Watch Flappy Bird get coded into Super Mario World with nothing but SNES hardware

A YouTuber called SethBling just combined Super Mario World and Flappy Bird. Why? We don’t know. But it’s how that’s truly amazing.

Before you roll your eyes thinking it’s a simple mock-up or sprite switch, it turns out the process is way more involved than you might expect: SethBling actually managed to run Flappy Bird inside of the Super Mario World game itself.

No, we’re not talking about an emulator either: he literally coded Flappy Bird onto an old-school cartridge-and-console setup, using nothing but official, consumer hardware. To do so required exploiting numerous glitches that have been discovered by the speedrunning community in the decades since the game’s original release. If he made one mistake, the game would either crash, or he’d have to start all over again.

And you thought you were good at Mario.

It was a compicated process but to summarize, SethBling was eventually able to inject code into the SNES’ RAM by moving Mario to a particular horizontal coordinate corresponding to a value, and spin-jumping to write the value. He even modified the game’s coin-counter to be a display for the x-coordinate, to avoid errors from trying to simply eyeball Mario’s location.

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After about 20 minutes of clever gameplay manipulation, he was then able to write 331 bytes containing source code for Flappy Bird, trimmed down by using Super Mario World’s own sprites. It works exactly like you’d expect it to.

In total the process took less an hour. It still gets us no closer to why he chose to add Flappy Bird to an already difficult game, but give the video above a look for the full explanation of the painstaking process.

Via: Popular Science