from Hacker News

Extracting Super Mario Bros levels with Python

by yeahdef on 6/29/18, 11:32 PM with 19 comments

• by doomlaser on 6/30/18, 2:13 AM

  I made this a few years ago. It's pretty much all of Super Mario Bros. in one image: https://i.imgur.com/g6JQ2WV.png / https://twitter.com/Doomlaser/status/1004802864433147904

  I want to do more of these and experiment with training generative neural nets on that kind of thing when I get the chance.

• by martin_drapeau on 6/30/18, 12:49 PM

  Very nice. A few years back I wrote http://mariocraft.club/ for fun (Super Mario in Javascript). Allows you to build your own levels. Very basic and unfinished but people love building levels.

  If anyone has interest in picking up the project, and auto-generating the levels, ping me.

• by BZH314 on 6/30/18, 4:55 AM

  @matts_ramblings approach is great to get a perfect authoritative reference we can use to test and/or train other tools.

  Other tools mapping the Super Mario Bros. levels:

  1. animmerger [1] by bisqwit

  Written in C++.

  Takes png images as input.

  This tool seems to be the reference in creating level maps for Super Mario.

  Matt's tool seems to use animerger to generate the color palette according to the source code [2]

  2. ALMA [3] by BZH314 (disclaimer: our baby project)

  Matt mentions using this approach as a possibility in the post.

  Written in Python using the OpenCV [4] computer vision library.

  ALMA takes videos as input, generates the map levels as images (png and animated gifs) and also generates the videos to show the algorithm in action [5]

  (shameless self plug: need more YouTube subscribers to get that sweet sweet vanity URL please :-)

  ALMA applies background subtraction to remove the moving enemies in order to keep only the background (a problem Matt's tool does not have)

  3. Manually stitched

  If you're looking for good SMB1 level maps stitched manually, there are some good work out there:

  Rick N. Bruns' nesmaps.com [6]

  Mariowiki: example of World 1-1 [7]

  Are you aware of other tools out there?

  ---

  [1] https://bisqwit.iki.fi/source/animmerger.html

  [2] https://gist.github.com/matthewearl/733bba717780604813ed588d...

  [3] https://bzh314.com/alma/

  [4] https://opencv.org/

  [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wanvx0PpE1w&list=PLa4uefpt5W...

  [6] http://www.nesmaps.com/maps/SuperMarioBrothers/SuperMarioBro...

  [7] https://www.mariowiki.com/World_1-1_(Super_Mario_Bros.)

• by arthurfm on 6/30/18, 8:37 AM

  How difficult would it be to do the same with Super Mario World on the SNES?