I took the Super Mario Clouds class this weekend at NYC Resistor. It was taught by Jonathan Dahan and David Huerta. The goal of the class was to recreate Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds project. This involved hacking a Super Mario Brothers cartridge to show just the clouds. Here is a video of his finished project:
The first step was to take apart a Super Mario Brothers cartridge. Interestingly enough, the actual board inside was much smaller than the cartridge. The game was divided into two chips: character/sprite data on the left chip and program data on the right chip. Since we were going to use the existing Super Mario sprite data, we only needed to remove the program chip. After carefully desoldering the program chip, we replaced it with a socket and a 27C256 EEPROM.
Next, We talked about how a Nintendo worked. There were some very helpful explanations in the Nerdy Nights Tutorials. The Nintendo uses a custom 6502 processor which has the audio processing built in to the chip. There is a separate picture processing unit used to display graphics. The program ROM is limited to a mere 32 KB, so Nintendo had to do some clever graphics manipulation in order to create a rather seamless side-scrolling experience.
The next step was to download Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds code. There was quite a bit of software setup required to run and compile the code from scratch. As a word of warning: some of these tools work best in Windows. As I am a Mac user, I used a Windows virtual machine on VirtualBox. To run the code, we used the FCEUX Nintendo emulator. Here is a screenshot of the original code as rendered by the emulator:
But what if we wanted to modify the code? The original Super Mario Clouds code was written in nbasic. To create a new binary, we first had to compile the code with nbasic and then convert it to 6502 assembly with nesasm. Those tools can be found here. Finally, an NES splitter is needed to split the resulting .nes file into .chr and .prg files (for the respective character and program chips).
Once we had the .prg file, it was time to burn our programs to the chip. This was done using an EEPROM programmer. We simply selected the chip type, uploaded our binary and let the programmer software do the rest.
After uploading our programs to the cartridge, it was time for the moment of truth. We plugged our cartridges into an old Nintendo and hoped for the best. Fortunately, most of the cartridges worked on the first try!
This project was a great way to spend an afternoon with my head in the (Super Mario) clouds. Now I really want to create my own Super Mario piece. I never thought I would be so excited to write assembly code…
