With Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario enjoying a comfortable friendship these days, a port of Super Mario Bros. to its 16-bit rival console doesn't seem that strange anymore. What's somewhat more surprising is how solid of a port it is.


It looks and almost sounds exactly like the NES original Super Mario Bros., a game that has been ported to many platforms. This port, created by Argentinian programmer "Mairtrus," is probably faithful for a very good reason. According to the Mairtrus, an automatic converter did much of the work, swapping one processor assembly language for another, leaving him with the chore of optimizing the game down to 64KB.

"At least the 75% of the code is still untouched after the translation," Mairtrus writes.


As you can see in this video, the original Super Mario Bros. bugs are more faithfully translated than the blippy music.

Mairtrus says the Genesis port, named SMB4MD for Super Mario Bros. for Mega Drive, won't currently play on real Sega hardware, only in an emulator, an unfortunate oversight that may change.

That's unlike some of these platform-jumping hack, like this shoddy Super Mario Bros. effort for the Genesis. It doesn't play like the original but borrows some of the graphics from Super Mario All-Stars for the SNES.

And nothing looks quite as bad as this Sonic the Hedgehog hack job for the NES. Graphically pretty good, otherwise... yeesh.

While Mairtrus' port of Super Mario Bros. isn't perfect, it's more than capable and gives us the opportunity to hear how bizarrely the Genesis' sound chip interprets those classic Koji Kondo tunes.


New Genesis Game: SMB4MD [DevSter Forums - thanks, Sam!]