Mario is not all about scrolling, there are more imprortant features that define its gameplay. Giana Sisters is actually not very Mario-ish, despite it has scrolling, and it is possible to make more Mario-like game without scrolling.
Acceleration, varying speed, killing enemies with jump, ability to break walls with head, a 2-hp system with small-big-shooting levels of upgrade, hidden passages all around - that's only few features of core Mario gameplay.
Totally agree - a jsw graphics type game with the features above would be better suited to the speccy
Mario is not all about scrolling, there are more imprortant features that define its gameplay. Giana Sisters is actually not very Mario-ish, despite it has scrolling, and it is possible to make more Mario-like game without scrolling.
Acceleration, varying speed, killing enemies with jump, ability to break walls with head, a 2-hp system with small-big-shooting levels of upgrade, hidden passages all around - that's only few features of core Mario gameplay.
you might be correct but scrolling gives the perfect playability and super fluid, continuous action, which is very important for the genre. Look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4COOVeGLBY
To have fluidity, you need high update rate. In the original SMB1 it is 50 times per second. On ZX you can get higher update rate (more fluidity) without scrolling rather than with scrolling. To get faster horizontal scrolling on ZX you need a lot of memory to store preshifted BG blocks, and you can't have too many of them. So 48K going to be out of question, if you don't want to have solid filled ground (like in the recent Sea Dragon game).
I saw both videos long ago, and in fact I linked the second one above in this thread. And I know another one that is worth to check out.
By the way, I made a 50 fps scrolling Mario background for 128K in early 2000s (it is lost), similar to the Gogin's engine but without two screen flicker. I stopped on objects drawing, and some time later Gogin released his demo, so there was no reason to continue.
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Totally agree - a jsw graphics type game with the features above would be better suited to the speccy
you might be correct but scrolling gives the perfect playability and super fluid, continuous action, which is very important for the genre. Look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4COOVeGLBY
and, this is the best conversion of super mario on zx spectrum:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9YipS3vYXM&feature=related
still, lack of ula contention helps a lot. I wonder if this could be ported to an actual zx spectrum +2 grey.
I saw both videos long ago, and in fact I linked the second one above in this thread. And I know another one that is worth to check out.
By the way, I made a 50 fps scrolling Mario background for 128K in early 2000s (it is lost), similar to the Gogin's engine but without two screen flicker. I stopped on objects drawing, and some time later Gogin released his demo, so there was no reason to continue.