超级马里奥 · Super Mario in Emacs text

A side-scrolling platformer drawn entirely with ordinary Emacs characters and faces. Every brick, question block, pipe, coin, enemy and Mario is a small character picture composed by hand; nothing paints a scene background, so the buffer's own theme background shows through. The world runs on a deterministic 60 Hz simulation, which makes the game reproducible in a headless test as well as in a graphical Emacs.

Capabilities

• Four original stages: a daylit plain, an underground corridor, a sky of floating platforms and a castle over lava. Each owns its map, enemy spawns, time limit and palette.
• Walking, running, held jumps, coyote time and jump buffering; block bumps release coins, mushrooms, fire flowers and stars.
• Goombas squash, koopas turn into kickable shells, fireballs and stomps work, and lava, pits and the level clock each end a life.
• Character-grid art: one world block is four characters wide and two text rows tall, bottom aligned. Adjacent blocks join into one border, and the two halves of a pipe form one rim without a seam.
• A camera that scrolls in single character cells and keeps the player a third of the way in; actors keep their offset inside their block, so walking does not jump a whole block at a time.
• A HUD with score, coins, world, time, power badge and lives, plus title, pause, settings, level-select and result dialogs.
• Best score and unlocked stages persist between sessions.

Prerequisites

Requirement	Why	Check
Emacs 29.1 or newer	the ETAF runtime	emacs --version
ecss, ebox, etaf, etaf-ui	the framework and catalog components	every root entry is on load-path

No external game engine, database or network service is used.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/emacs-taf/ecss.git
git clone https://github.com/emacs-taf/ebox.git
git clone https://github.com/emacs-taf/etaf.git
git clone https://github.com/emacs-taf/etaf-ui.git
git clone https://github.com/emacs-taf/etaf-mario.git

Add every provider root and this repository to load-path:

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/ecss")
(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/ebox")
(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/etaf")
(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/etaf-ui")
(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/etaf-mario")
(require 'etaf-mario)

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c m") #'etaf-mario-open)

M-x etaf-mario-open opens the game on a title screen over a paused stage; the optional prefix argument is a zero-based stage index.

Keys

Input	Action
← / →	Walk; hold with X to run
Z	Jump; hold for a higher jump
X	Run, or throw a fireball once Mario has the fire flower
↓	Duck as big Mario
P	Pause or resume
R	Restart the current stage
S	Settings (frame rate, jump feel, light or dark palette)
T	Switch the light and dark palette
F1 / ?	Searchable help with the effective keys
Q	Quit

Configuration

Variable	Meaning
etaf-mario-appearance	Initial palette: auto (follow the frame), light or dark
etaf-mario-frame-rate	Canvas refresh rate for new games: 30 (default) or 60
etaf-mario-jump-feel	Jump height for new games: normal, high or low
etaf-mario-progress-file	File remembering the best score and unlocked stages

Checks

make check   # structure, compilation, API and headless behavior scenarios

The headless scenarios drive the deterministic world, parse every bundled level, and assert the rendered characters row by row; they do not compare screenshots. The real GUI acceptance recipe is in docs/architecture.md.

Documentation

• Architecture — responsibilities, data flow, invariants and GUI acceptance.
• Package entry — the supported API inventory.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later; see LICENSE.