Super Mario Bros. Special (PC-88 Paradise) Hudson's weird version of SMB (not for NES, GB, or SNES)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 มิ.ย. 2024
- In this episode of PC-88 Paradise I play another one of the Nintendo games released on PC-88 by Hudson Soft. "Mario Bros. Special".
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00:00 intro
01:05 packaging
02:17 Let's start the game!
05:41 stage highlights
10:31 ending and credits
11:20 ports and hacks
13:05 wrap-up - เกม
![[TAS] NES Super Mario Bros. 3 "arbitrary code execution" by Lord_Tom in 08:16.23](/img/n.gif)
Oh man, this game was probably many anglophones first and only exposure to the PC88, and to say it doesn't make a good first impression is an understatement! So I really despise this game, more than I would for some other typical crappy PC action game, just for the negative image it tends to cause the PC88 in the west.
About the colors, I'm pretty sure you're right about them limiting it to 4 colors to speed up the rendering. The PC88 uses three bitplanes, one for each of the RGB primaries, which layer on top of each other to form 8 possible colors. Here it looks like they're using only the Red and Blue planes, skipping Green entirely. This technique was pretty common back in the V1 era before the MkIISR, when the PC88 was considered a fairly slow machine, used by games like Alphos, Thunder Force, and the original Dragon Slayer. Even in V2 mode, Thexder was able to achieve its impressive speed by greatly limiting usage of the green bitplane.
One interesting thing about even the first PC88s is that they let you remap the 8 logical colors to the 8 RGB outputs. So games like Dragon Slayer were really drawing the scrolling background in just *one* bitplane. Which is why it's at least not unbearably slow.
Similarly with SMB special, color 0 is blue instead of black on the overworld stages, letting them do XOR rendering on top of it without glitches. I have a feeling they were over frequently switching between planes when rendering the screen which could explain why the screen drawing is so painfully slow even for original PC88... but that's just a guess.
The 35th anniversary fan patch for the NES is the best way to experience the PC-88 version, in my opinion. In a sea of Super Mario Bros. hacks, this one deserved even an official Nintendo blessing.
It is actually one of my favorite versions of the Mario 1 engine. Harder than SMB1, but easier than The Lost Levels, with a lot of extra imagination thrown in.
Agreed because the level design is so cool. It’s just slightly off in a great way
Yeah as someone who has been looking at Romhacks for over 20 years and seeing what had been achieved in others like Kamikaze Mario 3 I was surprised no one made a perfect port... This release made me realize just what the NES could do, hopefully some of the other Special series gets some nes reimaginging or that Donkey Kong 3 Sequel.
@@hdofuwhat donkey kong 3 sequel??
@@ultraspinalki11 Donkey Kong 3: Dai Gyakushū
The use of the Smb Super Show in this was very good 💯
8:13 The fact that water stages are a welcome break from the platforming stages says everything that needs to be said about this version of the game :(
I love brightly-colored disks and carts.
So glad this channel exists, it is very hard for us monolinguists to get good info on the pc-88 and 98 computers. Thanks for being our stalwart guide :D
When I played this a few weeks ago I couldn't get past 2-1 even though I played for three hours. I didn't find out about the easy of 1-up bouncing, though.
This is like if Super Mario Bros. was an Action 52 game.
🤣🤣 Truth
And here I thought that zoomed in port on the GBC was a strange way to play this game.
at least that scrolls
The most official bootleg of SMB
One of the more famous PC88 exclusives for obvious reasons, but I had no idea they went through the hassle of producing yellow floppy disks. Pretty cool attention to detail.
Also, I am sure the game’s many obvious flaws are tied to how much time the devs were given to develop the game, rather than how much they cared. These issues all scream "rushed release". I suspect the deal with Nintendo was about to end and they had to get it done ASAP.
But the Sharp X1 version actually plays a lot better that the PC-88 version (even when the soft scroll is actually a more reminiscence of the first The Legend of Zelda).
Amazing this got past Nintendo's quality control, yet Id's MS-DOS pitch which had smooth scrolling was rejected.
Yeah, it's unfair, but Hudson was given special treatment. They had a close relationship with Nintendo at the time, as one of the first ever licensed developers on the Famicom. Shame Hudson didn't spend more time and effort to make this one better.
True, but this one wasn't a straight port, which makes it much more interesting. The unique level design and different enemies and powerups make it a compelling oddity.
I'd believe this guy, he has a trustworthy face
Well... they weren't Japanese. It's weird to be discussing this in reverse from the norm, but... yeah, Japan's Japanese supremacy has always been pretty intense and was even worse over 30 years ago. They're one of the countries that imported foreign beliefs about racial supremacy, but put themselves at the top of the hierarchy instead.
@@PosthumanHeresy no, the Japanese pretty much always believed themselves to be superior to other people. They didn't need foreigners for that
The weird graphics overlap you are seeing was a common technique - drawing with XOR. The idea is you can draw once, then draw the exact same sprite in the same place again, and it will revert to the background. This saves memory and arguably a little CPU time (since you don't have to remember what the background looked like before the sprite).
I laughed way harder than a man my age should have when I heard those sound effects you used at 0:53 when the screens opened. Good job, 10/10 video.
Thank you for sharing the insides of this game. A lot of people that have talked about it they just mention it as an oddity but never the technological aspects of it.
I love your content. Very obscure games for us in Canada.
So glad I found your channel it’s always interesting to find new games of classic ones that I never heard of . Thanks .
Do you think the floppy is yellow to emulate the Famicom Disk System floppy or is it just a coincidence?
I thought it was because the SMB Famicom cart was yellow.
The level design is really cool though. There’s a sort of uncanny valley quality to it that makes it very fun
This game does not play the best with the very weird way the screen scrolls, but the level design isn't that bad, and the usage of power ups from like donkey kong and stuff are really neat.
I think the level design is great. Someone made a SMB rom hack that ports all the levels and new items and it’s awesome
Imagine all the kids raised on this version of super Mario Bros
Funny how it's still Super Mario Bros even though Luigi is absent.. I like the idea of using the Donkey Kong enemies and that wing power up was very forward thinking.. almost makes me wonder if it inspired the Raccoon Suit from SMB3.
Congraturations on another interesting video, Super Basement Bros Special
Those nintendo games on the pc88 are a must have collectoon for both mario & nintendo fans😁
This is like something from an alternate universe where Miyamoto turned out to be a terrible game designer.
Always interesting seeing a port of this game. You don’t realize how solid the game play really is until you play a technically inferior version. Still neat to see!😊
It's odd, for all the new things they added and tweaked, they certainly wanted their version to stand out. But they couldn't have fixed the problems, so I wonder if they ran out of time working on it.
Programming aside, the complete lack of scrolling wouldn't have been an issue if the levels had been designed to always give you a little breathing room around the scroll point instead of forcing you to make blind jumps (as in, a sequence of self-contained one-screen challenges rather than a big level that's broken up at completely random points).
I've played the Gameboy port of SMB1, and while it has smooth scrolling, it's ALSO ridiculously hard because of having a smaller screen but not shrinking the graphics to match, so you constantly have less time to react to stuff and often have to do blind jumps. I don't even want to imagine how bad Special feels to play...
You're talking about the GameBoy Color version. If you compare it to the very popular black-and-white Super Mario Land games for GameBoy, those games did make Mario much smaller like you said. But the one you're talking about focused on making it look exactly like the original, rather than making it as playable as possible.
I can't imagine it was easy for Hudson to get their own version of Super Mario Bros to work on these now old computer systems.
Still, you have to admit the new additions are neat and the somewhat unique levels are the best thing about this. At least we now have 35th Anniversary to do the levels justice.
Been waiting for this one ever since the Mario Bros Special one. And watching GTV Japan talk about SMB Special. Also, that The Wizard opening was a great touch. :p
this game in particular is the game that got me interested in "official bootleg" games about 8ish years ago. it is bananas just how many games have these kind of ports and i am here for it!
Actually, the hammer and wings powerups, as well as the icicles and new enemies are nice, but you're right: the lack of scrolling really kills it more then anything else.
The thing that find funny about Mario Bros Special is that it Technically is in a weird way, The "Real" Sequel to smb1 since it came out before the other two.
and on top of that
had new stuff like enemies and items.
It's also uncanny that this is the first game that features any kind of flight power up, way before smb3.
Definitely worth playing with either the NES rom hack or The SMBC and Mari0 mappacks
other than that
the original version(s) are kinda like a novelty.
I just now realized I have never seen that particular kind of floppy disc in any other color before.
God, these colours are eye-searing, it's Resident Evil 5 all over again
LOL listening to the Super Mario Bros. theme on super slow speed sounds like danzón (a typical dance from Cuba and Mexico)
This series brings immense joy. Always knew of the PC-88 but knew nothing of substance about it. Keep it coming!
What a truly weird port of SMB. Thank you for sharing it with us!
Heck yeah I was waiting for you to get to this port.
It's quite sad that this is the most famous PC88 game outside Japan. Also finally a good review that doesn't treat emulation as gospel, all reviews I've seen complain about "a black screen and being dumped into the next screen" while this isn't the case as the screen is build up. It's certainly not as good as X1 version let alone real scrolling but it isn't the case that you just have a black screen on real hardware.
Yeah actually getting to see these PC88 and PC98 games ran on real hardware with correct performance is a huge credit to this channel.
The X1 version actually does have a huge disadvantage when comparing only real hardware. When playing on a real X1 it is considerably slower than the PC-88 version. Only when emulating at speeds impossible on real X1 hardware does it become the clearly better version as everyone says. Still, I think the graphical improvements they made in that version were probably the right choice... even sacrificing speed.
I don't need to express my joy of your content at this point... grabbed a snack and drink... Let's Go..!
Very cool video! I didn’t even know about this.
Another excellent vid. The Jeff Gerstmann full playthrough of this game is also a delightful bit of madness.
Jeff's face when it looked like the game crashed on him lives rent free in my head.
May the dithering be with you. Omg Dankey Kang hammer and barrels (faints)
I can't help but wonder how Japan felt about this game. In the English speaking world, when discussing PC-88 this is one of the games that always gets brought up but I suspect Japanese PC-88 gamers don't hold it in nearly as high esteem. It's much more interesting as trivia than to actually play.
I’m curious as well
This would be a really cool remaster Nintendo could make. I love the idea of using enemies and power ups from donkeykong and mario bros.
8:15 Those inverse-color cheep-cheeps are pretty creepy looking.
Sometimes Mario is weird and swims in the sky
New Sub!: Dryden, Michigan, US
Killer Vid! Keep 'em Commin'!
6:39 The NES original has a similar bug, by the way
Great episode. Hope to see the other nintendo licensed games in the future.
That movie edit was hilarious lol
My only experience with this was playing these levels in Super Mario Bros Crossover 10 years ago or so. Seems like that was much more enjoyable than the actual game would have been
I saw DGR Dave play this not too long ago. I even asked in chat if he had the proper settings for this when he played cause it seemed off. Based on your video, I’m assuming he didn’t read that note taped into your manual.😂
Here's the translation for the back of the box lol:
The whole of Japan is in a fuss!! That Super Mario has become PC software. From children to grandparents, people all over Japan are fascinated by Super Mario. Peach The older brother who thought he was the ideal lover. Now peach has become everyone's watchword. mario's path
um, various
And the world that unfolds one after another, with many hidden characters. You can now experience the wonders of Super Mario, a fantastic adventure, on your computer.
I love how the Koopas have bloodshot eyes
13:44 that castle looks pretty cool
Crazy when you think of how protective Nintendo is of Mario now days what trash he had been in
Butch Mario and the Luigi Kid was one of the best episodes
Indeed. If I remember correctly it was the first episode of the show me and my brothers saw and recorded on our VCR. We have been quoting it for decades. Using a bunch of clips from just that one episode worked great for this video.
I would assume this came before ID asked to port SMB3, so maybe this is a contributary factor to big N saying no to other ports.
that version of the game is a free 1-way ticket to eye problems. geez.
Great video , subbed
Oh boy I didn't know Nintendo and Hudson soft had make that games for PC-88.
These sounds like a good idea until you see these games are really downgrades from the NES versions, you must be a real skilled gamer if you managed to clear this super Mario Bros version without scrolling the screen. 🎉
The weird transparency effect must be XOR sprites, right? The background renders so slowly they must not want to redraw it every frame and XOR sprites can be drawn a second time to undo it. But that means kind of "encoding" the background in the rendered sprite so you get this dodgy transparency effect.
the game looks like hell trough and trough.
Jeff Gerstmann is still a threat.
I _love_ Super Mario Bros. Special. [pause] It’s so bad.
This probably helped sell a lot more Nintendos😂
0:51 I love the usage of “special” from Michael Beard when he announced Fatal Fury Special; but it was used in Super Mario Bros. Special instead-nice touch.
Anecdotally, the game actually made it in the Top 10 Worst Mario Games video I worked on a few years ago as #10. Someone actually did make a ROM hack of it for the Nintendo using the original Super Mario Bros. a base. I recommend that over the PC-88 iteration.
This game does look really rough indeed but it's such an interesting curiosity, the fact that the only official PC port of SMB was this does talk about how Hudson had special treatment back then. To some extent I wonder if Nintendo wasn't kinda glad that this port came up as janky as it was, it was probably good publicity for the Famicom original, just winning by default.
I don't know much about how capable the PC-88 actually was, specially early models, but I'm sure that even with the restrictions of no real scrolling and only 4 colors this could have played and looked better. I wonder if that SMB Special hack for the NES can be further hacked to implement the 4 colors sprites, just for authenticity sake.
Great video, info about these games is fairly scarce for those of us that don't speak Japanese, so this is very much appreciated :)
I kept skipping over this video thinking TH-cam was suggesting the first Mario Bros special haha !
Interesting gaming history
He’s got an early Mario maker looking suit on top .
i'll be defending this game til the day i die. fell in love with it as a kid back when someone in the west did a "let's play" back in 2009, haven't let go since. it controls bad. it looks bad. i love it, warts and all. the level design really is the strong point of the game and falls in with where the mario series was pre-smb3 (nintendo seemed to throw away a lot of the donkey kong/mario bros. elements after imo). the nes hack is your best bet and i was excited when it was released. and i have played both the x1 and pc88 versions! i wish emulators properly emulated the pc88's screen drawing, i find it neat.
i will say that i greatly appreciate this video for being a nuanced and fair review of the game, instead of being hysterical or exaggerated.
Very interesting gaming info!
Great Stuff!
Maybe it's a conspiracy theory, but I wouldn't be surprised if the idea with SMB Special was to sell more Famicoms.
Doubt it, Famicom was already so successful.
I don't think so, Nintendo just had a good working relationship with Hudson and weren't threatened by computer sales.
Plus they were still licensing their arcade games (eg Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Mario Bros, Popeye) to computers and even some other consoles not that long before this.
Super Basement Bros Special
I have heard of this one! some years ago found a massive archive of X1 stuff so that I think was the first time I got to try this one .... (though I did see the ROMhack done for the NES version.) yeah overall it was still kinda rough. I did like some of the ideas they tried like introducing more of the OG mario bros. elements in the game not already there from the Famicom/NES original.
My dude sounds like Nerrel without coffee.
Seeing all of the additional enemies from every Mario game prior to this one (which, admittedly, wasn't a lot of games) in one place really makes this feel like a celebration of Mario as a character, a mere five years after his first appearance, and makes the fact the end-result just... doesn't look very good or very fun to play all the more upsetting.
To be fair, the NES mario had a similar glitch in regards to lives. More than 10 lives and it would start displaying graphical garbage, and if you hit too many it would treat it as having 0 lives.
The Hudson bee 🐝 group 😅
1:20 That's probably from the 1986 Super Mario Bros. anime movie
Ahh the memory rollback strikes again, this technically means you can have 255 lives.
.
.
I really hope you do a video on that really weird Donkey Kong 3 port/sequel.
I would love to! I don't think I've ever seen the game for sale in the wild. Definitely want to find one and give it the "proper PC-88 Paradise treatment".
Would love to see that too.
@@BasementBrothersdo you ever show pirated games? Or is it possible to emulate on pc?
@cosettapessa6417 I like to have the original disk and packaging in my collection before I really "play" a game. Just the way I am as a collector. Some viewers might not care but I also like to be able to show the game in my own hands in my videos and play them on real hardware. Everyone is free to play as they choose though!
@@BasementBrothers ok
Appreciate the effort as I know how anything with Mario on it sellers are like "Give me lots of money.", like only way later has Super Mario World been priced more logically in NA, as there are literally millions of those carts.😉
3:41 Basically the same thing happens in ZX Spectrum games called "attribute clash", coders always tend to favor the background attributes rather than the character overlapping it for some reason. I think the idea is it hides the tile block outer edges(no color-key transparency) better but I just find that makes the characters blend into the background rather than pop out visually.
4:20 You say that but poor scrolling is often worse than none at all.😐 Largely the implementation is poor, like the screen should update near instantly. See any ZX Spectrum games for much better page-flipping engines.
To me the controls are the biggest betrayal since that could have been the one saving grace of this edition. So often for all PC clones and ports of arcade/console games they failed to capture the feel of any of those games Egs. DOS-Mega Man, DOS-Street Fighter 2.😬
That game is pretty messed up, but I think it's worth playing it
13:52 The Famicom used a 6502 at 1,79mhz, the clone Z80 at 4mhz of the PC88 is just better. It's true that the Famicom has the PPU doing the heavy lift in the graphics department, but the PC88 has enough cpu muscle and ram to not only to match the colours well enough but also having basic scrolling like Valis, even for the most basic configuration of the PC88. This looks barely better than a ZX Spectrum game while this machine is capable of much more, it's baffling.
Again, back then in the mid 80's it's not like Nintendo had the same standards that they would have 5 years later. The Nintendo post Super Mario 3 is where things started to get it like nowadays with a firm grip on its IPs.
So glad that NES romhack exists. The original PC-88 version is just dreadful.
I wonder if maybe it was released before they were done with it.
Oh, this is special.
The original Super Mario Bros also wouldn't display lives properly after 9. If I remember correctly it would show junk graphics like something that looks like a crown at 10. For a long time SMB was the only game I owned so I would regularly amass lives on a warpless playthrough.
I noticed in the manual you flashed for a moment it shows the enemies from the original and none of the new ones. Do all the original enemies appear in the game?
The new power ups are funny. I can imagine some Japanese kid telling his schoolmates he got the hammer in SMB and nobody believing them.
Yeah, that's right. I kind of forgot about that. The original SMB replaces the 10's digit in the count to weird symbols and letters. That was also weird but different from hexadecimal. Still, the one-up trick is just so easy to do in SMB Special that I find it really weird that they didn't bother to fix the lives display. I did the trick by accident after playing the game for just a few minutes.
Yes, I believe all original SMB enemies appear in the game. The manual doesn't show any of the new enemies or power ups as they wanted to keep them a secret. The end credits lists them and says "Try to find them all!" So I guess they were supposed to be like easter eggs, and motivation for multiple playthroughs.
The reasons the sprites look weird on top of stuff is because they use XOR rendering for performance reasons, where it's:
bg = bg ^ fg
While proper overlapping would be:
bg = bg & (~mask) | fg
So fewer operations especially if the mask is the NOR of both bitplanes.
I think the game is so slow and didn't bother trying scrolling because they never developed with SR II machines in mind, which were only first released shortly before the game was. Same with eg Dragon Slayer.
The original PC8801s in V1 mode and "memory wait" were really slow. Just mapping a framebuffer bitplane into the Z80 address space dramatically slowed down *every* memory access whether they went to the framebuffer or not. So you really did not want to draw a lot to the screen.
The X1 version of this game did a lot better in part because the background characters were drawn with the text layer which used a programmable color generator with 8 color tiles.
The XOR rendering explanation sounds like the correct reason. Thanks!
You're not quite right about what machines this game was targeted for though. It says right on the cover that the lowest machine this will run on is the mkIISR, and that the game WILL NOT run on the original PC-8801 or the 8801mkII. Dragon Slayer, indeed was made to run on earlier machines and in V1 mode. But that game is from late 1984. SMB Special is from 1986, and by that time the mkIISR had already been out since January of the previous year. It is weird that a game intended for mkIISR released at this time didn't take advantage of the V2 mode, but I guess they did so for performance reasons.
But yeah, you seem really knowledgeable about the PC88 and X1 so thanks for your comment!
@BasementBrothers It's just speculation on my part, but it's very strange that a game designed with the SR II in mind wouldn't work in V2 mode and use the much faster GVRAM access times and ALUs for vastly improved rendering speed. Have you seen any other SR II games require V1H mode?
Maybe they were reusing code from their older pre-SR II games that didn't like V2 mode.
But all this plus requiring SR II is also pretty odd. Maybe they wanted guaranteed SSG sound?
Agreed completely! It is weird for a game from this time to not target V2 mode. But I guess they did it for performance reasons? Like the the other commenter said, they just used the red and blue planes and skipped green to make everything run faster. Then it didn't really matter whether it ran in V2 or V1. It didn't need the capabilities of V2 I guess.
Let's see a wall jump on SMB Special!
Disclaimer: I can't even do a wall jump on regular SMB1 except once in a while when I'm falling into a pit; occasionally I get the clutch "catch" on the side of the pit.
Wow, you actually have a real copy of the game! I've played plenty of SMB Special and know a fair bit about it, but it was of course just ROMs on emulators, not actual physical copies. That's cool. But yeah this version of the game is pretty awful, the SharpX1 version while not spectacular by any means is VASTLY superior to this in nearly every way except the music being too fast (if you play it on 8Mhz so the gameplay runs at the proper speed). Though now there's also that SMB1 romhack that accurately recreates this game anyway so for most people it's probably best to play that if they're interested (there's also a remake I found a few years ago for SMBX 1.4.4 that was quite good but given SMBX 1.4.4 isn't an official version of SMBX and I'm pretty sure often contains viruses or something I wouldn't really recommend seeking that out anymore unless you really know what you're doing. The guy who did the remake does have a TH-cam channel though with a trailer in case anyone's curious).
The Hudson bee gives you over 8000 points?
I really wastedy life 😢
Question about those Romhacks... do they include all the new enemies and powerups? I've heard that they don't and just replace them with normal Mario enemies.
It feels like it was intended to be an entry level game, like the original. The priority was likely on getting it to run at all on any and all pc 98's. We've all had a moment when we wanted or bought a game only to find our hardware wasn't up to snuff. This was for those people
That's a good guess, but that's actually not how the PC-88 series works. There were only 6 different existing models of PC-88 at the time, and they weren't very upgrade-able. You couldn't do things like replace the CPU for example. All models this game runs on are clearly listed on the cover, and each of them has clearly defined specs set in stone. And even the weakest one of those models (PC-8801mkIISR) could have ran a better version of this game in my opinion.
@@BasementBrothers Oh word! thx for the clarification. Obviously all I've got to go on is vibes and limited-contexted speculation, so I really appreciate the response coming from a more informed source. Love the vids for that
Yeah. By the way, if it was PC-98 instead of PC-88, your first comment would be a lot closer to the mark. PC-98 was a much longer-lived and much more upgradeable series of PC's, so not having a PC with high enough specs to play a game you wanted was certainly a constant problem for PC-98 owners. Indeed, developers would often not target the latest specs in order to make sure more people could play their games.
But this was definitely not the case with SMB Special on PC-88. It had a clearly defined set of PC-88 models it was made for, and it didn't include the very oldest ones.
C’mon On With The C’mon sent me!!✋🏼
Im excited for this one 🤓