Mario Paint, Nintendo’s weird but beloved image, animation and music creation tool from way back on the SNES, is an anomaly. As with the Gameboy Camera and everything else Nintendo makes that has creation as its purpose, so much love went into it! It has an interface with whimsical characters like the Save Robot and Undodog! There are jolly icons representing the musical notes in the music maker! You can play with the title screen! Totaka’s Song is hidden there! There are randomized startup and erase animations! There’s that fly swatting minigame! Homestar Runner wouldn’t have existed without Mario Paint! I could, and should, go on, but I should more get to the point.
The point is, Mario Paint was also pretty unsuited to its hardware. I mentioned recently the fact that the cartridge doesn’t actually have enough memory to save all of its data and tries to use data compression to make everything fit, which, due to the nature of compression, doesn’t always work. Also, Mario Paint came with the SNES mouse which it requires, packed in, raising its price and increasing it even more in the aftermarket. And, worst of all: you can only save one image to the cart at a time, and the official supported way to preserve your work, as the Brothers Chaps did with the Homestar Runner link above, is to record it using a VCR.
This sounds like the kind of thing the hacking community could solve, but a rapid Google search (I’m running out of time in making this post) doesn’t turn up anything, even though I’m sure this exists somewhere. Someone on hackaday.io says they’re working on a physical device that could rescue the image off of a Mario Paint cartridge, and would even have an LCD screen built into it so you could see a cart’s image saved onto it, which I’m sure would have blown a young Mark and Matt Chapman’s minds long ago. But the last update was in 2023.
Going the other way, putting outside images onto a Mario Paint save, is not only possible but there’s a tool to do it automatically, hosted, awesomely, on Neocities.
There’s speculation that Nintendo themselves might do something with Mario Paint and the Switch Online service on the Switch 2. The Joycons on that system can be used as mice! But given the direction Nintendo’s been going with Sw2 (“switwo”) it’d probably be a paid feature, and nothing’s even been hinted at yet so who the hell knows. But imagine support for exporting Mario Paint images to your SD card, or onto your smartphone?
