Screentendo Turns your Computer Screen into a Playable Mario Level

Screentendo may be the answer if you are bored at work and wish to put off your work. GAMING

This app lets you transform any website into a playable game for the famous 1980s Nintendo classic Mario Bros.

And the creator of the app has provided step-by-step directions to help transform the pages into blocks - but it requires a certain level of knowledge in coding to use.

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A developer from London has developed Super Mario code for Macs. It's called Screentendo It makes use of a window to change a website into 'blocks'. Mario can then be controlled around the stage, like in the game. However, it requires a bit of coding to enable the feature. Screentendo created the MailOnline logo.

Screentendo was designed by Aaron Randall, a London-based developer.

By dragging a window over a web page, various components can be transformed into blocks from the Super Mario games.

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Mario himself appears later and allows players to move around the makeshift level and to destroy the blocks.

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The list includes arcade trailblazers Pong and Space Invaders, smartphone favourites Angry Birds and Minecraft and a variety of other games for consoles and computers.

They are: Doom, FIFA soccer The Legend of Zelda, the Oregon Trail, Pac-Man, Pokemon, the Sims, Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario Bros, Tetris and World of Warcraft.

And to actually use it, you'll have to be proficient in altering source code, and using the program CocoaPods.

He explained that Screentendo starts with transparent windows that can be moved and adjusted to fit over other applications.

"After placing the Screentendo Window over a specific area of the screen and pressing inside it, the application will render an appropriate level dependent on the content below it."

MailOnline was informed by Mr Randall that he developed the app in 'just ' a few days.

The most complex part of this app was the image processing - making the application take any image, and comprehend the structure of the image in a way that can be used to generate an appropriate game level,' he said.

He said it works on any website, however it performs best on pages that have 'distinct contrast'.

Screentendo is an adaptation of the early Super Mario Bros game, screen shots of which are shown. For the moment, Screentendo is only available for Macs. The code can be downloaded from GitHub. Mr Randall states that the app is very much an experimental hack currently, and has a few flaws

Mr Randall added that he constructed it because he loves building things, especially smaller projects like this.'

He said: 'It's an excellent excuse to study new frameworks and languages and to try to solve some interesting problems you wouldn't normally tackle.

'The idea came from an exchange with a colleague at work. He is a much of his time looking at graphs which monitor our servers. I joked with him about one day I'd design an app to overlay these graphs, transforming them into something interesting to look at.

MailOnline was told by Mr. Randall that he created the program in just several days. The most difficult part of this program was the image processing - making the program look at any image, and understand the underlying structure of the image in a way that could be used to create the game's level,' he explained.

"A few weeks later, we had a hackday at my office (where everyone spends the day working on whatever they want) and I whipped something that later became Screentendo.'

On his website, he explains that the app at moment is an experiment in proof-of-concept hacking which has a few shortcomings.

He stated that the phyiscs were a bit off. He wanted to create something that worked well enough'.

Continue reading:

AaronRandall/Screentendo * GitHub

Screentendo | Aaron Randall