The Kingdom of Philtopia

Ever play Super Mario War? If you haven’t it is essentially Super Mario death match in the setting of SMB1,2,3 and Mario World graphics.

It’s you and 3 other marios trying to stomp, hammer, shell, b-bomb each other to death until you have no lives left. There are other game modes like chicken, ctf and king of the hill to keep it interesting but to put it plainly it is a great multiplayer game.

I decided to see if I could get this running on my Pi and not only just running but also working with my arcade controls.

I downloaded the source yesterday and at first ran into a few basic issues, Installed LibSDL, SDLMixer, SDLImage ,  blah blah blah packages. Long story short I got it working but the backgrounds were garbled, maybe 1 or 2 maps were playable. Refreshing the maps list caused a crash after about 6 maps as well.

Still a success, it was working in some manner at least I thought

Today I was investigating how to correct that issue when I came across a Raspberry Pi Forum post outlining a better and simpler method to get it running and it had a patch. A patch that I had hoped resolved my garbled maps issue.

Script:

wget --no-check-certificate https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/sm/smw-svn/smw-svn.tar.gz
tar -xf smw-svn.tar.gz
cd smw-svn
svn co http://supermariowar.googlecode.com/svn/trunk smw
cd smw
dos2unix configure
chmod +x configure
patch -Np0 < ../gcc.patch
./configure
make

I modified the script slightly to add –no-check-certificate to the wget (as mine failed by default with it not present) and it was off to the races. After about 20 minutes the script had done its job. The SVN was downloaded, patched, configured and compiled.  Once you have run sudo make install you should be able to execute the game with “smw”

Problems

Unfortunately the background issue and map crash was still present. I had noticed however some maps now appeared to work so I started going through the list pruning the unplayable maps and the ones that caused the game to fault.

It’s also occasionally crashy it was a beta after all and despite my efforts I can’t seem to find a copy of the older more stable 1.7 source. Despite the problems it is well worth the effort to install.

Controls

The controls for SMW are 100% customizable for game and menu input. This means anything SDL can detect as an input you can set up. You may need a keyboard at first for menu enter/cancel until you set up a primary controller for that but once that’s covered keyboards can be put away!

The first controller I obviously set up is my arcade controls. Works 100%

Second was a semi busted ps3 controller I have that doesn’t work over bluetooth anymore but still works as usb. The PS3 controller I tried to plug in through my keyboard first but the bus power was too low so I plugged it in directly to the Pi. After that I started SMW and it was detected automatically.

You can have upto 4 players so technically with a good powered hub or 4 bluetooth gamepads you could have a lot of fun with this game