editing sprite palettes super mario kart

In terms of the NES, a sprite is just a drawing composed of a set of 8 by 8 pixel tiles. Each sprite-group can only use 4 colours, with one of those colours used for transparency. When the Goomba walks across the screen, the sprite is flipped to animate a walking motion.Įach character in the game uses a combination of tiles to draw and animate their movements, for example: a Goomba's sprite is composed of 4 tiles stacked two rows high and two columns wide. For Mario things get a bit more complicated.Mario runs, jumps, crouches, swims, and becomes Super! Each of these actions need to be animated on screen in some way, while keeping within the NES restrictions on colour use and rom storage space.įor my Super Lupo Bros. project, an important part was to switch the Mario sprite into something that looked a bit more like me. Riggs demonstrates how all of the Super Mario Bros.īut how do you change graphics in a game that already exists? To figure out this process, this youtube video by John Riggs was very helpful.

cart data in the NES rom can be inspected visually using a program called Tile Layer Pro (TLP). To get a sense of what is involved, take a look below to see how I've changed the Mario sprites to Max sprites: Using TLP, the sprite data can be viewed and edited, allowing you modify the existing graphics. In the gif above, the left side shows the first four tiles which compose Mario's upper torso, and the right side shows a sample of the subsequent tiles used in the game. Note that the whole graphic is made from screengrabs of Nixel, a browser based sprite editor.

Editing sprite palettes super mario kart