Automatic Mapping of NES Games with Mappy | Hacker News Reader

Automatic Mapping of NES Games with Mappy

arxiv.org

71 pointslainon28 comments

This reminds me of a project that turns 2D NES games into 3D in real time.. not joking!

https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/9/11189002/3dnes-emulator-ni...

Currently developing a different take on this same concept, but using hand-modeled voxel shapes in place of sprites.

Haven't posted any significant updates in a while but progress is steady; just added cell-shading outlines to sprites that require it (can't translate black outlines into voxels otherwise) and improving the render pipeline to accommodate it.

http://n3s.io but more recent screenshots are at https://twitter.com/n3semu

Great... now put the camera in Mario's head and let me play some FPS mario

That would be pretty neat in VR !

Yes, this was an inspiration of ours! In fact we use Tom7's fork of the FCEUX emulator for Mappy and our other recent work in automatically learning game design elements from NES games.

This gave me a (stupid) idea. 2D to 3D seems possible to implement reasonably well with enough time and effort, given that it involves taking data and extrapolating it into another dimension -- for example, giving depth to sprites, etc. But what about the other way around? Taking 3D games (to keep things simple-ish, say from one particular platform) and automatically mapping them to 2D games. This sounds kind of absurd. Instead of instrumenting 2D game data with a little something extra, you'd have to compress/project the 3D data down into two dimensions -- in a way, stripping down the information contained in the original game. This is almost definitely impossible to pull off automatically for all games on a particular (3D) platform, at least in a way that isn't 100% awful to play. It's an interesting thought experiment to think of how it might be done, though.

Aren't 3D games already 2D, as they are just projecting 3D world onto 2D plane? Alternatively, taking 2D intersection of 3D world would lead to something like 2D/3D mode of Miegakure: https://youtu.be/9yW--eQaA2I?t=46

A stark reminder of how old I am was my initial confusion as to how someone used that crappy arcade game featuring a mouse to map Nintendo levels.

Hahaha thanks.. I forgot about that game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mappy

Man now I'm kinda missing all those old arcade-style games, it's been a while. Centipede, mario bros, galaga.. they were pretty damn fun. Totally different game play to what you see now. No hesitation to make it next-to-impossible to win.

See if there are any beercades in your area, if not start one!

Yeah, my next project is hopefully to make a retro machine out of the Raspberry Pi I've never done anything with so I can raise my young daughter on "real" video games: 4 directions, one action button, that sort of thing.

I made a "retropi" Linux pi box for my brother and nieces. It works remarkably well and wasn't hard at all. Though I needed to include a keyboard and instructions on how to exit(we had an intellivision growing up, but most controllers lack a number pad ).

The intellivision games don't hold up that well,the mame games are much better. A good controller though helps. I feel an arcade cabinet makes those games better. The kids kinda like them, but arcade games are designed to be hard and short and lack nostalgic appeal

https://retropie.org.uk

Now I want to see Mappy used to map out Mappy-Land (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mappy-Land).

I thought at first that this was to do with memory mapping/banking...

Is this project open source?

Googling is ineffective due to an NES game called Mappy.

At least partly:

https://github.com/JoeOsborn/mechlearn

Researchware though.

Anyone have the details on how game magazines used to create their maps? I read somewhere that Nintendo Power used a Mac IIfx with a TV capture card, someone grabbing screens as another person played through the levels.

I'm pretty sure that they just took photos of a TV (like a good PVM monitor, not a wood-grain cabinet Zenith), at least in the beginning. There's no doubt that these are photographs of a CRT:

http://www.superluigibros.com/images/media/nintendopower/1_s...

Reading that magazine was sometimes almost/more fun than playing the game -- you get all the art and logic without the frustration and sisyphean replay

If you look at the old player guides (the Super Mario World guide comes to mind) you'll actually find a couple mis-pastes where the image was laid out or cut badly before being photographed for the magazine.

It took a fair amount of work to only get pictures of the level's relevant features (and to always crop out the actual player).

Link to a couple good sources in this recent HN comment branch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14929835

Sounds like Nintendo Power had a dedicated machine in Japan while some other magazines were stuck photographing CRT monitors.

If a IIfx was involved, that wasn't until many years down the road (given the release date of the NES and the IIfx).

I'm curious how well this would work on games like the original Legend of Zelda and the Lost Woods (and Lost Hills) section.

It's discussed, with images, on page 6

There are also instances with more complex mechanics at play: in Zelda’s “Lost Woods”, the player moves through a sequence of identical-looking rooms and must use the correct door in each of those rooms or return to the first room in the sequence. We do not expect to be able to automat- ically cover all such cases since in the end room connections are defined in opaque game programs and we cannot hope to address every possibility. We therefore leave it up to a human analyst to select which rooms should or should not be merged.

There was a similar project that was able to extract the background matte painting for animations. Their example was a reproduction of a 15-30 foot painting for the Scooby-Do universe. I haven't be able to find it in years.

Bright Man should be Flash Man, right?

Yep.

Ack, an embarrassing error! Thanks for pointing it out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com