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[KNT-Zero]

Jesus christ.

I mean, its functional for an old PC platformer, but for a Mario game, it looks like a bad chinese pirate bootleg.

 

[MrCunningham]

Wow, that's awesome. It's not perfect, but this is pretty legendary stuff right here.


People have to remember that scrolling platformers didn't exist like this on PC-DOS before 1990. This demo was John Carmack showing that it could be done through a method that he pioneered called adaptive tile refresh, which allowed for the game to only update what was needed and ignore the rest. This was an accomplishment in EGA. This game lead to Commander Keen, and Commander Keen started the 2D platformer trend on DOS in the 1990's.

 

[Teletraan1]

Looking at those jump physics is painful.

I eagerly await your demo with a better approximation to show up in 2035.

 

[NinjamicWZ]

Very cool to see... hell, just to know about.

 

[Ingueferroque]

Such a fascinating era. This build needs to be in a museum.

PC Gaf: He's using a Mac. How does that mac you feel?

ID had long been a champion of OpenGL, and Q3Test came out first for Mac.

 

[MoosiferX]

How fascinating! Chances are that if Nintendo hadn't rejected this, I would've experienced Super Mario Bros. 3 on a PC rather than the NES. My parents never purchased me a Nintendo (we had an Atari and then strictly PCs) and DOS gaming was what I grew up with, especially games like Commander Keen. Pretty cool stuff!

 

[KennyL]

Graphic done by Tom Hall.

https://youtu.be/hlVrFAdBolM

Skip to 15:20

 

[ramparter]

Lol why do people think the tech demo was how the game was going to be on PC? It was to show that they could do the complex side-scrolling games like Mario, and they didnt even need the source code.

Had Nintendo said yes, they would have been allowed to use the code to port the game.

Some of you have less foresight than Nintendo did back then.

Its easier to jump to conclusions than actually think about something.

 

[ghostjoke]

I swear Romero has some giant vault of early 90s nostalgia. I wonder how different things would be if Nintendo hadn't of rejected it.

 

[IdreamofHIME]

Makes Little Big Planets jumping look good.

 

[Kosma]

Bet he is enjoying many Hookers, I know i would

Although I found a great place to get them for cheap here too now

 

[MrCunningham]

There was this moment when Halo was first being shown off as a Mac exclusive and John Carmack couldn't stop talking about Mac gaming that it almost seemed like it would become a thing. So funny to think back on now.

John Romero actually got his start by making games for the Apple II. He was making Apple II games from like 1982 to about 1988.

 

[CharminUltra]

This is COOL! and YIKES! all at the same time.

 

[PSqueak]

Their mario sprite is adorably rotound~

 

[Adaren]

 

[I speel my dreenk]

It's super impressive as a tech demo, and a really interesting piece of gaming history, but Nintendo was right to say no to it for all kinds of reasons. It's still a far sight better than the PC-8801 version of Super Mario Bros, which was officially licensed by Nintendo. That does an amazing job of pointing out how limiting the lack of smooth scrolling was for games on various PCs.

This is horrifyingly amazing, and needs to be the next tile set in Mario Maker.

 

[The Orz]

It's a tech demo made in a few days pushing tech beyond the understood limits.

Yeah, some of the comments in this thread baffle me. Though I suppose said comments are being made by users who aren't old enough to remember or even know what platforming was like on PCs back in late 80s, early 90s (HINT: pretty terrible).

This demo is very, very impressive. Honestly it looks better than Commander Keen (I played the hell out of those games).

 

[VariantX]

Those floaty jumps. Nintendo did well to reject this.

Of course they weren't going to get the physics right. This is more about proving it could be done. Naturally they probably would have been given some access to code used for nes mario 3 if Nintendo approved the demo.

 

[Ziffles]

Gawd why couldn't they just like load an emulator, which were most definitely plentiful in 1990, and rip the sprites or something sheesh get with it Carmack

(Very impressive, but not surprising of course considering Carmack's wizardry)

 

[Ishida]

The girl is even creepier.

 

[Reversed]

Mario's eyes looks like Flurry's

The eyes are the least concern, though, and I'm talking about that irritating PC speaker music.

 

[LPride]

I swear Romero has some giant vault of early 90s nostalgia. I wonder how different things would be if Nintendo hadn't of rejected it.

It's 2015 and George W. Bush is still president. John Romero and Gunpei Yokoi are having dinner together in world trade center building 7

 

[Piston Hyundai]

I'll just assume anybody shitting on this just doesn't realize how groundbreaking it is.

 

[OmegaFax]

It'd be hilarious if this was eventually made into an actual game as a Super Mario Maker costume.

 

[TI82]

I'll just assume anybody shitting on this just doesn't realize how groundbreaking it is.

People are shitting on this? what's wrong with them lol

 

[dark10x]

Love seeing this. Everything was just drawn from looking at the screen, right? So insanely cool.

I'll just assume anybody shitting on this just doesn't realize how groundbreaking it is.

It cannot possibly be anything else.

People seem to forget that, during that time period, the PC platform was not suited for this type of thing. Scrolling at 60fps on an IBM PC was unheard of. I don't think this was actually 60fps, but it was still far smoother than anything else at the time. It basically showed the world that proper scrolling could be done on the platform.

 

[WeskerXXI]

That is awesome, even moreso because I just read Masters of Doom for the first time this summer. Never thought we would see this prototype, I wonder if Romero could have the original "Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement" demo too.

Everybody who hasn't, read Masters of Doom. Great, great book, can't recommend it enough

 

[PSqueak]

I'll just assume anybody shitting on this just doesn't realize how groundbreaking it is.

They're judging it as a mario product, and not as a break thru in computer gaming side scrolling technology.

They just see a shitty mario 3 port, rather than the precursor to the excellent Commander Keen series.

 

[Raist]

Why is it so vastly different than the real deal? Was this just a PC re-imagining or something?

They did that from scratch in a day or something. Not a port.

 

[AcademicSaucer]

That jump

 

[Pathfinder]

They were better off going with Commander Keen.

 

[Serra]

Damn, thats awesome. Carmack is a god.

 

[jahepi]

It would be extraordinary if they release the source code such as wolfestein 3D.

 

[RowdyReverb]

This is really cool! I'm almost through Masters of Doom and I looked for footage of this demo a while ago to no avail. Perfect timing for me

 

[RichiRamjag]

Lol why do people think the tech demo was how the game was going to be on PC? It was to show that they could do the complex side-scrolling games like Mario, and they didnt even need the source code.

Had Nintendo said yes, they would have been allowed to use the code to port the game.

Some of you have less foresight than Nintendo did back then.

It was a great choice for the time tbh.

 

[zero86r]

Does he live in Galway? My home town, cool.

He has been over here quite a few times the past while checking out Pulse college and stuff, I've yet to spot him out and about though!

 

[PetriP-TNT]

Pretty awesome to see something like this!

 

[virtualS]

Just to show how far ahead Nintendo can be from other developers on gameplay.

You did good Nintendo

Pretty sure this was just a tech demo to show Nintendo that Mario 3 visuals were possible on PCs at the time and to beg for the lucrative rights to port their games. Gameplay and sound would obviously be corrected.

 

[Piers]

Rather impressive otherwise, I'd say.

 

[Seven4sses]

Looks cool for a demo, but Mario looks like he came out of a Spy Vs. Spy video.

 

[Dreamwriter]

This is totally amazing that they managed to pull this off. Something to remember: in that era, there were NO 2D sidescrolling games on PC. PC wasn't really a gaming machine, it wasn't designed for scrolling, most developers thought it wasn't possible to do it smoothly, if at all. If any scrolling was involved, it was generally in herky-jerky chunks. This demo not only has perfectly smooth scrolling, but large sprites and lots of animations. It's a great proof of concept, and had Nintendo approved of it, I'm sure they would have tweaked the physics and Mario's looks and everything to better match the original game (within the PC limitations of course).

 

[Tacitus_]

Bow before the altar of Carmack

Adaptive Tile Refresh is a computer graphics technique for sidescrolling games, invented by id Software's John Carmack to compensate for the poor graphics performance of PCs in the early 1990s. Its principal innovation was a novel use of several EGA hardware features to perform the scrolling in hardware. The technique is named for its other aspect, the tracking of moved graphical elements in order to minimize the amount of redrawing required in every frame. Together, the combination saves the processing time that would have been required for redrawing the entire screen.[1]

Because CGA (the previous generation of PC graphics hardware) lacked features for scrolling in hardware, scrolling would previously have had to be done in software, by redrawing the entire screen for every frame – a task which PCs of the time lacked the performance to carry out. Adaptive tile refresh minimized the computing power required for sidescrolling games to within the reach of available hardware, and thus made such games possible on the PC for the first time.

The new game was a recreation of the first level of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. 3, intended as a realistic test bed for the adaptive tile refresh concept, and was developed within a week.

 

[AtomicShroom]

Wow at all the people in this thread expecting a finished product for a technical proof-of-concept demo created in record time without having the original source material available. smh...

 

[SigSig]

smh at people ripping on this.
This tech demo probably is a bigger achievement than the creation of the original Mario Bros 3.

 

[SRTtoZ]

Oh my god, Mario's eyes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUuH4TEmgLo

 

[radios shipping overview]

This is awesome. I can see and hear the origins of Commander Keen all over this, stylistically. Keen itself was mindblowing on the PC back then. It was so great to finally get a platformer that looked and sounded (nearly) as impressive as SMB3 was back then.

 

[Lupin the Third]

smh at people ripping on this.
This tech demo probably is a bigger achievement than the creation of the original Mario Bros 3.

If DOS PCs of 1990 couldn't easily pull off SMB3 gameplay and graphics I would say the original, running on a-bit-old-even-by-1983-standards CPUs with only an extra memory manager on each cart, was indeed a feat.

 

[Lupin the Third]

I know he shouldnt had said it but all these athletes say worse shit. Put a mic on them while playing uncensored. The beloved Tom Brady is one of the worst offenders.

Wrong thread?

 

[FSLink]

Wow at all the people in this thread expecting a finished product for a technical proof-of-concept demo created in record time without having the original source material available. smh...

Seriously, shame on you guys.

This is really impressive, even moreso after rewatching the terrible Hudson Soft version of SMB1 lmao

 

[Pixels]

Wow at all the people in this thread expecting a finished product for a technical proof-of-concept demo created in record time without having the original source material available. smh...

People need to realize it's a tech demo.