I don't know if it's possible, but is there a way to tweak the video settings of any emulator to see a level (e.g. Super Mario Bros) from the beginning to the end? Like here:
I know the image from above is photoshopped (I guess), but can an emulator do that, and then still be able to play?
Best Answer
Short answer: No
One thing to keep in mind about older systems (both for video games and home computers) is that memory used to be a luxury. They didn't have gigabytes (or even megabytes) to spare of either storage or RAM. Rendering an entire level when only a small part would be displayed would have been a huge waste of precious computing resources.
Also, there's no reason to assume that every single NES game coded its map the same way. It's very likely that over time they figured out better ways to do it, so even in similar games (SMB1 vs SMB3) the maps would be stored in memory differently. This means that there's no reason to expect an emulator to know how to take a particular game and render the full map for the current level.
There are also a lot of other problems with this - I know that in SMB1, enemies that are off-screen don't move. Would you expect them to be moving the entire time, or only when the active portion of the screen reaches them? The former affects the gameplay of various games, while the latter would require additional logic that currently doesn't exist inside the game code.
Even if you modified the game code, an emulator isn't going to be able to handle it unless you modify the emulator as well. The emulator will need to be able to handle game maps of differing sizes, as well as expecting to give the game more resources.