When I wrote Atari 800 Donkey Kong, I used 16-bit precision arithmetic for the motion, with pretty good results. All the jumping was done with a horizontal velocity, a vertical velocity and a vertical acceleration. A jump is just setting Mario's vertical velocity to some value, and you need to do floor collisions (but you want those anyway, so other objects can interact with floors).
There was a funky "bounce" at the edge of the screen in the arcade version that I captured pretty well by reversing X and Y velocity on a wall collision; this could not have been done well with a lookup table. It wasn't that much code, and the simple parameter space made playability tuning really easy.
There was a funky "bounce" at the edge of the screen in the arcade version that I captured pretty well by reversing X and Y velocity on a wall collision; this could not have been done well with a lookup table. It wasn't that much code, and the simple parameter space made playability tuning really easy.