Hi everyone. Anyone love Mario Paint?

[JamesO2]

I didn't know the game came with a player guide, much less with sprite work samples to work with! You would know better than I would, but is the color differences possibly due to palette limitations in Mario Paint? 
Or maybe these are prototype sprites they used for development? I'm also very curious with Ganon and Bowser's size differences. The player guide versions seem to be close in size to the player characters. I don't know all of the details of the the SNES, but could this discrepancy be due to trying to keep all character sprites within a given grid size?

The color differences are partly due to Mario Paint itself. It had 15 predefined colors you could choose from, plus one dedicated for transparent pixels. Most of these colors don't match with most SNES game's palettes, so the artists who designed the Player's Guide had to make a lot of artistic liberties to choose the best colors to represent shading, etc.

But part of the color difference is due to modern LCD displays too, as the colors shown on the sprites above would have appeared slightly differently on AV cables on a tube-tv, or through an RF switch cable (what a lot of SNES systems were hooked up with back then). For example, you could mix red and blue pixels in a dither pattern and create a unique purple color -- and on old TVs (which is what Mario Paint was designed for) the image was blurred in a such a way that it genuinely looked purple. But again, with modern LCD screens, this trick doesn't quite work as well, as the human eye can better see the distinct pixel differences.

On top of that, the Player's Guide book is printed on paper, so the ink colors are different yet again from the on-screen pixels. A lot of the artwork in the book seems to have been designed with print media in mind, as they tend to look better in the books ink "palette" versus the actual in-game Mario Paint palette. Another issue is that the pixel images in the Player's Guide appear to be actual screenshots of the game's in-game pixel editor. So this means they're screenshots of a fuzzy AV signal, coming out of a SNES, and then printed onto paper. So there is significant image degradation.

So you get some of the same problems that pixel artists have had trying to copy beta pixel art from screenshots in old magazines. I'm creating two sets of the pixel art found in the book: one with the in-game color palette, and one with a "corrected" palette, based on the Guide Book scans. Here's some comparisons, from a page that contains a huge Megaman sprite:



As far as I'm aware, this spritework doesn't exist any game files. It's unique art to the Mario Paint Player's Guide.

And here's some examples from some Street Fighter 2 pages, comparing the Mario Paint version to the official sprite art:

As you can see, the artist who redid these sprites for the Book, didn't copy them exactly, instead making a recreation that is loosely based off the official Street Fighter 2 spritework. Above, I made 2 versions of Ken, because it's hard to tell Orange, Red, and Brown apart in the book (due to them likely using cheaper inks/printing techniques in  the 90's). So there's a bit of guesswork on my part too.

I find all this stuff fascinating, because these are unique spriteworks published by Nintendo, that were only published in print media form.

Another issue, is that SNES didn't have square pixels in a 1:1 ratio, like modern screens. The SNES output an 8:7 ratio, meaning the pixels were a little wider than they are tall. This is actually reflected in some of the Player's Guide art, as well as a lot of SNES games -- the artists took this squash into account. For example, there are some pixel arts that are actually oval on modern screens, because they designed them with the SNES 8:7 output in mind!

Anyway, you can view the whole book online here, so you can see for yourself what kind of art is in there:
https://archive.org/details/Nintendo_Pla...3/mode/2up

You can flip through it with the arrow keys.

There's sprites and artwork from all sorts of sources in there: including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons, Battle Toads, Plok, Star Wars, tons of sports teams, and tons more of totally unique works of art. There's even some artwork of Wayne's World and Michael Jackson! It's a wild piece of media. I don't know how much they paid to get all those difference licenses!

Also, thanks for the warm welcome.