Talk:Dr. Mario

Does anyone know exactly how slow the cascade speed is? --Lardarse 22:48, 20 April 2007 (EDT)

During a cascade, the playfield is scanned from bottom to top, and any piece above empty cells is moved down by one row. This process takes 16 frames, one for each row of the 8x16 cell playfield. I imagine that the process is so slow due to the limited proficiency of the developers for exploiting the NES video bandwidth. --Tepples 23:09, 20 April 2007 (EDT)

So every 15 frames, because it's one frame lower than it was last scan loop? --Lardarse 13:32, 21 April 2007 (EDT)

Correct. But I might be off by one, having not single-stepped in a while. --Tepples 22:18, 21 April 2007 (EDT)

Gravity

I drafted a possible update to the Gravity section: User:BaviH/Dr._Mario_Gravity. I wanted to get some feedback before replacing the existing Gravity section.

• Is the information about specific memory addresses and CRC32 checksums acceptable or off-topic on Tetris.Wiki?
• Other sections in the Dr. Mario article are prefixed with "NES version". I assume the current gravity information is NES-only as well?

-- BaviH (talk) 19:13, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

ROM checksums are unnecessary, I think. We do have memory addresses on a few pages, so I think it should be okay to leave those in. Apart from that I think we can add it to the page now. As for other versions, I don't think the Game Boy version has been investigated enough, the page could use some more info on that. Arcorann (talk) 03:41, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

Virus Generation max level

Possibly a question for User:Nightmareci:

I'm curious about the level cap in step 1---it seems to generate sequences that look out of place compared to those I see in-game. It seems like perhaps step 7.3 of the algorithm allows for going above max_row, and due to the iterative way the algorithm runs, seems to always do that in the leftmost column/s of the (max_row+1)th row. On level 20, it seems to do this maybe half the time. Here's a few examples of what I've seen:

     ====          ====          ====   
     |  |          |  |          |  |   
  +--+  +--+    +--+  +--+    +--+  +--+
  |        |    |        |    |        |
  |        |    |        |    |        |
  |ZZOO    |    |XOO     |    |Z       |
  |ZZXOZXOO|    |ZXOO XXZ|    |ZZXXZZOO|
  |XOZXXZOO|    | X Z OOZ|    |XXZOXXOZ|
  |OX ZO XX|    |OZXX ZZ |    |XOOZ OXX|
  |ZZOO XZZ|    |   OXXZO|    |ZZOX    |
  |XZZ  O Z|    |ZX ZZ OX|    |OXXOZZ O|
  |XX  O XO|    |XXOZ OOX|    |OOXZ  O |
  | OOZX Z |    |XZOOXZ O|    |XOZZXOOX|
  | ZOOXXOZ|    |O XXZ XO|    |X  XX  O|
  |Z XXZZ X|    |ZXXZ OZX|    |ZZOOZZXO|
  | XZZOOZX|    |XZZOOZZX|    | OX Z OZ|
  |XXO  O Z|    |OZZO   Z|    |OXZZXOOZ|
  |ZOX   OO|    |ZOOZXO  |    |XXZO  XO|
  | OX ZZOX|    | OXXZOX |    |  OOZ XX|
  +--------+    +--------+    +--------+

I got results more in line with what I was expecting by changing the 17 in that step to max_row. However, I don't know enough about the algorithm to know if that change is fully correct, or if I'm just misunderstanding something in the algorithm on the page. I'm curious to see what others think.

Happy to share the code that generated this, too, if that's of interest.

Chandlerswift (talk) 05:15, 23 October 2020 (UTC)