I had a silly idea tonight that for a game like Super Mario Bros. where the scrolling follows the player, and the player is usually in the center of the screen, collecting a single column of the screen per frame and combining them horizontally would produce a sort of timelapse image where the player would be seen as a blurred stripe moving through the scenery, which would be stretched or squashed according to the player's speed. I think I've seen something like this before, but in this era of information overload and the futility of trying to find anything in Google, I figured I'd just go ahead and hack it into my emulator rather than searching for prior art. Here's an example from Super Mario 3:It's a bit rough (and that's one of the better portions), but you can see the path of Mario hopping from point to point. I tried this with several games: Super Mario Bros. 1 Duck Tales , and Life Force . In the latter case the game scrolls at a fixed rate, so you get a sort of shabby automap.