[doomlaser]

I made this a few years ago. It's pretty much all of Super Mario Bros. in one image: https://i.imgur.com/g6JQ2WV.png / https://twitter.com/Doomlaser/status/1004802864433147904

I want to do more of these and experiment with training generative neural nets on that kind of thing when I get the chance.

[godot]

As a kid in the early 1990s I always thought 8-1 was unusually long and I always seem to get down to the 99s warning music before I can finish the level, even running at full speed. This visualization really shows clearly how much longer that level is compared to the rest.

[T-hawk]

Besides the physical length, 8-1 also starts you with 300 ticks on the timer rather than the usual 400.

[oh_sigh]

Great visualization, thanks for these! On a side note, I find it funny that this image takes 16x more space than the actual game of super mario.

[ekianjo]

The game assets reuse the same sprites all the time, so it's going to be much smaller than a representation of all of its level in bitmap.

[enriquto]

but a good image compression algorithm could find these repeated patterns and store them only once. If anything, I would expect that this image compressed by a modern algorithm would be much smaller than the original game.

[scrollaway]

It really can't, not in a way that would allow the image format to be generic enough. Remember that PNG is used for trillions of images, whereas SMB has the luxury of only caring about a limited set of colors, and of having a Sprite engine available in the console itself to help optimize it all.

You're looking at a lot of procedural data where for example the patterns behind the sprites can change without having to create a new sprite. Where the palettes were separate from the image data so they could look different without having to use double, triple the storage. These things can't be picked up on by png, it's not a smart enough format to be able to arbitrarily detect all repeated patterns of varying sizes and turn them into what amounts to a procedural level script.

I can't find a good exhaustive sprite sheet of SMB (this is the best I can find, but it contains a ton of repeats: https://www.mariouniverse.com/sprites-nes-smb/). I'd love a visualization of just how tiny SMB is in terms of what's stored in it.

[T-hawk]

A good image compression algorithm could. PNG just isn't smart enough for this purpose. One could argue that the NES code and PPU data itself constitute a very efficient compression scheme for compliant images, albeit human-crafted rather than algorithmic. IOW, it's unlikely any automatic compression scheme will outperform simply running the SMB program.

[doomlaser]

PNG has a paletted mode as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics#Pixe...

[ifoundthetao]

I also want you to do that. Then I want you to do an incredibly in-depth video series walking through how you did the whole thing.

[bproven]

You sure this wasnt' in Nintendo Power back in '89? ;) I remember these types of visualizations to help walk through / beat the old NES games - especially Metroid!

[TAForObvReasons]

Do you have a similar diagram for the Japanese SMB2 ("lost levels") ?

[mohn]

The second column here [1] has links to individual level PNGs. It's not the whole game in a single image, though. I'm surprised to see that "VGMaps.com: The Video Game Atlas" hasn't been mentioned yet in this thread.

[1] http://www.vgmaps.com/Atlas/NES/index.htm#SuperMarioBros2J

[T-hawk]

Nitpick: 3-1 and 6-2 have cloud areas and 4-2 has several pipe areas that aren't shown.