros." It had a nice ring to it. This is the name that was on the title screen before I had even finished with re-doing my first enemy. But as I neared the end this past week, I began trolling around for images to create the label art. It was during this research that I learned of a Japanese Famicom-only release called Return of Mario Bros. From what I saw it looked like it more faithfully re-created the look of the original arcade than the original 8-Bit release. Since this was, in essence, what my project was all about, I decided a change was in order. So now I had a new name, proving that nothing in this project was beyond adjusting right up to the end.

 

Which is now.

 

I hereby give to you, my friends of the AtariAge Message Board, first crack at Return of Mario Bros. for the Atari 2600. Here it is:

 

Return of Mario Bros. for the Atari 2600

 

Here are some screenshots from the game:

 

 

As far as I can tell, the Atari copyright notice is the only graphic in the game I haven't replaced.

 

And here's a link to my page of fake 2600 labels where you can see the label that I designed for it.

 

Fake Atari 2600 cart page (There are some ColecoVision carts there as well - hope we're good like that.)

 

It's loosely based on a Brazilian bootleg label. If you want a full-size copy of both the front and the end label, you can e-mail me at rhindle@hotmail.com and ask for the zip file (it's about 75K).

 

As for the game, please try it out in any emulator you may have to make sure the code is not corrupted. I use PCAE and it has always worked fine, but I'm not sure about the others. If you have a Cuttle Cart or modified Supercharger, I'd like to know if it works there too.

 

Finally, I'd very much like to know what everyone thinks of the work. In the end, I find that I'm quite satisfied with the whole thing, despite the length of the project. Any budding programmers out there can also consider this my 'audition tape' in case you have graphics work available.

 

I'm releasing this in this manner because I think the people of this board are a great bunch. It's much more civilized here than other places and I thought I'd do something nice for all of you. I eventually plan to make sure Hozer Video gets a copy of this .bin and the accompanying label art, but for now, I'll keep it here.

 

Thanks, and I hope you all like it.

 

[ 10-16-2001: Message edited by: Rhindle The Red ]

[Tempest]

Looks nice! There are a few other 2600 games I can thin of that could use a graphics facelift. Maybe you'll start a trend?

 

Tempest

[Nukey Shay]

You shouldn't have any problems with the modified games running on anything (except maybe the limited support of VCS.exe)...provided you follow Rhindle's tip of not messing with the height of objects. Making an object smaller than it normally is may cause a glitch in games that check to see if a value is actually IN the data table before it writes it to the P/M area...but for the most part this should work as well (as in erasing an object completely so it can't collide with your player...like erasing the two "Toth" sprites in Raiders so you can search the Valley of Poison for that elusive signature without getting shot at!). I've done both many times without any ill effects under PCAE, Stella, and Z26.

 

BTW the link to those editing programs is at Dan Boris's page:

2600GFX.ZIP

 

Pick it up partway down the page.

 

Instructions...

SHOWGFX will create a text file that contains the bit pattern for the ENTIRE .bin, so make sure you set the parameters correctly. For example...

 

SHOWGFX PACMAN.BIN 0 4096 > PACMAN.TXT

 

...will convert the 4k rom to a text file (the second number would be 2048, 8192, or 16384 for 2k, 8k, or 16k .bin files respectively). The > pipe will put the data into the text file...omitting it would just throw the text on the dos screen. Then, open the text file with notepad or dos edit and make your changes. Be sure to keep the original spacing between the X's and spaces (the Insert key will overstrike characters instead of adding new ones, so you can press it once and type away).

 

To change it back to a .bin file, simply type...

 

EDITGFX PACMAN.TXT PACMAN2.BIN

 

Be sure to change the name so that the original is not overwritten.

Happy hackin'

 

[ 10-16-2001: Message edited by: Nukey Shay ]

[NE146]

That is some REALLY excellent work Rhindle

 

A couple of years ago, I discovered showgfx and editgfx off of Dan's page (I think) and they are indeed great fun. However, I've pretty much lost track of the huge amount of UGLY altered bin files on my HD... (one example being a horrid looking Adventure with a bloated mspacman graphic inserted for the dragons.

 

Again, nice work

[khryssun]

Congrats Rhindle !

Nice work

[Mindfield]

Nicely done indeed! I'm presuming that the moving coins on the normal levels are generated in realtime (rather than sprites) which is why they can't be converted to actual coins from the spinning Vomit-on-a-Cracker that they are currently, and making platforms that would actually rise in response to bumping it from below would require reprogramming -- no easy task. But the rest of it looks great! Mario looks like Mario. Shellcreepers no longer look like walking mucous, and crabs actually look like crabs. :-) Nice job overall. It's the Mario Bros. that should have been...

[fsuinnc]

Fantastic Job on the graphics!

 

Previously Posted ------

And as for the hack you wanted to do, these programs will work for reshaping the bomber to a certain

extent, but you'd need to actually disassemble the .bin and change code in order to change the

colors. SHOWGFX does nothing about that. (If I knew a good way to do it easily, I would have shifted

Mario's head so it was one pixel shorter, allowing a three pixel tall hat that was more accurate.)

----------------------------------------

 

I used these programs to make a hack of Space Jockey which I called Console Wars. I changed the little tanks and planes to Characters from other Console games (K.C. Munchkin, The Lock and Chase Guy, etc.) And I was able to change the colors of the these as well as allthe backgrounds, Point values, Number of ships per game, etc. It just takes a lot of patience and some luck to find where the to put the X's and where to put the blanks. http://www.geocities.com/fsuinnc/ConsoleWars.html

[+Random Terrain]

I too hope that more people do things like this. I also hope that someone makes a great PC Windows Atari 2600 game editor that lets the average doofus like me play with the guts of a game or at least the graphics. A user friendly Atari 2600 game editor would be great!

 

If anyone has heard of ResThief, I bet the guts of the Atari 2600 game editor would be similar to it by automatically examining the bin file, but instead of dumping what it finds into a folder like ResThief does, the information would be displayed in the editor.

 

[ 10-16-2001: Message edited by: F of i ]

[Ze_ro]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Mindfield:

Nicely done indeed! I'm presuming that the moving coins on the normal levels are generated in realtime (rather than sprites) which is why they can't be converted to actual coins from the spinning Vomit-on-a-Cracker that they are currently

---

 

I would guess that the coins are done as missiles, which would explain their square shape. Converting these into a sprite would not be an easy task. You'd have to basically re-write a huge part of the code to compensate for extra sprites, likely adding a lot of flicker. I think the square coins are good enough.

 

--Zero

[chrisrob9]

So much has been said by other people I almost don't feel like posting a message, however I find this very exciting. Even though now you can play the games on emulators like Mame, there is something about being able to push the 2600 to it's limits and see just how close the games could be made to look like the arcade. I actually remember wondering on several 2600 games, "If they really wanted to how close to the arcade could they make this game?" I figured they "dumbed down" games for the 2600, especially with the 5200 and other systems out that they wanted people to move up to. I also hope more people will do this.

[+Random Terrain]

Has anyone been to the following page? He also talks about what he used to edit the Mario graphics.

 

GRIMLICK's Rumble & Frenzy 2600 adaption

 

One more thing: the link that Nukey Shay gave is about the only place on the internet where you can download Showfx and Editgfx. They are both in the zip file called 2600gfx.zip.

[Atari-Jess]

What I want to know is who did a half assed job and actually did the Atari 2600 mario bros graphics?

I mean what you did is just WAY better than what that other dude did.

[StanJr]

Hey Rhindle! Return works great on PCAE and is loads of fun! The amped up graphics make it a much better play than the original. As a matter of fact, I replaced the old Mario Bros. with yours in my emu catalog. Thanks for your hard work! If you do get this thing to a cart, put me down for one!

 

Super Stan

[Nukey Shay]

fsuinnc--

It doesn't necessarily need to be limited to "lucky guesses". You can use PCAE with the debugger turned on, and scroll down the list of instructions in the file. If you start getting a lot of BRK instructions or seemingly random bytes, these areas are where the data tables are (a little easier to find for any non-programmers out there).

 

As far as where to put those X's, you can use the Windows calculator in scientific mode. Click on the decimal mode and enter any value from 0 to 255. If you click on the binary mode, the 1's will show you where to put those X's for that value (if the binary number shown is less than 8 digits long, zero's should be added to the left...1011 would be 00001011).

But what value should it be? That all depends on what you are trying to change. Colors are easy to find...especially if you have a list of them used in the game. Here is a list of colors used in Atari hardware...

00000000 00 Black

00010000 10 Gold

00100000 20 Orange

00110000 30 Red

01000000 40 Pink

01010000 50 Violet

01100000 60 Violet-blue

01110000 70 Blue

10000000 80 Light blue

10010000 90 Blue-green

10100000 A0 Aqua

10110000 B0 Green-blue

11000000 C0 Green

11010000 D0 Yellow-green

11100000 E0 Orange-green

11110000 F0 Orange

The table on the left shows the binary value for each color at it's darkest hue, and the next column lists the hexadecimal value. So if you are looking to change the color of something that normally shows up as red, look through the program with PCAE to find a hex value in the data areas that is 3X (X being the brightness value). It's rare to find a color value with the rightmost bit on (i.e. odd numbers)...since this bit has no effect on colors.

Scoring can also be very easy to find. It's a pain to try to convert a hex value into it's decimal equalivant. There is a 6502 shortcut around this problem...and it's the SED instruction. This tells the CPU to do the following arithmatic in decimal mode. 19+1=1A in hex...but if the SED instruction was used, it would be 19+1=20 (what we are all used to). Many programmers took advantage of this, and you might find the instruction used for scoring, levels, lives, or any other counter used in games. In hex, ADC #01 means to add one, while SBC #01 means to subtract one.

 

[ 10-16-2001: Message edited by: Nukey Shay ]

[Rhindle The Red]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Ze_ro:

I would guess that the coins are done as missiles, which would explain their square shape. Converting these into a sprite would not be an easy task. You'd have to basically re-write a huge part of the code to compensate for extra sprites, likely adding a lot of flicker. I think the square coins are good enough.

 

--Zero

---

 

Although I can't prove it, I think the 'wafers' (as they are called in the instructions) are generated as backgrounds. This belief comes from the strange way they move and the way they sort of grab colors from whatever is nearby, if they were a player/missile graphic, they'd usually have a single color. Also, there seems to be no way to cause them to flicker, although under proper circumstances all other sprites will. I first developed this theory when looking at the Space Invaders remake that uses backgrounds for the invaders. (I can't think of the name right now.) The way the invaders disappeared when shot reminded me of the 'wafers.'

 

Anyway, I looked for every square shape in the .txt file, trying to see if anything could be done about it. None of them were related to the 'wafer', so I put them all back the way they were and resigned myself to being unable to change it.

[Jess Ragan]

Thanks, guys! I'm gonna have a lot of fun with that graphic editing software...

Oh, by the way... Return of Mario Bros. seems to work fine on Z26, Rhindle. Just thought you might like to know. I played both Return of Mario Bros. and the original game designed by Atari and the turtles look oh so much better in your version... they're much more cartoony, while the ones in the Atari version are small, square, and have very little personality.

So, the coins in Mario Bros. for the 2600 are actually wafers, huh? I hope Mario's not thinking about eating them after they've tumbled through the sewers like that. Yuck!

 

JR

[Rhindle The Red]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Atari-Jess:

What I want to know is who did a half assed job and actually did the Atari 2600 mario bros graphics?

---

 

To be fair, in those days there weren't all the PC tools that we have now for checking the graphics of a 2600 game. As far as I know, every time you wanted to actually run your code you needed to dump it to an EPROM. Over the last weekend (when I finished the game) I literally went through about 15 to 20 different .bin files as I finalised the looks of the title screen, the Shellcreepers, and even a quick change to the Sidesteppers. This would have taken many more hours (if not days!) to do back when this game was made. And these were just the smallest of changes.

 

I give the original programmer all the credit in the world for getting the gameplay into this game. Without that, there'd be no point to fixing the graphics.

[Jess Ragan]

Well, Rhindle, you've inspired me to do my own game hacks. I finished work on the 2600 version of Galaxian last night... I'm hoping the editors of AtariAge will post the ROM soon. I can't put it on my site, due to restrictions on content over at Emulation World (you can't post commercial ROMs).

 

JR

[fsuinnc]

For those who might not have seen this there is a nice little article on changeing VCS graphics (It's actually pretty old but got me started).

http://www.gooddealgames.com/articles/ocgs.html

[Ze_ro]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Rhindle The Red:

Although I can't prove it, I think the 'wafers' (as they are called in the instructions) are generated as backgrounds. This belief comes from the strange way they move and the way they sort of grab colors from whatever is nearby

---

 

This is actually what makes me think it's done as a missile object. As far as I know, there are two sprite objects, and two missile objects... however, you only have two color registers for all four. Thus, Player 1 and Player 1's missile are always the same color, and same for Player 2 and their missile.

 

To actually get multiple colors in a sprite, you can change the color between scanlines (For anyone not following, this is why you can have horizontal color stripes but not vertical). If you let the "wafer" be on the same platform as you, it gets the same colors per scanline as Mario. If you could find the location of the colors it's using for the Mario sprite, it would be easy to test this (Make him all white or something, and see what happens to the wafer).

 

As for the flicker, I think Mario Bros uses the two sprites for everything other than wafers and background (eg, turtles, fireballs, Mario, etc). Missiles are probably only used for the coins. Since the missiles are independant of the sprites, you won't ever see the wafers flicker unless you somehow managed to get three of them onscreen at once (since there's only two missile graphics available), and I don't think that's possible (Even if you could get this to happen, I imagine one of existing two would simply vanish and be replaced by the third)

 

Sorry if this was a little heavy on technical details, but that's how my mind works

 

--Zero

[Rhindle The Red]

Okay, so how exactly do they get multiple characters on the screen? I just ran the game and got the following screens:

 

So what's what in that scenario? Do you mean that all five characters on the left and the four different characters on the right (plus an extra Slipice) are being handled by the two sprite limit?

 

Hoo-ha! So why does the game not allow any of the main enemies (Shellcreeprs, Sidesteppers, Fighterflies, Slipice) on the same level with another main enemy, but there can always be a wafer or a fireball (or both!) regardless of what else is there?

 

And what about the POW bar?

 

To quote the great Edward D. Wood, Jr.: "My mind's in a muddle..."