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cory arcangel, a "post-conceptual artist" (???), released an art project called Super Mario Clouds, where he claimed to have taken a mario bros NES cartridge and erased everything except the clouds
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this is a fascinating story tragically buried under layers and layers of Art Criticism Discourse so let me spoil it for you:https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/932714358479753216 …
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in reality it turned out he threw away all of the original code and replaced it with his own program that just used the original graphics (which are stored on a separate chip). but neither the palette, layout, or even clouds themselves actually quite matched the original game
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and so the documentary is about this, and then the author sets about /actually/ doing what cory claimed: taking a fan disassembly of the game and deleting everything except the clouds
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the result is an invisible mario walking along an invisible version of the transition cutscene between world 1–1 and world 1–2, forever trudging towards a pipe that doesn't exist. but there was one interesting wrinkle
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for incredibly obscure technical reasons, the tiny coin in the HUD that sits next to your coin count can't be erased. without it, the screen stops scrolling
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(the documentor then goes into how this is an interesting commentary on capitalism, but tbh from his description of the problem it sounds like he could've just replaced the coin with a single sky-blue pixel. but then it wouldn't be High Art i guess)
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sprite 0 is special-cased to set a flag when an opaque pixel in sprite 0 is drawn atop an opaque pixel on the background, and i guess smb used this to implement scrolling somehow. using the hud coin is a fascinating choice http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/PPU_OAM#Sprite_zero_hits …
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from a glance at the disassembly — by which i mean, searching for 'scroll' and 'PPU_ADDRESS' — i don't see how this caused a problem, but i know zip about NES hacking. (warning, this gist is 16klines) https://gist.github.com/1wErt3r/4048722
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ah, okay, i misunderstood. i thought the game was scrolling the camera when it hit the coin, which made no sense, but i guess it /always/ starts drawing at x=0 and then jumps to the camera position after drawing the hud?https://twitter.com/everyfan3417/status/933553559479701504 …
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so you could get rid of the coin entirely by just drawing from the camera position in the first place, since there's no hud to keep unscrolled. but at that point you're not just "erasing" any more. probably the same rationale as not modifying the coin
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End of conversation
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