Series · part of Mario

Dr. Mario

Nintendo's falling-block puzzle series, begun on the NES and Game Boy in 1990.

Dr. Mario is a falling-block puzzle series in the Mario franchise. It began with Dr. Mario (NES).

Games

Mechanics

Mechanic	Dr. Mario (NES) 1990
Chain	Cascade
Clearing	Line of four
Delayed auto shift	Delay, then repeat
Drop speed	Piece ramp
Entry delay	Animation
Garbage	Dropped on top
Lock delay	None
Piece randomizer	Dealt in advance

A marked cell changed from the game before. “Uses” means the game has the mechanic, with no variant recorded yet.

Every claim, by mechanic and game

Concept	Dr. Mario (NES) 1990
Chain	When a clear happens, `updateField` sends the placed pill's steps back to `checkDrop`, which lets unsupported halves fall, and the match checks run again, so one pill can set off a chain of clears. Code In a one-player game each virus cleared scores 100, 200, or 300 points at Low, Med, or Hi, times 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, then 32 for the 6th to 11th virus cleared by the same pill. The multiplier isn't capped (the clamp is one of the disassembler's bugfix options, not in the original build), so from the 12th virus on it indexes bytes past the end of the 11-entry table. Code
Clearing	After a pill lands the game scans the bottle row by row for 4 or more cells of one color in a row, then column by column for 4 or more in a column, and clears every run it finds. Code
Delayed auto shift	A press of Left or Right moves the pill at once and zeroes `currentP_horVelocity`; held, the count rises each frame and at 16 the pill moves and the count restarts at 10, so it moves again 16 frames after the press and then every 6. The European build uses 13 and 5. Code A blocked shift sets the count to 15, so a pill held against a wall or the stack moves on the first frame the way is clear. Code
Drop speed	`fallingPill_checkYMove` counts frames at the pill's row and drops it when the count passes an entry of `speedCounterTable`, so a row takes the entry plus one frame. The speed setting picks the starting entry, index 15, 25, or 31 for Low, Med, and Hi, which is 40, 20, or 14 frames per row; entries 0 to 14 are never reached. Code Every 10th pill moves the speed one step further along `speedCounterTable`, up to 49 steps, and each level past 20 starts a step further. After 49 steps a row takes 4 frames at Low, 2 at Med, and 1 at Hi, the table's last entry. Code Holding Down, and no other direction, drops the pill a row on every other frame, and the drop resets the gravity count. Code
Entry delay	In a one-player game each new pill waits for Mario's throw: `action_sendPill` steps the pill along a table of 21 positions, once a frame at Med and Hi and on every other frame at Low, and puts it in the bottle when the table ends. In a two-player game the pill goes straight to the bottle. Code
Garbage	In a two-player game, 2 or more matches from one pill send that many half-pills, at most 4, in the colors of the matches, to the other player's bottle, where they land at its top row in a frame-dependent column. Code
Lock delay	When a drop is blocked, the pill moves back up and is placed in the bottle at once, so a pill resting on the stack locks at its next gravity step. Code
Piece randomizer	At the start of each level `generatePillsReserve` deals 128 pills, shared by both players. Each pill is one of 9 color pairs, found by adding a random 0 to 15 to the previous pill's index and subtracting 9 until it fits; the game reads the reserve in a loop, so the same 128 pills come round again. Code Because the 16 random values wrap at 9, steps of 0 to 6 from the previous pill's index each come from two values and steps of 7 and 8 from one, so the same pill follows itself with chance 2/16, where a uniform pick would give 1/9. Code A level holds (level + 1) × 4 viruses; for player 1 levels past 20 count as 20, while player 2's count is uncapped. The count of viruses still to add runs down, and its low two bits pick the color (0 yellow, 1 red, 2 blue, 3 a color from a 16-entry table), so each run of four from a multiple of 4 goes yellow, random, blue, red. Each virus goes at a random height no higher than the level allows and a random column, moving on to the next free cell, and takes another color if one of its own lies two cells away in a straight line. Code