All Star Mario Bros

So you want to play Super Mario All-Stars

I ran into this the other day when someone asked me about playing the SNES Mario compilations on original hardware versus emulation. The short version: Super Mario All-Stars is the 1993 collection that remade the original four NES Mario games with enhanced graphics, music, and the added feature of saving progress via battery backup. It also included Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels as a separate cartridge insert for many copies. The practical problem I keep running into is that finding a complete, working copy in 2026 is genuinely difficult. The battery inside these cartridges died decades ago, and even when you buy one "as is," the save feature won't work unless someone has already replaced the CR2032 cell. I learned this the hard way when I picked up a used copy at a local shop for twelve dollars. It looked fine. Plugged it in, tried to save after completing World 8-4 in SMB2, and got nothing. I opened the cartridge, found the old battery was corroded, desoldered it, and replaced it with a fresh one. Took about twenty minutes and cost me three dollars at RadioShack back when they still existed.

Where to find all star mario bros

If you're looking for the physical cartridge, check eBay, Mercari, and Facebook Marketplace. Avoid listings that say "tested working" without photos of the actual cartridge label — a lot of people sell blank flash carts or empty shells pretending they have the real thing. Authentic copies have the Nintendo seal sticker on the front and the proper label art. The Lost Levels only came with the gold-label "Complete Collection" reprints from later years, so if you want those levels included, look specifically for that version. For emulation, the experience is straightforward. Any decent SNES emulator handles it fine. Snes9x, bsnes, or RetroArch with the bsnes core will all run All-Stars correctly. ROMs are widely available online — search for the SMAS ISO or .smc file. I use RetroArch myself because it lets me apply a CRT shader and set global save states, which is useful since the original battery backup saves are unreliable on real hardware.

Here is something most people miss: the enhanced graphics in All-Stars are not simply upscaled versions of the NES originals. They were redrawn from scratch by Nintendo's art team, which means some sprites behave differently than the NES versions. Level layouts and physics are identical, but sprite dimensions changed slightly, and in Super Mario Bros. 3 there are new palette swaps and animation frames that weren't in the original. If you're speedrunning or doing frame-perfect comparison research, this matters. I found a couple of community runners who didn't account for the sprite difference and got confused when their tool-assisted savestate records didn't match between NES and All-Stars times. The Lost Levels are actually harder than people remember. The original SMB1 was designed with a western audience in mind and was comparatively forgiving. The Lost Levels were originally released as part of the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2, then repurposed as a harder challenge for SMB. When Nintendo bundled it into All-Stars, they kept the difficulty intact. World 4-2 with the fake Block mechanic will wreck unprepared players. I recommend starting here only if you've already beaten the other four games at least once.

A couple of concrete tips that will save you time:

• Use savestates on emulators. The original game only saves at specific checkpoint blocks inside each level. If you die before reaching one, you restart from the beginning of the stage. On emulator, save states bypass this entirely and let you test specific sections without grinding.
• The "1-Up" trick in SMB1 exists. If you get a mushroom near a block in World 1-1 and position Mario so the mushroom falls into the gap before the flagpole, you can pick it back up and repeat the sequence. This gives you extra lives and is especially useful on The Lost Levels where lives are scarce.

There are legitimate downsides to consider. The All-Stars graphics, while improved, still cap out at the original 8-bit color palette for most sprites. Some texture changes look muddy on modern HD displays because the upscaling is crude. If you care about visual fidelity more than authenticity, consider the Super Mario Maker series or the Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury bundle instead. All-Stars is worth playing if you want the actual historical experience — the way these games felt in 1993 with minor polish — but it is not the best-looking Mario collection available today. One more thing: if you play on original SNES hardware and your TV has a component input, use it. The RGB output through the SNES AV multibox or YPbPr adapter produces a noticeably cleaner signal than the standard composite cable. The difference is subtle but real, and it makes the redrawn sprites in All-Stars actually look better than they do through a cheap composite connection. I switched a few months ago and stopped using composite entirely for this game.