Forward

This is the Super Mario Brothers Arcade HD PACK (SMBArcade) designed for use with the popular Mesen emulator and an original copy of Super Mario Bros. The goal of this pack was to imagine a world where Nintendo had never produced the Famicom or NES and instead continued releasing arcade games, evolving the hardware as the years went on.

I started this pack in mid-late 2024 and am writing this readme on 3/2/2025. I have been very careful to be as thorough as possible, including many "impossible" situational graphics for the sake of Minus World spelunking, though I am aware there are a few I may have not accounted for.

Instructions

To install this pack, you will need two things: an up-to-date version of the Mesen Emulator (www.mesen.ca, version 2.0.0 or greater) and an unmodified copy of Super Mario Bros for the NES (not the Famicom Disk System version).

Simply boot up the game and navigate to Tools -> HD Packs (NES) -> Install HD Pack, then select the ZIP file provided with your download.

Limitations

The nature of HD Packs is that you are, for the most part, unlimited in terms of what you can do to the game graphics, even adding backgrounds and all sorts of crazy effects, granted you can program them in. For this project, though, given the scope, I saw fit to set some limitations on the graphics and sound to help better match the feel of a 1985 Nintendo arcade release.

The nature of a "What if" like this, though, is to sacrifice some real accuracy. Had they never made the Famicom, many of the oft-overlooked earlier titles that influenced Super Mario Bros may not have ever existed and might not have domino'd into the final game.

For the graphics, I kept myself to the 8 (4 sprite, 4 bg) palettes mostly intact, barring the added colors. Colors were added on an "as needed" basis and were never to exceed 8, though in reality, none ever surpassed 5-6. This helps the game look wonderfully cartoon-y and vibrant while giving enough color for detail.

The style themselves were based on many recurring graphical elements from Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Mario Bros, as well as many hours looking into old artwork released around the time of the game to really get a feel for what this world would've looked like in the heads of the developers, had they had the hardware to produce it.

The sound is another story. From 1981-1983, Nintendo often used microcontrollers instead of actual sound chips (i.e., the MCS-48) that were given custom software to generate 2 channels of sound, with additional sound effects coming from TTL logic chips on the arcade boards. After this point in Nintendo's arcade games, they began using the Ricoh 2a03 chip, and sometimes 2 of them. This chip is the same as in the NES/FC, so I was met with a choice. Either they would've used it, and the music and sounds would've been the same, or they would've used something else. Given that to my understanding, the Ricoh 2a03 was born for the sake of use in the NES/FC, I decided they likely would've gone with something else that would not have been the same MCS-48 chip.

I used the HuC6280, a wavetable chip based on the earlier WDC65C02 for the music and sounds. However, I limited the songs/sounds to only use 1 waveform each. This is because, afaik, music was on Nintendo's mind very early into Super Mario Bros development life, and had they had the chance to release this as an arcade game, it's possible they would've gone with something rather fancy like the HuC6280 or other waveform-type chips. There are even a few tracks that use the waveform from Super Mario Bros 2 JP's ending theme.

Credits

This pack was made and started by Simon Triplett - https://simont-128.itch.io/

Audio programming by Cubear on the Mesen HD Pack Discord.

Using the wonderful HD Pack Editor by Mkwong98 on GitHub - https://github.com/mkwong98

And many others who helped/assisted with ideas for the way the various elements of the Mushroom Kingdom should look.

Thank you for reading, and please do enjoy!