Beta64 You guys should show the linked Bowser rooms and perform the "Bowser can't breathe fire" glitch when you play live! I did this all the time as a kid but it appears virtually unknown online despite me trying to spread it. Also, if you play the Japanese version you can do the World 9 Warp Zone scrolling glitch without hacking the game (use a warp whistle while in the canoe then press left).
you and A+ helped me find so many goodies, and props to Boundary Break who said at the end that you guys influenced him. Great group of youtubers, hope you collab again soon.
The reason why some background details are on the sprite layer is to work around the 4 colors per 8x8 square limitation. As for the masking sprites at the pipes, the NES has two options for sprites. Behind the background, or in front of the background. This option can be chosen only for each 8x16 (or sometimes 8x8) unit of the sprite. Since the object that emerges or disappears into pipe can move smoother than that, a workaround is needed. They place a dummy 16x16 behind-the-background sprite at the edge of the pipe. This makes it invisible. However, when Mario, or a piranha plant coincides with the pipe, the PPU will not draw Mario at that location, because the PPU can only process one sprite per each pixel. And that opportunity is already taken by the invisible dummy sprite.
Shameless plug: I reverse engineered all of SMB3 into a disassembly and made the hack 3Mix. With that out of the way: 0:30 All "level styles" generate a default expanse of tiles as appropriate to their theme. The Throne Room actually uses the "Fortress" style of tiles, with just a graphics set unique to the throne room. This texture is just a glitched-looking version of the (admittedly unusual) texture you see in the "wrong-way" portions of Bowser's castle. 1:37 This actually isn't a specific "death trigger", it's an erroneous application of the routine that causes "crush death" in autoscroll levels. Mario is in "cinematic" mode and is running automatically to the right outside of normal movement code. Normally the game prevents Mario from moving too far to the right, but "cinematic" mode Mario is able to, which causes an 8-bit math operation to produce a technically incorrect result and think that Mario actually has fallen too far left (and thus was "crushed.") 1:50 Really none of this should be a surprise. Even games today have alternate rooms and the like in the same level space. SMB3 specifically only ever toggles between a "main" and "alternate" section of a level, with a few rare exceptions such as the "Big [?] Bonus room" pipes. So there's only ever so much accessible grid space available. 2:18 This seems cooler than it is. The world map code used to check what tiles can be entered is actually just a lot of lazy range checking. "If tile ID is greater than X but less than Y" type stuff. So there's quite a few tiles that just get thrown in the mix purely coincidentally. They do not actually indicate "lost" development or anything so fun. And of course, the "secret glitch levels" if you will is just that the game falls out of world map mode and into gameplay mode with mostly nulled out data, in particular there's no proper handling for the world map as gameplay tile data. Everything else is luck of the draw in the world map logic and chaotic memory to dictate where you end up. 3:15 Limitation of the BG layer on NES of course... a sprite can only be fully behind or fully in front of it. So they used sprites to fake it being "under" the border. Also, if the map is scrolling left or right the border needs to temporarily be represented as sprites because there's no additional layer to the background. 3:40 Again, no surprise here. SMB3 can only have the "main" level and its "alternate", so naturally all bonus rooms and goal are just there. I wouldn't call existing maps "inaccurate" because they don't detail the grid precisely as it physically exists, however. 4:25 Correct that the pipes can't obscure as Nintendo wanted. Sprites can only be in front of or behind the background layer. This explains why Mario "vanishes" in the original Super Mario bros when he enters the pipe at the end of a water level; he flopped behind the BG layer. However, there's a quirk in the PPU that a sprite behind the background can overwrite a sprite in the foreground if it is in memory in the right order. Nintendo took advantage of that here so that they could have complex backgrounds in their levels but still have the player and enemies appear "behind" the pipe. The sprite choice incidentally is mostly arbitrary so long as it covers all pixels. 5:05 Maps always scroll by default; it's an opt-in to disable that functionality. It's not disabled but it doesn't matter because you can't get there anyway. Also that rule of "Mario will wind up on the other side of the screen" applies to gameplay logic, not world maps. There's never a map that has Mario wrap horizontally so there's no code for that. He will APPEAR to wrap horizontally beyond a scroll end if you do that, but he actually logically thinks he's gone to the next screen and all data will be wrong. 5:32 In this case, you did find something unused! There's actually a "Large Fortress" tile. When you compare it to the in-use "mini fortress" tile, there's an analogy there to the original Super Mario Bros. "little fort at the end of levels except the fourth" and the "big castle" after the fourth level of every world. This possibly suggested a direct reference to the original game would have been in place on the map at some point. Incidentally, the game is even coded to have the large fortress "crumble" like the smaller one does. (It does not have a unique tile for this, however, and just uses the same rubble tile.) The fact that it gets "devoured" by map animations does suggest it was cut early in development. 6:07 Partially correct. But they also intended there to be other hosts (a Koopa Troopa and a Hammer Bro) so it made sense for that to be swapable. Though arguably you could do that with BG tiles too. 7:20 Correct, all SMB3 levels by default generate a default stylistic set of tiles that were convenient for level builders and saved on space by taking care of the "greatest need." However, the "glitchy wall" would never be visible normally because the game locks the horizontal levels at a maximum of 15 screens of scrolling. Whatever method you're using to bypass the limit is allowing it to go further than the game would ever allow anyway. So really nothing "ends" with a glitchy wall, you're just breaking the game... more. 7:45 This is actually the only special case exception to world map drawing if I remember correctly. But it was probably done just due to palette / drawing limitations of the PPU. That is, they could never have that complex, round looking cloud over the "way down below" part of the map without it being the wrong color on one or the other. The fact it covers Mario is probably just coincidence. 8:23 It's square due to the technical limitation of how the background layer words. The sprite overlay just makes it look nicer. 8:28 There aren't technically "brown skulls." What you've mixed up is the game is using special code to make the "spotlight" effect, but it lazily ignores the border, so it's overwriting it with a full skull tile that normally shouldn't go there. If you were to hack the game to break the darkness overlay completely or you view the raw world map data you'll find it's just a normal, bordered map grid like any other. There are a lot of additional skull tiles off the path, though. (Which becomes revealed by 9:20)
If you're not seeing the "Read more" link, reloading the page usually fix it; but that might make you lose track of the comment you were trying to read, so instead, control-click (or middle-click) the timestamp of the comment in question to load it in a new tab (dunno what you can do if you're on mobile though).
After so many screens, doesn't the game start drawing the RAM as level tiles, after you've exhausted the actual map limits? At least, that's what I heard somewhere
On the NES, there are two ways to draw sprites behind the background. The first way is to set the sprite flags as "behind background", then it will be behind *everything* in the background. This was used in older games. The sprite will be drawn behind everything that isn't a simple sky color. You see this effect in games like Super Mario Bros 1, and Hogan's Alley. The second way is to place a higher priority sprite (the masking sprite) as "behind background", then place a lower priority sprite (player, mushroom, etc) on top of it. The higher priority sprite (masking sprite) will prevent pieces of the lower priority sprite (player, mushroom, etc) from being drawn. This allows the sprite to appear behind a block, but other parts of the sprite can still be in front of a complex background.
These days, you have thousands upon thousands of sprite layers to choose from... more than you'd ever need, especially with how dominant and easy to make 3D is.
Well, yeah, but that's because the concept of a hardware sprite basically isn't used anymore. On a modern system you mimic this either in software, or using texture mapping hardware with the camera locked to a specific distance and orientation. PC's never had sprite or background layers at all, so any 2d PC game that appeared to use tiles and sprites was doing all the work on the CPU. PC graphics cards were really dumb. Basically all you had was video memory and some framebuffers. If you wanted to do anything at all with that, you had to do it in software and calculate the change in the frame manually, then send the data to the graphics card. meanwhile something like an SNES had huge amounts of dedicated functions for dealing with background layers, tiles, scrolling and movable sprites, as well as various weird graphical effects. Then, later on, 3d accelerator cards happened and PC's suddenly gained a lot of specialist functionality too, but all of it was designed for 3d, not 2d. Nowadays GPU's are close to being fully programmable, and a 2d engine built to run on a GPU can basically use as many backgrounds and sprites as it likes, and the only real limitation is how much memory you have. For instance an snes background layer could have 3 backgrounds of up to 64x64 tiles, which are 8x8, and about 1024 such tiles. Each individual tile, if using 16 colours per tile (which is the most common type), uses 32 bytes. Which means 1024 tiles use 32 kilobytes. (The data structure for a 64x64 tile background layer is 8kb, so that's another 24 kb.) So... Leaving aside issues about how you design maps, what can you do with a modern, fairly low end GPU with 4 gigabytes of RAM? Well, if you keep the same type and amount of tiles... How about background layers that are 16,384x16384 tiles in size? Well, the tilemap for each such layer would take up 512 megabytes, so you could have 8 of those. Or... Let's extend the number of tiles allowed by making each entry 32 bits instead of 16 like on the snes. That means that same tilemap takes up 1024 megabytes, so you only get 4... But, now you get 2^26 (67,108,864) possible tiles, instead of 1024 But what do you need to store that many tiles? Well, 2 gigabytes in fact. So you could have that many tiles, and two layer worth of such tiles... And you'd be able to fit it in 4 gigabytes of VRAM. Of course, 16,386x16384 is 268,435,456 entries which means you have to re-use the same tile at least 4 times... But This is the kind of absurdity that you could do on a modern system. It's not ACTUALLY unlimited, but it's so huge compared to the 8 bit and 16 bit era, that it might as well be.
Kuralthys I think the Commodore 64 actually had a graphics card for 2d things like background layers and sprites. It's just that DOS computers were designed for office software rather than for games.
You finally got them on the show! This is great. I consider you 3 the best of "behind the scene gaming". I hope you guys do more collaborations in the future.
+The Senate He does Siper Mario 64 videos. It explores different ways to do things (one time he did two cutscenes at once to explore the outcome) he gets a little technical but he's really good.
Please do many more things together!! How about an episode, where you guys do all the things you are known for, for one game? I mean A+ does the glitches, Shesez does the Boundary Break and Beta 64 does everything that has to do with the Beta/early game versions? I hope you know what I mean... like a 30min episode, with all your skills and you help each other out! Like in this episode! Love you guys and hold your quality level!
I think those "glitchy levels " are actually the map of one of the worlds being loaded as a regular level. the shape and layout seems to add up to that
This is my NUMBER ONE favorite Nintendo/nostalgia game! Well, it's tied with the original StarCraft. I'm a bit sad you can't really boundary break Starcraft 1, there's nothing to break unfortunately.. Anyway, great episode, I'm really happy you covered it man!
Well the cloud in World 5 is going over some land. It would be impossible to make it part of the background and still make it look convincing due to palette limitations.
It amazes me how long this game has been around and how much it's been pored over over the years and yet there are still things we're just discovering about it.
This was truly impressive. My 3 favorite UA-camrs, one of my top 5 Mario games, a great intro, great content, just great everything. I love this episode and I love you guys! You truly did a great job! Shesez, I'm looking forward to the next episode. Beta64, I'm looking forward to the next supply of Beta elements. A+, I'm getting pumped for my weekly dose of glitches. You guys did great! P1XRK1NG signing out.
youd be right gabriel. However here on boundary break, I present all footage as how i understand it in that moment. And then I learn and grow from and with all of you!
Gabriel Mann: The Glitchy walls the first screen of glitchy wall his the RAM, the 2nd screen of Glitchy wall his the ROM. When Mario goes through a level normally without any glitch, and/or hack, he his in the WRAM, and the WRAM his from $6000 to $7FFF(left to Right in horizontal levels but from top to buttom in vertical levels) and the level ending his way before $7FFF, so that his why you see empty space, way before you start to see the RAM the RAM his $0000 to $0FFF, and after that the ROM Start $9FFF to $8000( depending on the version your using the ROM that start after $0FFF, can be $AFFF to $9000, or $BFFF to $A000, or $CFFF to $B000, or $DFFF to $C000, or $EFFF to $D000, or finially $FFFF to $E000) Different version used different ROM, but they all have something similar the ROM his backward, if you continued going pass the ROM it goes to $1000 to $1FFF to finish the RAM, in horizontal level after that it start again after that on $6000, in Virtical levels after $1000 to $1FFF to finish the RAM it goes to $2000 to $3FFF(PPU Control)(still looks like glitchy wall) and then $4000 to $5FFF( That his the APU. EXT)and then you return to $6000 your back to the top of the level. I might be wrong on something if I am wrong on something @Shesez can correct me if he knows about this.
After what happened with the OOT video, I used to wish that you didn't do any collab, then came this video and it gave me hope. Btw, it really shows that you took inspiration from them. You aren't that type of youtubers that I think of immediately when talking about youtubers, but Everytime I remember you, I binge-watch all of your videos
The comment section: 99% is about the "Son of a glitch" sound at 7:25 The other 1% is about anything else. Edit: Also one the glitched level's 1-up blocks at 2:48 is infinite.
My. Absolute. Three. Favorite. A+Start is so good with his glitch humour he made me surpass my (irrational and inexplicable) fear for glitches in gaming! I love you guys so much. Keep up the magnificent work. Cheers from Brasil!
I do believe I was the first to discover where /exactly/ that unused fortress sprite off the right of the Warp Zone was used, but don't quote me on that... I meant to get it on TCRF MONTHS ago, but I just never did! It thrills me to see it on here!!
You do really well with this. Your commentary and pretty visuals help a lot for what you're talking about, there is no other youtuber like you so thank you for that
From 5:18 in the video: "And if we speed the game up 6,400 times its regular speed..." He should have said "64 times its regular speed" (or "to 6,400% of its regular speed").
Keep up the good work, you all are seriously my favorite tubers. You're uncovering 'secrets' and in your words, "rather underwhelming answers to childhood questions". Thank you so much and I'm glad there were more wandering minds other than mine that wondered what lied beyond the boundaries. Cheers.
I believe A+Start mentioned this on one of his Son of a Glitch videos, the glitchy walls are actually used to host the RAM image of what's contained in a level/map. This means the game can be 'modified' by messing around with those tiles to change memory addresses that then have the possibility of warping the player to a mystery location. That's also the reason those normally inaccessible glitchy levels on the maps are there as well.
Woke up, watched Beta64 (Super Mario 64), then watched Son of a Glitch (Mario Kart episodes), then wanted to watch boundary break... this freaking comes out.
I'm loving these NES/SNES episodes. It's amazing how much is hidden away off screen. It was cool having Andy and Beta64 is this video too. I'll be looking forward to even more NES/SNES videos :)
The "masking" layer on the pipe may be because the game needs to use a separate "Mario going down the pipe" animation sprite. You have the front facing Mario, with whatever power ups he has, going down, and then a masking pipe sprite to cover Mario as he goes behind it.
Great episode. Gaming doesn't get much better than Super Mario Bros. 3. I'm not sure how well known this is , but Mario is able to glitch through two walls in Bowser's Castle by flying while crouching and landing on the small space above the two separate statues. When he stands up, he will be pushed through the wall to the next area.
This is amazing. Yes, NES has only 1 tile layer + the sprite layer, its so restrictive :D I think the glitchy wall is when the game start to read bites that arent alocated for the room. So it could be bites of code that the game try to read as graphic, so yes, you can picture code that arent pictures
For anyone curious, that "glitchy wall" is the game trying to put graphics to game ram. if you interact with the glitchy wall without a walk through walls cheat, you can edit game data and even call the ending to beat the game in only a couple levels.
You're famous again! Kotaku loves your channel which is awesome. Besides the fact you have a collab with beta/A+. You are totally up there with them. Well done yo! I never miss a upload, keep up the good work
i was always curious as a kid about going into the 3 mud ponds in world 8 (map1). so satisfying to finally be able to enter them with the walk anywhere code... even the lonely pond in world 2 where the warp whistle is.
“…co-piloting this big giant bird…” is that a BOTW reference? BOTW released a little less than five weeks before this video was published, could that be a reference to Vah Medoh?
I still have a GBA and Super Mario Bros. 3's cartridge (along with several other GB and GBA cartridges). Still very entertaining to play Gameboy games, 14+ years after they were released. The Gameboy really did have some good games.
The darkness effect in world 8 is mostly on the background layer because you can only have 8 sprites visible on a scanline at once. I'd assume the cloud in sky world is on the sprite layer just to save on graphics needed.
I theorize that A+Start is the triforce of power because he has the highest sub count. Beta 64 is the triforce of wisdom because he has to do the most amount of research. And Im just courage because what is courage really good for youtube
Something else I noticed was that if you use the walk through walls code to explore World 6, one of the icicle groups actually loads you into a glitch-autoscroll thing, while never decreasing the timer. Whilst in the stage this glitch wall will sort of "shake" and then move up. It's a never-ending process that loops indefinitely. Mario is also nowhere to be found
In the Boss rooms with the Koopalings, you can actually stand on top of that wall to the left and right, even if you say the room is stuck in the 'top left' corner of the map. Speedruns will do this to catch the wand faster, because if you're offscreen you don't have to fall through the screen at the end of the fight (otherwise you want to catch the wand as close to the ground as possible to fall less far).
![Super Mario Bros 3 LOST BITS | Cut Content & Unused Levels [TetraBitGaming]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/7s3-0--niYI/mqdefault.jpg)
I was recently re-watching Beta64, then decided to re-watch A+Start Son Of A Glitch, then re-watched Boundary Break, and this came out... WHAT. EVEN.
And then Shesez replied to you. WHAAAAAAT?!
And then Beta64 replied to Shesez who replied to you. WHAAAAAAT?!
And I have no good reason to be replying to you. Wut
And then some random guy named Lakitu replied to Beta64 who replied to Shesez who replied to you. WHAAAAAAT?!
And then I saw this on Twitter and decided to join in on the fun. WHAAAAAAAAAAAT!?
Such a great episode with so many interesting findings! I was honored to be a part of this, Shesez. :)
The honor was all mine!
I just want to say that both of you are some of my favorite youtubers.
Beta64 You guys should show the linked Bowser rooms and perform the "Bowser can't breathe fire" glitch when you play live! I did this all the time as a kid but it appears virtually unknown online despite me trying to spread it. Also, if you play the Japanese version you can do the World 9 Warp Zone scrolling glitch without hacking the game (use a warp whistle while in the canoe then press left).
please Beta64 can you do Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on the Sega Genesis
you and A+ helped me find so many goodies, and props to Boundary Break who said at the end that you guys influenced him. Great group of youtubers, hope you collab again soon.
The reason why some background details are on the sprite layer is to work around the 4 colors per 8x8 square limitation.
As for the masking sprites at the pipes, the NES has two options for sprites. Behind the background, or in front of the background. This option can be chosen only for each 8x16 (or sometimes 8x8) unit of the sprite. Since the object that emerges or disappears into pipe can move smoother than that, a workaround is needed.
They place a dummy 16x16 behind-the-background sprite at the edge of the pipe. This makes it invisible. However, when Mario, or a piranha plant coincides with the pipe, the PPU will not draw Mario at that location, because the PPU can only process one sprite per each pixel. And that opportunity is already taken by the invisible dummy sprite.
7:25 you can hear a very faint "son of a glitch"
Yeah I heard it to
I heard it
u sure its glitch...
Ice Snake
It’s a series
I heard it
7:24 *_DONT HIDE THAT SON OF A GLITCH FROM ME._*
that's a kewl cat RALSEI. GUNS R BAD!!!
*𝙉𝙤*
Shameless plug: I reverse engineered all of SMB3 into a disassembly and made the hack 3Mix. With that out of the way:
0:30 All "level styles" generate a default expanse of tiles as appropriate to their theme. The Throne Room actually uses the "Fortress" style of tiles, with just a graphics set unique to the throne room. This texture is just a glitched-looking version of the (admittedly unusual) texture you see in the "wrong-way" portions of Bowser's castle.
1:37 This actually isn't a specific "death trigger", it's an erroneous application of the routine that causes "crush death" in autoscroll levels. Mario is in "cinematic" mode and is running automatically to the right outside of normal movement code. Normally the game prevents Mario from moving too far to the right, but "cinematic" mode Mario is able to, which causes an 8-bit math operation to produce a technically incorrect result and think that Mario actually has fallen too far left (and thus was "crushed.")
1:50 Really none of this should be a surprise. Even games today have alternate rooms and the like in the same level space. SMB3 specifically only ever toggles between a "main" and "alternate" section of a level, with a few rare exceptions such as the "Big [?] Bonus room" pipes. So there's only ever so much accessible grid space available.
2:18 This seems cooler than it is. The world map code used to check what tiles can be entered is actually just a lot of lazy range checking. "If tile ID is greater than X but less than Y" type stuff. So there's quite a few tiles that just get thrown in the mix purely coincidentally. They do not actually indicate "lost" development or anything so fun. And of course, the "secret glitch levels" if you will is just that the game falls out of world map mode and into gameplay mode with mostly nulled out data, in particular there's no proper handling for the world map as gameplay tile data. Everything else is luck of the draw in the world map logic and chaotic memory to dictate where you end up.
3:15 Limitation of the BG layer on NES of course... a sprite can only be fully behind or fully in front of it. So they used sprites to fake it being "under" the border. Also, if the map is scrolling left or right the border needs to temporarily be represented as sprites because there's no additional layer to the background.
3:40 Again, no surprise here. SMB3 can only have the "main" level and its "alternate", so naturally all bonus rooms and goal are just there. I wouldn't call existing maps "inaccurate" because they don't detail the grid precisely as it physically exists, however.
4:25 Correct that the pipes can't obscure as Nintendo wanted. Sprites can only be in front of or behind the background layer. This explains why Mario "vanishes" in the original Super Mario bros when he enters the pipe at the end of a water level; he flopped behind the BG layer. However, there's a quirk in the PPU that a sprite behind the background can overwrite a sprite in the foreground if it is in memory in the right order. Nintendo took advantage of that here so that they could have complex backgrounds in their levels but still have the player and enemies appear "behind" the pipe. The sprite choice incidentally is mostly arbitrary so long as it covers all pixels.
5:05 Maps always scroll by default; it's an opt-in to disable that functionality. It's not disabled but it doesn't matter because you can't get there anyway. Also that rule of "Mario will wind up on the other side of the screen" applies to gameplay logic, not world maps. There's never a map that has Mario wrap horizontally so there's no code for that. He will APPEAR to wrap horizontally beyond a scroll end if you do that, but he actually logically thinks he's gone to the next screen and all data will be wrong.
5:32 In this case, you did find something unused! There's actually a "Large Fortress" tile. When you compare it to the in-use "mini fortress" tile, there's an analogy there to the original Super Mario Bros. "little fort at the end of levels except the fourth" and the "big castle" after the fourth level of every world. This possibly suggested a direct reference to the original game would have been in place on the map at some point. Incidentally, the game is even coded to have the large fortress "crumble" like the smaller one does. (It does not have a unique tile for this, however, and just uses the same rubble tile.) The fact that it gets "devoured" by map animations does suggest it was cut early in development.
6:07 Partially correct. But they also intended there to be other hosts (a Koopa Troopa and a Hammer Bro) so it made sense for that to be swapable. Though arguably you could do that with BG tiles too.
7:20 Correct, all SMB3 levels by default generate a default stylistic set of tiles that were convenient for level builders and saved on space by taking care of the "greatest need." However, the "glitchy wall" would never be visible normally because the game locks the horizontal levels at a maximum of 15 screens of scrolling. Whatever method you're using to bypass the limit is allowing it to go further than the game would ever allow anyway. So really nothing "ends" with a glitchy wall, you're just breaking the game... more.
7:45 This is actually the only special case exception to world map drawing if I remember correctly. But it was probably done just due to palette / drawing limitations of the PPU. That is, they could never have that complex, round looking cloud over the "way down below" part of the map without it being the wrong color on one or the other. The fact it covers Mario is probably just coincidence.
8:23 It's square due to the technical limitation of how the background layer words. The sprite overlay just makes it look nicer.
8:28 There aren't technically "brown skulls." What you've mixed up is the game is using special code to make the "spotlight" effect, but it lazily ignores the border, so it's overwriting it with a full skull tile that normally shouldn't go there. If you were to hack the game to break the darkness overlay completely or you view the raw world map data you'll find it's just a normal, bordered map grid like any other. There are a lot of additional skull tiles off the path, though. (Which becomes revealed by 9:20)
I hate when UA-cam crops off comments! It's just a glitched-looking version of what, exactly?
If you're not seeing the "Read more" link, reloading the page usually fix it; but that might make you lose track of the comment you were trying to read, so instead, control-click (or middle-click) the timestamp of the comment in question to load it in a new tab (dunno what you can do if you're on mobile though).
4:25 That would explain why, when you went behind the white blocks, enemies would still go "underneath" mario?
After so many screens, doesn't the game start drawing the RAM as level tiles, after you've exhausted the actual map limits? At least, that's what I heard somewhere
Am i seeing this right
Did a member of vinesauce just comment on boundary break
I need sleep
On the NES, there are two ways to draw sprites behind the background.
The first way is to set the sprite flags as "behind background", then it will be behind *everything* in the background. This was used in older games. The sprite will be drawn behind everything that isn't a simple sky color.
You see this effect in games like Super Mario Bros 1, and Hogan's Alley.
The second way is to place a higher priority sprite (the masking sprite) as "behind background", then place a lower priority sprite (player, mushroom, etc) on top of it. The higher priority sprite (masking sprite) will prevent pieces of the lower priority sprite (player, mushroom, etc) from being drawn. This allows the sprite to appear behind a block, but other parts of the sprite can still be in front of a complex background.
And what was the second?
We may never know
These days, you have thousands upon thousands of sprite layers to choose from... more than you'd ever need, especially with how dominant and easy to make 3D is.
Well, yeah, but that's because the concept of a hardware sprite basically isn't used anymore.
On a modern system you mimic this either in software, or using texture mapping hardware with the camera locked to a specific distance and orientation.
PC's never had sprite or background layers at all, so any 2d PC game that appeared to use tiles and sprites was doing all the work on the CPU.
PC graphics cards were really dumb. Basically all you had was video memory and some framebuffers.
If you wanted to do anything at all with that, you had to do it in software and calculate the change in the frame manually, then send the data to the graphics card.
meanwhile something like an SNES had huge amounts of dedicated functions for dealing with background layers, tiles, scrolling and movable sprites, as well as various weird graphical effects.
Then, later on, 3d accelerator cards happened and PC's suddenly gained a lot of specialist functionality too, but all of it was designed for 3d, not 2d.
Nowadays GPU's are close to being fully programmable, and a 2d engine built to run on a GPU can basically use as many backgrounds and sprites as it likes, and the only real limitation is how much memory you have.
For instance an snes background layer could have 3 backgrounds of up to 64x64 tiles, which are 8x8, and about 1024 such tiles.
Each individual tile, if using 16 colours per tile (which is the most common type), uses 32 bytes.
Which means 1024 tiles use 32 kilobytes.
(The data structure for a 64x64 tile background layer is 8kb, so that's another 24 kb.)
So... Leaving aside issues about how you design maps, what can you do with a modern, fairly low end GPU with 4 gigabytes of RAM?
Well, if you keep the same type and amount of tiles... How about background layers that are 16,384x16384 tiles in size? Well, the tilemap for each such layer would take up 512 megabytes, so you could have 8 of those.
Or... Let's extend the number of tiles allowed by making each entry 32 bits instead of 16 like on the snes.
That means that same tilemap takes up 1024 megabytes, so you only get 4...
But, now you get 2^26 (67,108,864) possible tiles, instead of 1024
But what do you need to store that many tiles? Well, 2 gigabytes in fact.
So you could have that many tiles, and two layer worth of such tiles...
And you'd be able to fit it in 4 gigabytes of VRAM.
Of course, 16,386x16384 is 268,435,456 entries which means you have to re-use the same tile at least 4 times...
But This is the kind of absurdity that you could do on a modern system.
It's not ACTUALLY unlimited, but it's so huge compared to the 8 bit and 16 bit era, that it might as well be.
Kuralthys
I think the Commodore 64 actually had a graphics card for 2d things like background layers and sprites. It's just that DOS computers were designed for office software rather than for games.
7:24 turn up your sound and you hear...
Son of a glitch
son of a gliitch
Flame the Pyrohog I know that
WHAT THE F IS A PYROHOG
i heard it and was about to comment about
yaaah
You finally got them on the show! This is great.
I consider you 3 the best of "behind the scene gaming". I hope you guys do more collaborations in the future.
The Senate love em all
For "behind the scenes gaming" you also have to include pannenkoek2012.
Felix Klenk don't know him
+The Senate He does Siper Mario 64 videos. It explores different ways to do things (one time he did two cutscenes at once to explore the outcome) he gets a little technical but he's really good.
They're the triforce of hidden stuff in gaming.
who heard the son of a glitch at 7:25?
Once In An Orange Moon me
Me
I did
Me
I did.
Am i the only one that heard "Son of a Glitch" in 7:25 ?
Nope i did to XD
You are not.
ClassBuilder GD nope
ClassBuilder GD looked in the comments to see if anyone else did
I did too
7:25 "Son of a Glitch" in the background
I heard that!
Always a pleasure guys :) Great work dude!
thank you man! thank you thank you thank you!!
Please do many more things together!!
How about an episode, where you guys do all the things you are known for, for one game?
I mean A+ does the glitches, Shesez does the Boundary Break and Beta 64 does everything that has to do with the Beta/early game versions? I hope you know what I mean... like a 30min episode, with all your skills and you help each other out! Like in this episode!
Love you guys and hold your quality level!
A+Start why is that sound there at 7:25
A+Start favorite youtuber!
Whats the walk throgh wall code ? Is it a game genie code
I think those "glitchy levels " are actually the map of one of the worlds being loaded as a regular level. the shape and layout seems to add up to that
Upon further inspection, it's the world 2 map!
FINALLY UA-cam recommended me a good video.
thank you youtube!
This is my NUMBER ONE favorite Nintendo/nostalgia game! Well, it's tied with the original StarCraft. I'm a bit sad you can't really boundary break Starcraft 1, there's nothing to break unfortunately..
Anyway, great episode, I'm really happy you covered it man!
Well the cloud in World 5 is going over some land. It would be impossible to make it part of the background and still make it look convincing due to palette limitations.
Anyone else hear the really quiet "son of a glitch" at 7:25 ?
i did
same (3 weeks late XD)
Me
Ueah
Same
who heard A+ starts glitch series intro "son of a glitch"
trunks-kun I did lol
I really did not expect you ever doing a Boundary Break on SMB3! great video!
7:23 in the background "Son of a glitch" 😂
Surprisingly cool episode for an NES platformer.
Does Bowser go anywhere note-worthy when falling to his doom, though?
Superkidra i hate it questions are as good as this one. it must be answered!!!
It amazes me how long this game has been around and how much it's been pored over over the years and yet there are still things we're just discovering about it.
AT TIMESTAMP 6:35 )
When you miss the entire minigame by 1 space
They should have made it so you get a small bonus if you match 2 and a big one if you match 3.
A surprisingly great episode! Who knew there was that much to discover in a 2D game?
This was truly impressive. My 3 favorite UA-camrs, one of my top 5 Mario games, a great intro, great content, just great everything. I love this episode and I love you guys! You truly did a great job! Shesez, I'm looking forward to the next episode. Beta64, I'm looking forward to the next supply of Beta elements. A+, I'm getting pumped for my weekly dose of glitches. You guys did great! P1XRK1NG signing out.
You could say it's the best boofing thing I've ever seen. (Those from the Luigi's Mansion livestream will understand the joke.)
P1XRK1NG Retroman Shut the boof up! Lol jk I was there as well. :-)
+AAG Ventus NO! I don't boofin wanna! I'll say what the boof ever I wanna boofin say! ;)
an yay, Green Goblin said unto spooderman, IMPRESSIVE!!!
"where we basically take the camera any where we want .."
Love dat line .
Aren't the "glitchy walls" the game trying to read RAM as level elements?
youd be right gabriel. However here on boundary break, I present all footage as how i understand it in that moment. And then I learn and grow from and with all of you!
the willingness to learn is what matters to me ;) love the show dude! keep it up!
Because of this comment, I am now going to research this. Thank you for you willingness to comment with some knowledge.
Gabriel Mann: The Glitchy walls the first screen of glitchy wall his the RAM, the 2nd screen of Glitchy wall his the ROM. When Mario goes through a level normally without any glitch, and/or hack, he his in the WRAM, and the WRAM his from $6000 to $7FFF(left to Right in horizontal levels but from top to buttom in vertical levels) and the level ending his way before $7FFF, so that his why you see empty space, way before you start to see the RAM the RAM his $0000 to $0FFF, and after that the ROM Start $9FFF to $8000( depending on the version your using the ROM that start after $0FFF, can be $AFFF to $9000, or $BFFF to $A000, or $CFFF to $B000, or $DFFF to $C000, or $EFFF to $D000, or finially $FFFF to $E000) Different version used different ROM, but they all have something similar the ROM his backward, if you continued going pass the ROM it goes to $1000 to $1FFF to finish the RAM, in horizontal level after that it start again after that on $6000, in Virtical levels after $1000 to $1FFF to finish the RAM it goes to $2000 to $3FFF(PPU Control)(still looks like glitchy wall) and then $4000 to $5FFF( That his the APU. EXT)and then you return to $6000 your back to the top of the level. I might be wrong on something if I am wrong on something @Shesez can correct me if he knows about this.
SuperNickid TF???
After what happened with the OOT video, I used to wish that you didn't do any collab, then came this video and it gave me hope. Btw, it really shows that you took inspiration from them. You aren't that type of youtubers that I think of immediately when talking about youtubers, but Everytime I remember you, I binge-watch all of your videos
My three favourite UA-cam's all in one.
I GOT HIGHLIGHTED AND A HEART :D
Lucky bastard.
I agree, potato!
@2:18 “wicked excited”..... I see you’re from New England
Who else noticed that (son of a glitch) in the audio at 7:26
The comment section:
99% is about the "Son of a glitch" sound at 7:25
The other 1% is about anything else.
Edit: Also one the glitched level's 1-up blocks at 2:48 is infinite.
I know it's annoying
7:25 I swear I can hear a small "Son Of A Glitch!" there.
Because you do
Same
i also did hear it
7:25 Who else heard “Son of a Glitch!”
My. Absolute. Three. Favorite.
A+Start is so good with his glitch humour he made me surpass my (irrational and inexplicable) fear for glitches in gaming!
I love you guys so much.
Keep up the magnificent work.
Cheers from Brasil!
This has to be the best crossover ever! I loved this episode
I do believe I was the first to discover where /exactly/ that unused fortress sprite off the right of the Warp Zone was used, but don't quote me on that... I meant to get it on TCRF MONTHS ago, but I just never did! It thrills me to see it on here!!
fittingly your name is captain mario
You do really well with this. Your commentary and pretty visuals help a lot for what you're talking about, there is no other youtuber like you so thank you for that
Did you hear The ''Son of a glitch''? 7:24
7:25 You can hear “Son of a GLITCH” which is the name of an A-Start show who was featured in this episode.
6400% the speed is not 6400 times faster;)
MrPionner121 your point?
From 5:18 in the video: "And if we speed the game up 6,400 times its regular speed..." He should have said "64 times its regular speed" (or "to 6,400% of its regular speed").
I do.
So?
This is why we aren't misleading, kids.
I beat this game when I was 8 or 9. All these years and I never would of known any of this. Thank you brother.
9:11 Seeing the entire dark map is probably the coolest part of this.
It never occurred to me that you never explore the top 1/3 of the map.
A lot of this can be summarized as "Have you ever played Mario Maker?"
Seeing how the areas interconnect makes sense
SO EXCITED FOR KINGDOM HEARTS 2
...First boundary break episode I watched. Good luck with whatever you're going through man. Love your work dude.
Who else heard at 7:27 son of a glitch
I heard the first time XD
That is a neat looking texture.
This is probably one of the most interesting Boundary Break episode so far.
7:25 I heard "Son of a glitch"
I was just looking if somebody noticed..
Keep up the good work, you all are seriously my favorite tubers. You're uncovering 'secrets' and in your words, "rather underwhelming answers to childhood questions". Thank you so much and I'm glad there were more wandering minds other than mine that wondered what lied beyond the boundaries. Cheers.
MY 3 FAVORITE CHANNELS
IN ONE
*_OKAY_*
I believe A+Start mentioned this on one of his Son of a Glitch videos, the glitchy walls are actually used to host the RAM image of what's contained in a level/map. This means the game can be 'modified' by messing around with those tiles to change memory addresses that then have the possibility of warping the player to a mystery location. That's also the reason those normally inaccessible glitchy levels on the maps are there as well.
Who else heard a+ start's intro when he was in the desert glitch wall?
7:25 you can hear "son of a glitch" I see you're a man of culture yourself, A-START is a good channel.
When he turned his head to the side at 10:06 I thought A+Start and Beta64 were going to appear on screen with him
I loved that little "Son of a Glitch" at 7:22
Woke up, watched Beta64 (Super Mario 64), then watched Son of a Glitch (Mario Kart episodes), then wanted to watch boundary break... this freaking comes out.
I swear that nobody likes my comments, even when the freaking UA-camr likes it.
I'm loving these NES/SNES episodes. It's amazing how much is hidden away off screen. It was cool having Andy and Beta64 is this video too. I'll be looking forward to even more NES/SNES videos :)
*Son of a Glitch!*
The "masking" layer on the pipe may be because the game needs to use a separate "Mario going down the pipe" animation sprite. You have the front facing Mario, with whatever power ups he has, going down, and then a masking pipe sprite to cover Mario as he goes behind it.
7:25 I swear I could hear: “Son of a Glitch” being said very softly
the "glitchy wall" is the memory, you can see some wrongwarps go past memory and some crazy things happen if you interact with it
That Kickle Cubicle Music at the end
wow im glad you recognized it!
It's one of my earliest childhood games I love it!
i.imgur.com/ugTQzQ3.jpg I don't often Subscribe to channels but you've earned it! #140,400
Great episode. Gaming doesn't get much better than Super Mario Bros. 3.
I'm not sure how well known this is , but Mario is able to glitch through two walls in Bowser's Castle by flying while crouching and landing on the small space above the two separate statues. When he stands up, he will be pushed through the wall to the next area.
Well this is a cool. 3 youtubers that i currently watch in 1video. If syckoh would have been here this would have been a dream.
(it already is)
Well this made my day :)
Shesez, Scykoh, A+Start and Beta64 in ONE video? Oh dear goodNESs (hahaha) make it happen please.
Wow, your channel has come so far and deservingly so. Some of the most original content seen on UA-cam in a long time.
did anybody else see the swastikas at 0:55 ?
This is amazing.
Yes, NES has only 1 tile layer + the sprite layer, its so restrictive :D
I think the glitchy wall is when the game start to read bites that arent alocated for the room. So it could be bites of code that the game try to read as graphic, so yes, you can picture code that arent pictures
awesome stufff!!! great watch, the quality if the video looks great, what camera do you use? subbed.
thanks for subbing! I use my friend Pats camera. unfortunately i dont have the details of it
Totally man! Good stuff
For anyone curious, that "glitchy wall" is the game trying to put graphics to game ram. if you interact with the glitchy wall without a walk through walls cheat, you can edit game data and even call the ending to beat the game in only a couple levels.
I actually found an unused level that's off screen, I have a video on it on my channel
It's a fully functioning level that isn't glitched at all
Everyone please like this so he can see
i'm curious ima go see!
Lloyd Johannessen ikr
SmashFan03 I can't find it.
Nice collab, A+Start is how I found your channel in the first place.
Most of these comments are about the "son of a glitch" and it's pissing me off
Super Mario Bros. 3 is one of my favorite Mario games i've played. Thank you for this video.
I like andy (a+start) but i am getting kinda mad that he hasnt uploaded any glitch videos :( i like "low poly" but the glitch videos were better :3
You're famous again! Kotaku loves your channel which is awesome. Besides the fact you have a collab with beta/A+. You are totally up there with them. Well done yo! I never miss a upload, keep up the good work
thanks dude!
I was first subscribed to a+star then beta64 then I subscribed to shesez now I support all the channels 😇😇😇
i was always curious as a kid about going into the 3 mud ponds in world 8 (map1). so satisfying to finally be able to enter them with the walk anywhere code... even the lonely pond in world 2 where the warp whistle is.
7:25 oRiGiNaL cOmMeNt
Uh huh
“…co-piloting this big giant bird…” is that a BOTW reference? BOTW released a little less than five weeks before this video was published, could that be a reference to Vah Medoh?
7:25 son of a glitch!
7:25 I thought I was hearing stuff but I rewinded the video and if you put your volume up you can hear “son of a glitch”
A+start is in this video am I dreaming
Do another SMG plz! It was your second video and there was so much more you could have explored!
super mario sunshine first but i definitely will!
I still have a GBA and Super Mario Bros. 3's cartridge (along with several other GB and GBA cartridges).
Still very entertaining to play Gameboy games, 14+ years after they were released.
The Gameboy really did have some good games.
7:25 Son of a glitch
The darkness effect in world 8 is mostly on the background layer because you can only have 8 sprites visible on a scanline at once. I'd assume the cloud in sky world is on the sprite layer just to save on graphics needed.
Holy trinity?
We prefer the term Triforce of Awesome XD
Beta64 Now that begs the question... What does each piece of the triforce represent?
I theorize that A+Start is the triforce of power because he has the highest sub count. Beta 64 is the triforce of wisdom because he has to do the most amount of research. And Im just courage because what is courage really good for youtube
The courage to be genuine and yourself, trying out this show, making it your full-time thing.
NairbNroh definitely. I'd never take that leap lol
Something else I noticed was that if you use the walk through walls code to explore World 6, one of the icicle groups actually loads you into a glitch-autoscroll thing, while never decreasing the timer. Whilst in the stage this glitch wall will sort of "shake" and then move up. It's a never-ending process that loops indefinitely. Mario is also nowhere to be found
7:30 did you here it say "son of a glitch" like if you did
Edit1: wow that’s the most likes I’ve gotten!
In the Boss rooms with the Koopalings, you can actually stand on top of that wall to the left and right, even if you say the room is stuck in the 'top left' corner of the map. Speedruns will do this to catch the wand faster, because if you're offscreen you don't have to fall through the screen at the end of the fight (otherwise you want to catch the wand as close to the ground as possible to fall less far).
7:45 that is an island
he is talking about the cloud
my 3 favorite youtubers all teaming up to do a video?? NICE!!!!!!!!!!!!! 15/10
7:25 Son Of A Glitch
This is clearly wild gaming magic. The Hammer Suit does not appear until the snow world.
Can you do all of this in All Stars or Advance 4?
I can
I didn't bother reading the title, but I am honestly surprised to hear BETA64 in this video.
Please do kingdom hearts!!!!!!
I've been suggesting this as well. Please!
watch the outro fellas
Shesez 😁
One more thing Shesez on the kingdom hearts ep. Try and get the gamers joint or skywardwing to be featured on your ep.
+Propeller Tails That profile picture matches the comment XD.
The one "unused" texture in the castle room was actually a used texture, but a different pallete.