Try, Try Again - Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, Issue 11 (Patreon)

Welcome back to Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone.

I cannot apologize enough for neglecting the Patreon for the last few months. I admit I have a problem with trying to bring my content up to the best quality I can; if I feel that I am unable to do so, I choose not to publish it if it is not up to my standards. As you can see, this results in sometimes lengthy periods of inactivity. I have spent the time leading up to this thinking about how much this hinders my work, and how to overcome this tendency. I will try to do my best from now on to prioritize the regularity of my content over other concerns. Of course, it would be completely reasonable for you to doubt me given my previous track record, so I will once again restate my refund policy:

You are entitled to refunds in any amount up to the entirety of your contributions over the course of supporting my Patreon. I will issue all refunds without question, and as soon as possible, upon request. Please do not hesitate to ask for refunds as I understand completely that any promises I have made to deliver a certain amount of value were not kept in full, so I am not entitled to your support.

That said, if you have decided to continue supporting me, I am extremely grateful and I will try my best to provide content that will hopefully make it worth the contribution starting from this month onward. To everyone else: I am deeply sorry to have failed you. I hope you will still be able to enjoy the daily content on my three public sites.

Today, I have something special: graphical rips of Super Mario Bros. Deluxe that, to my knowledge, do not currently exist anywhere else on the Internet. 

The Unseen Prints

Super Mario Bros. Deluxe is one of the only two games in the greater Mario franchise to support the Game Boy Printer accessory - the other one being the Game Boy Color release of Donkey Kong Country. The Game Boy Printer was reasonably popular at the time of its release in 1998, but support quickly ceased and now the devices are rare and the special paper used for them even more so.

This leads to the unfortunate state of affairs that most people currently playing Super Mario Bros. Deluxe have no means of seeing the Game Boy Printer-exclusive content (especially those playing it on the 3DS Virtual Console, as that one cannot connect to the printer at all). 

Now, if you have played the game, you may think this is not a big deal; after all, the game does show previews of all the printer-exclusive images on-screen, meaning you would not actually miss out on anything save being able to hold the pictures in your hand. However, that is not entirely true: the previews are in many cases less detailed than the printed images.

Emulators exist that are able to extract printer data from the game. I went through the entirety of the printable content in Super Mario Bros. Deluxe and extracted it, which to my knowledge is the first time anyone has published this online. I will now present the findings with some commentary about the differences between the in-game previews and the printed versions. Note that the preview is always either to the left or above the printed image. The source of all images in this article is myself.

Let us begin. The printable images in the game are divided between the album, the Toy Box, and the scoreboard. The album contains elaborate artwork, but what the average player doesn't see is that some of it is much more elaborate when printed than when it is displayed.

On the first page of the album are the awards, gained by beating various game modes. Take a look at the difference between the Peach Award's in-game image (left) and the printed image (right):

Due to the printer utilizing a roll of paper, it can print tall images (or long images if turned sideways) that would be impossible to display on the Game Boy's screen. Here is the Mario Award:

These each take up 3 screens worth of space; not even the SNES would have been able to display these at full resolution at once. 

The printer is able to utilize shading since it does not print in color; this will be visible even more clearly in later images, but for now, note the metallic effect on the octagon around Yoshi and how much more elaborate it looks than the in-game version.

Same with the shading on the ribbons around Toad; there is even a dithering effect on the shadowed portion of his spots.

The Bowser Award has a horned skull in the middle that is hard to notice in the in-game version; in addition, the added resolution allows angry veins to be depicted next to his eye in the illustration.

Now, let's take a look at the second page of the album, which depicts single-screen scenes of friendly characters. These do not have dramatic changes in the printed versions, however, the printer is able to smooth the lines with extra shading, giving them a more polished look.

On a regular printer a black background would be a waste of ink; of course, the Game Boy Printer is a thermal printer, meaning it uses special paper that darkens when heat is applied instead of ink. This allows it to darken as many pixels as desired with only battery power being used. Note the subtle anti-aliasing around Mario's nose and glove.

Same here; especiall Mario's mustache looks much smoother.

Note the more detailed three-color dithering near the top of the vine instead of the in-game two-color dithering.

This image is a good example of the smoothing being applied. The top of Luigi's hat looks very rough on the left, but much more rounded on the right.

This image has an actual difference in line art between the versions; note Peach's crown. Peach's belt is also a different color from her dress in the printed version, adding detail.

The places where the smoothing works the best are long lines at a slight angle to the horizontal or vertical; see Peach's gloves. In the colored version, the pixels are clearly visible, while the printed version looks almost like vector artwork.

Funnily, the stray light pixel to the upper right of the coin is present in both versions, and is much more noticeable in the printed version.

Once again, Mario's glove benefits from the anti-aliasing. The black shading on the overalls also produces a more striking effect, although this is of course subjective.

The printed Yoshi looks smooth enough to be a scan from a manual.

On the third page, enemies are displayed.

The Blooper is a rare case of the dithering being less elaborate in the printed version compared to the in-game artwork, although the latter suffers from looking as though it was improperly resized with stray pixels everywhere. The colored version look much better at a distance, but the printed one's lines are cleaner.

Perhaps the most striking example of the anti-aliasing in action is the Hammer Bro. The lines on his torso are very rough in the in-game artwork compared to the individual pixels being nearly invisible in the printed picture.

The Spiny's colored version includes stray yellow pixels on the shell that were cleaned up for the printed version.

Pages 4 and 5 each contain one picture that is unlocked by collecting four parts of it; defeating each of the Fake Bowsers (and the real Bowser) in the different worlds with fireballs opens up a new part. 

Page 4 has this Bowser artwork, the head of which was used for the Bowser Award seen earlier. Strangely, although the printed version is more detailed, the in-game one has extra shading. This cannot actually be printed at once with the Game Boy Printer; instead it prints the left and right column separately and those need to be pasted together by the player.

The last page shows Mario and Luigi. In this one, it is the printed version that has added shading, except on the faces, where the colored one is more detailed. For an unknown reason, there are also regular discolored pixels on Luigi's shoes. I believe this is a side-effect of extremely sparse dithering that was not caught in production.

If all album images are collected, the cover of the album also becomes available:

Next up, the Toy Box. Three of the features inside support the printer: the Calendar, the Fortune Telling game, and the Mystery Room. 

The calendar suffers when printed from the lack of color for Saturdays and Sundays, as well as very hard-to-distinguish black symbols on dark gray background for the flags.

The date screen looks largely the same but swaps out the text background for black on white.

The fortunes have slightly different fonts in the images (best seen in Mario's "V" in "Very Lucky") but are otherwise similar to the in-game versions.

Finally, there is the Mystery Room, which contains the highest amount of printable material in the game. There are 7 Toads and Princess Peach, each of whom offers a different selection of printable images. Four of the Toads offer images that are presented on-screen in black and white, and come out absolutely identically when printed; I will not present those here. Instead I will concentrate on the ones that are different when printed.

One of the Toads offers banners of logos of Nintendo products:

This Nintendo logo may be the highest-resolution Nintendo logo in the data of any Mario game, which is impressive given that the game is 20 years old at the time of this writing. The only slight issue is the uneven bottom of the "t"; otherwise, this looks nearly identical to vector artwork.

Here, the "I" in "Entertainment" is one pixel too short on the top, but otherwise perfect.

This one is as close to perfect as the resolution allows.

This graphic is unique to this game; also note how the N64 logo has its edges emphasized with white lines in the printed version; this is not visible in the preview and not the case with the actual N64 logo.

The Super Mario Bros. logo is the largest printable graphic in the data that is not customizable; it takes a whopping 8 screens of printing. 

Speaking of customizable graphics, the next Toad has banners with enterable text. However, instead of being printed all in one screen, each letter is large, taking up about 40% of a screen. If the entirety of the message field is used, the resulting print takes 26 screens - and a roll of Game Boy Printer paper lasts for 180 screens, so just under 7 of these maximum-length banners. I have used the message "TEST" here to save space.

This is the borderless variant.

The "Nintendo logo" border would have been very impressive with a Nintendo font, but unfortunately, it remains the same as the other banners.

An elaborate Piranha Plant border. Strangely, the preview shows prominent leaves under the heads, but on the printed image, only the upper left head has leaves.

Finally, a border with sprites from the game. Note how the ground tiles do not transition smoothly, but instead cut off right after the hill and before the castle due to the dynamic length of the message.

The final Toad has more customizable banners:

This one has probably the most amount of detail that can only be seen with the printer. There are tiny A and B buttons as well as Heart, Mushroom and Star buttons. There is also very three-dimensional-looking shading on the antenna.

This name card provides us with a more detailed version of the Super Mario Bros. design of the Super Mushroom, which has been supplanted by the ubiquitous design with eyes from Super Mario Bros. 3.

The font on this one is very odd, particularly the bad kerning in "Music".

There is also this banner to print your own dice. Note that each of the die faces is the size of a Game Boy screen, so the die has to be quite large. 

Finally, there is Peach, who has four printable images:

Most of these look the same, except for the last one, where the colors are inverted.

Lastly, the scoreboard has only two printable screens, the Rankings and the challenge mode totals:

To optimize for readability, the background was changed to white in the rankings.

I hope these graphical rips were of interest to those who have always wondered what the printed versions of those images looked like.

This concludes today's article. Thank you very much for reading.