If you grew up with an 8-bit Nintendo console, then your childhood was tainted by a well-oiled propaganda machine promoting vices ranging from sodomy to the metric system. The Japanese, who were still angry about losing World War II to Godzilla, deployed Mario Bros. in 1983 as a weapon through which to bring about the downfall of the Western world. Originally, Mario Bros. was not supposed to have any abbreviations in its title since shortened words displease the emperor, but Nintendo could only translate part of the word “brothers” due to budget constraints and a desire to keep their propaganda hero away from the touchy subject of race relations. For the same reasons, the original 12-brother cast was scaled back to just two. The extra plumbers would have expanded the hero lineup well beyond the standard red and green. Each of the forgotten characters could be described by one of the following words: yellow, blue, pink, invisible, wheelchair-bound, morbidly obese, heavily irradiated, perpetually drunk, attracted to animals, and serving twenty-five to life. Here is a brief examination of a few of the characters and enemies that did make the cut for Mario Bros. and the dangers they pose to modern society.

Everyone over the age of sixteen knows that Goomba was the teen heartthrob of the 1980s. This is somewhat unnerving since Goombas are walking mushrooms with overgrown eyebrows. Nintendo basically taught a generation of children to procreate with fungus. Contrary to common belief, Goombas are not dumb. Most graduate from community colleges, and a few have even managed to earn master’s degrees in fields ranging from growing on rotten logs to slowly walking back and forth. In fact, the observant will notice that the word Goomba ends with the acronym “MBA.” Unfortunately, Goombas are more or less extinct thanks to Mario’s senseless multi-game murder spree.

Koopa Troopa has always been a highly suspicious enemy because he just doesn’t seem that dangerous. I can say from personal experience that it is not very hard to jump on a turtle. Furthermore, I was disappointed to find that instead of shooting off in the distance as a deadly projectile, the shell pretty much stays where it is after making a few crunching noises. Koopa Troopa is actually an attempt by Nintendo to train the American soldiers of tomorrow to jump on reptiles, thereby making them vulnerable to the famous Japanese turtle-shaped landmine. Nintendo is also promoting its leftist agenda with this enemy since Koopa Troopa is a slang term for the masculine partner in a lesbian relationship.

Through Shy Guy, Nintendo taught a generation of youngsters that the best way to treat social anxiety disorder is by jumping on it with an overweight Italian plumber. Maybe Shy Guy would fit in and make some friends if he stopped dressing like a serial killer. In fact, Shy Guy’s original name was “Midget Jason.” Unless he was formerly an NHL superstar, Shy Guy should have realized that wearing a hockey mask is not the best way to cover embarrassing acne. In the Mario Bros. series, Shy Guy’s main weapons include listening to emo and writing angst-filled entries on LiveJournal.

Any self-respecting American should be wary of Mario for two reasons. First, Mario is supposed to be an Italian plumber, yet Italy doesn’t have indoor plumbing. Second, Mario is allegedly an Italian created by a Japanese game company, yet Italy and Japan don’t even exist on the same planet. If Mario came walking down my street, I’d lock my door based on those two factors alone, but there are many more questions that have never been answered.

For instance, if Mario is supposed to be a plumber, why is he wearing overalls, the one lower body covering that makes plumber’s crack absolutely impossible? Furthermore, if he can jump fifteen feet in the air, why doesn’t he play basketball? One can only conclude that Mario had the worst high school guidance counselor on the planet – if he graduated from high school at all. There is no reason to believe that Mario has any formal education since he never demonstrates the ability to read write. In other words, Nintendo sent American children a hero who gave up a lucrative NBA deal to pursue a career as an illiterate plumber in a country without running water. The Japanese haven’t been this direct with an attempt to destroy America since they sank the Titanic.

These are just a few of the videogames that are bringing about the ruin of Western civilization. Check back tomorrow to learn the dangers posed by pinball and Chinese checkers.

I've been really busy working on the new dynarec engine, so I've not been posting as frequently as I'd like. I've made a lot of progress in the following areas:

Most integer arithmetic and logical instructions now implemented (i.e I'm now generating optimised assembly for these instructions rather than calling a generic function to handle them

Regsiter caching implemented (although I'm only using a greedy allocation algorithm at the moment, as I've not yet fully implemented the fast linear scan algorithm I talked about in the previous post)

I'm directly linking all direct branches to compiled fragments

I'm linking to all indirect branch targets

So far I'd say I'm around 40-50% through the work on the dynarec engine.

Now for some stats The following table compares the framerates at various points (previous framerate is for the R4 release of Daedalus, current framerate is for my most recent development build):

Previous Framerate (Hz) Current Framerate (Hz)

Mario Head 3 6
Mario Main Menu 14 25
Mario Peach Letter 6-7 11
Mario Flyby (under bridge) 6 10
Mario In Game 5-6 9
Mario Kart Nintendo logo 10 23
Mario Kart Flag 6 11
Mario Kart Menu 7 11
Zelda Nintendo Logo 20 23
Zelda Start Menu 2-3 4
Zelda Main Menu 10 13

Overall I'd say the dynarec is currently achieving up to a 100% speedup in the roms I've tested, which I'm very excited about. Mario is certainly starting to feel a lot more playable, and the Mario Kart menus are a lot more responsive now.

I specifically included Zelda in the results because I'm not seeing the same kind of results there, so I need to take a closer look at what's going on there (it's quite possible it's just using a few of the arithmetic and logical ops I've not spent time optimising yet).

A twofold improvement in framerate is pretty good, but I now think I can do a lot better. Here's the list of things I currently have on my 'TODO' list:

Fully implement all the remaining integer ops (including all the 64 bit instructions)
Finalise implementation of the fast linear scan register allocation algorithm

Keep track of 'known' values for specific registers and use this to optimise the generated code (e.g. most of the time the top half of the N64's 64 bit registers is just sign extended from the lower half)

Cache the memory location pointer to by the N64 stack pointer (SP) and optimise load/stores using this register as a base pointer

Optimise all memory access instructions (currently all the cached registers get flushed for all memory accesses other than LW/SW/LWC1 and SWC1)

Detect and optimise 'busy wait' loops (e.g. many roms sit in a tight loop waiting for the next vertical blank interrupt to fire which is just wasting cycles on the PSP)

Implement all the branching instructions (I've currently only implemented BNE, BEQ, BLEZ and BGTZ)

Implement instructions and register caching for all the cop1 (floating point coprocessor) instructions. (I think this will give a huge speedup.)

Although the list is quite short, there's quite a lot of work there. What I'm quite excited about is that I think these changes will start to provide significant speedups as they're implemented. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but I'm starting to feel that certain roms are going to be very playable in the not too distant future.

I'm going to try and release a new version of the emulator soon. Unfortunately it's probably not going to be this weekend (due to various social commitments); towards the end of the following week is more likely. I'd certainly like to get a version released before the World Cup starts and all my free time is taken up watching football

-StrmnNrmn