Super Mario Bros. Pico-8
This is a recreation of the original Super Mario Bros, crammed into under 24KB of a Pico-8 cartridge (spritesheet memory is unused). The code is all new and not ported from the original game, so things work differently, but I tried to make it feel similar.
It includes all original levels, the minus world, and the second quest. Due to the token limit and limited likelihood of use, the alternating 2-player mode has been replaced with just playing as Mario or Luigi. Hope you enjoy playing!
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Controls:
L/R--------------Move/Select world on title screen
X/V--------------Run/Shoot Fireball
Z/C--------------Jump/Start
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Special thanks to:
- Josiah Winslow for composing the music and many of the sound effects (https://winslowjosiah.itch.io/)
- Zep for his PX9 compression system
- Thisismypassword for the Shrinko-8 minifier (https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?uid=29645#m)
- Nick N. Bruns of NESmaps.com for documenting level maps
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Comments
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Any chance we could get an exe version :D I'd love to have this for my console
Hmm, that's not something I'm familiar with. I googled it and there seem to be tutorials about doing that, how is a .exe different from having the .p8.png file?
I have a homemade pico console and I have an autoboot script to auto play games with and exe file. I have a script as well that runs p8 and p8.png files but it had some issues with multicarts so I just kept the exe file ones. If it's too much by all means I understand, I have no idea on how the process works. The only thing I saw was to export it as a .bin file. But I know Nerdy Teachers and a few others have done it so they could be of some help.
But overall all this rambling just to say I'd love to put this on a physical SD card to play on my console :D
Well, I'll look into converting it. It's right at the token and compressed size limits, so hopefully that doesn't present any issues.
I'll be praying and waiting :D
Nice, you actually managed to port the whole game! (Considering Pico-8 is weaker than the nes... I really wonder how did you managed to do this..)
Thanks 🙂,
I saw your walkthrough, glad to see no new game-breaking bugs popped up.
To answer your question, I had to develop systems and techniques to cram a lot of information and logic into a tiny space, since despite much being faster than an NES, Pico-8's game carts can only be a tiny 32 kilobytes, while many NES games were hundreds of kilobytes. If you look at the other games I've posted on Itch, you'll see they're all 1KB or less. That's been due to a combination of finding optimization an interesting challenge, and also that severe size constraints really help to limit scope. For this project in particular, I used a system I built that greatly compresses level maps by storing them as placeable objects instead of individual tiles. If you're interested, you can check it out here: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=42848
I am planning to work on more games that are bigger than a kilobyte, I'm actually currently working on a Pico-8 version of the original Mega Man. Like SMB, it's helping me learn a lot. I think I can get it to fit in a Pico-8 cart without significant cuts, though it'll take a while to finish.
It seems to work flawlessly, the couple of levels that I played.
Thanks, I've had some playtesters and put out a few updates. There might be some small bugs yet, but the major issues seem to have been fixed.
Awesome Pico-8 version. And also happy 40th anniversary Super Mario Bros.
Thank you,🙂
It was nearly finished in early '24, but I wasn't sure about releasing for a while. I guess the timing was appropriate.