Mario Paint "Data Over Flow" error 

Imagine as a kid, it’s night. You’re all alone. you make a masterpiece in Mario paint. And save it. And this happens

Surprising that it has such error handling for a game of its age.

Imagine trying to save a recreation of the Mona Lisa and this happens

For those who don't know: Mario Paint splits saving into three steps: 100-25: Compress the data for storing within NVRAM 25-12: Erase the old NVRAM data 12-0: Write data to NVRAM (the amount of time this takes depends on how much needs to be saved) If it reaches 0 (indicating that the save memory has been completely filled) before all the data is saved, it errors out like what's shown here. Pretty remarkable that Nintendo added such an error handler, considering this is such an extreme edge case.

The music that plays when the robot is trying to save your image is pretty cool

YOOO, I KNEW I WASN'T MAKING IT UP! Thanks for posting! The thought of having seen an error screen like this was killing me, because it was a very vivid memory, but it wasn't documented anywhere until now

not only is it crazy to even program an error handler for something that would almost never happen, but to dedicate any amount of limited memory to the smoke animation and the explosion sound effect (although the sound effect may be used elsewhere in the program, most likely...)

The robot is working hard and taking a long time to do his task. This is because the game compresses the images and music before saving it to the cart's battery backed ram which is a very CPU intensive task. But why did the robot fail at the task he was assigned to perform? Any piece of data that is made up mostly of the same bytes (like a simple drawing of a red house against a solid blue background will compress down to a very tiny size. A complicated piece of colorful art with many bytes that are different from each other will not compress so much, and it's possible that it wouldn't be compressed enough to fit in the save RAM of the cart. And why the overflow error. All compression algorithims including modern ones have this issue due to the way compression generally works. Lets say: Top half of screen is white bottom half is green and the screen is 200 by 200 pixels. The algorithim would only have to store something like White pixels 1 to 20,000 Green pixels 20,001 to 40,000 Now if the screen is top white, middle red, and bottom green the algorithim has to store it as White pixels 1 to 13,333 (give or take) Red pixels 13,333 to 26,666 Green pixels 26,666 to 40,000 You can see that the compressed data grew and it will continue to grow as more unique things are added to the image, even if it's something as simple as a black dot. If there are enough 'unique' elements on the screen that the compression has to have descriptions of, the less effective the compression actually is and it might not compress down the images enough to fit in the tiny amount of save ram a SNES cart typically has.

The robot looks like something out of Machinarium. Such a simple yet uncanny looking design

at least an error message that really tells what happened. Today's error messages are just like "LOL PROBLEM!" and if asking for support it like tells you to restart your router, reinstall the game, reinstall windows, shove a light bulb up your left ear and pet The Elephant's Foot.

My dreams of making magic eye puzzles in Mario Paint have been shattered.

0:12 that music, combined with the robot gives me chills.

Moral of the story: don't attempt to recreate a Jackson Pollock painting in Mario Paint

I don't think that sound effect is even used anywhere else

This isn’t really as scary as people think it’s just a goofy robot with a smoke coming out of its ears animation for overflowing and malfunctioning which is a neat addition

That robot and music would’ve scared me and given me nightmares as a little kid

i cant be the only one who just randomly press this, hear this song and go "omg, wtf this song was from this??"

"And that means you made a masterpiece my little painter boy" Me to my child if i ever give him this instead of Paint

The mario paint robot already freaks me out, i would be terrified if I saw this

noone talks about the small Mario peeking near the bomb icon 😢

The robot is already scary enough lmaooo

Wait that's the origin of the bot and his song? I thought it was from Mario Maker!

Mario Paint was pretty underrated. So as a child.. prior to me having Mario Paint, I used a VTech Video Painter to play around with art on screen. It was a canvas like device you used with a pen that connected to the TV through RCA Video. There were a couple of things you could do with it, but Mario Paint surpassed every aspect of that device. By having mouse support, and being able to not only make drawings, Mario Paint also let you create basic music and animations, or just color. And it came with a cool bonus game as well. Wish Nintendo kept on making 'creation' studio-like 'games' that could inspire people into creative arts of music and animation. An excellent effort for game creation came from Mario Maker though.

what if you wanted to go to heaven but god said DATA OVER FLOW

That robot is terrifying

Nintendo HATES Jackson Pollock!

So this is where the Mario Maker Coursebot Music originated

Mario and Sonic were such mortal enemies in 90s that Mario even had to rival Sonic in giving kids nightmares with spooky hidden message imagery.

wow they actually programmed that in as a function? wonder how many people have ever seen this till now?

So I tried it by using all the colors with the spray paint and... IT FRICKING WORKED!!

The robot is so unsettling even brfore the error...

Man even just the robot loading normally is unsettling. It’s probably a mix of the song and the weird robot “lips”

I always wondered if this was possible but I've never been able to create anything that could do this.

It’s crazy we *just now* found this error in this game that’s been out since the 90’s. What other old games could we find hidden errors like this in?

i was today years old when i found out the coursebot music is also from mario paint holy shit

The music is kinda lit tho 💀

To be fair, why would you ever what to save something like *THAT*

It just stopped at 12. Only for it to stop. I’ve NEVER seen this before!

Welp, that's a new one to me and I played Dr. Mario religiously back in the day. Good find!

I like how the data overload song is practically “Magic Penny” by Malvina Records. Nintendo is all for going against copyright infringement laws, unless it’s their property that’s being infringed upon.

This is one of the most important videos on RU-vid.

SimEarth for SNES actually has a similar condition if there are too many entities on the planet - it will give you a popup that it can only save enough of them to a certain point and the rest will be discarded.

I like how the music changes to a level finished type tune as soon as the data overflow error occurs

Never knew you could burn out the robot. Now I guess it only handle certain bitmaps, but not all of em. Well that's some creativity now flushed!

Imagine you’re a kid, playing this on the computer in the basement, and it’s completely dark because you stayed up until 11 working on your masterpiece. And then this shit happens

This feels like nightmare fuel for a 5 year old

"IT WONT GO SMALLER THAN 12" "reject it"

Ngl I’d be scared if that appeared on my tv at 3 am

so that robot is how the coursebot was born in super mario maker...

Newly documented for the world!

WOW extra points for the coder to cover this case!

Never got this error back in the day, very interesting!

This is the best error handling I've seen.

That robot would scare the living daylight out of me if I ever saw it as a kid 😅 I was already traumatized enough with the Valve guy with a valve in his eye 😅 On top of that my aunt made up a super creepy story to explain that pic: apparently that guy cried too much and had doctors put a valve in place of his eye to be able to control his crying 😂

I'm surprise they make an error animation like if they was expecting this to happen in the future.

I like how it continues playing the music like nothing ever happened. It’s like, “welp shit, oh well”

I keep getting recommended this video and i love rewatching it

This is definitely one of the videos of all time

Static is the most convoluted picture a TV screen can interpret. A scrambled, chaotic signal of waste

i enjoy how the music just resumes like nothing’s happening

That high-pitched whistly instrument that comes in around 0:35 reminds me of that sound Bill Wurtz uses to underscore bad things like deadly lazers or eating porridge (but you've heated it for the wrong amount of time)

this tune kicks ass

Pretty funny how the music changes, it makes the error feel like a "game over" screen

I like how this silly sqrl video randomly got recommended to me ;3

Imagine actually putting hours into something in Mario Paint, wait for it to save cuz you really like it, and this happens

Congratulations, you beat the game. :3

As if that damn thing wasn’t horrifying enough

so this is where the Coursebot theme originates

semi-unrelated but i really do love how mario paint stuff was used in the mario maker games

Interesting thought experiment: * For every possible image, either store the raw image or a compressed one depending which is smaller in bytes. This will be a subset of them where the size is small enough to also encompass the data of how it was compressed. * This is apparently impossible mathematically? (Due to the pigeonhole principle). * Maybe not? There are a couple of caveats. Some images raw would be smaller than the set number of bytes (e.g. "3" is smaller in digits than "3849"). And the raw ones which just happen to have the compression sequence could be a mix up. So this would have to perfectly cancel out if it was a perfect compression algorithm.

It amazes me that nintendo cared so much that they put a error handling of this kind in an snes game but in 2022 can't even release their games in full

After playing OMORI, I realize that this might have been the inspiration for the recycling machine.

It is important that this be preserved.

Saving ALOT of data. Do not remove game pak. WARNING! File compression error. Data cannot be saved.

The game can't handle that much data! You gave it an aneurism.

Mario hiding in the corner

Seriously though, why can't we have error messages like this for everything!? It would be hilarious

BRU- I DIDNT KNOW THAT ONE SONG FROM MARIO MAKER TWO WAS HERE!

I love how they made a little animation for it as well

I had no idea the course bot theme in both mario makers were a DIRECT rip of this song. I also had no idea an SNES could make music like this.

Poor coursebot got overloaded

Is this legit?! I couldn’t find any references to this on sites like TCRF! I’m going to try this myself, first on emulator and then on real hardware. This robot scared the shit out of me when I was little and if I’d seen this it would have haunted my dreams lol

Even the error screen has charm.

Moments later, Jackson Pollock threw his NES out the window.

Bro defeated the Mario paint secret boss

I'm moreso just shocked to find out that Mario Paint must use some form of image compression. Why couldn't they just give it enough SRAM for the whole thing 😭

that robot scares me so much, I guess I won’t sleep in the past

I got this for Christmas as a kid with zelda link to the past. Loved both of them

my 9 year old self trying to save a random art that is a colour spam type :

One time I played Mario Paint so long the game blacked out.

dude that robot haunts my dream.

\*Music casually switches to Creative exercise\*

I remember figuring this out at a young age. I got a 8088 IBM PS/2 computer before my Super Nintendo so I understood what was happening. It couldn't even get on AOL but I did unzip .BAS games. 😀

Very interesting to see, was it docummented before? I also wonder if there are any other games that can have this happen. I thought of SMB3 on GBA which had eReader card levels, and I heard that the cartridge didn't actually have enough memory to store them all

This was one of the first video games I've played, and I had no idea this was a thing.

i was perfectly content to sit through the bangin' save music and bop

0:48 Edit, yooo mario in bottom left

I love how...immersive (shall we say?)...this error is.

There is an Easter egg in that picture, look at the bottom left.

thats where the mario maker saving music comes from