VblankEntertainment
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2014–2022
10:45 · 399K views · Feb 27, 2013
Making-of video about ROM City Rampage, the NES version of Retro City Rampage, covering how the game's core was crunched to run on real 8-bit hardware and how NES games are made.
Recommended as a fascinating look at fitting a modern game into NES constraints.
8 comments from Hacker News
If you like this, you should also check out the work around Retro City Rampage. RCR is a GTA1 clone for multiple platforms from a few years back, but the developer also made a real NES ROM of it. Here's a great talk about that process: this video (I'm not related to the project, but it's one of the few games I've 100% completed because it was just so good)
It's hard not to look back at the past with rose-colored glasses, but in the case of the NES, there were so many low-quality games out there that it's easy to remember how bad some of them were even back then. I know I wasn't the only kid who would shell out $2 or $3 and rent a game for the weekend, only to find out that the game was flat-out terrible. Sure, there were a lot of good games back then that are still fun to play now (Super Mario Brothers, Contra, etc), but going back and playing a random game in an emulator really drives home the fact of how big of a bomb most of the games were. That said, who hasn't been interested in how NES games worked or how they were programmed? There's a great video on Youtube about converting ROM city Rampage over to run on the NES this video
Here's a fun video on how a modern 8-bit style game was ported to actually run on an NES. this video You would probably enjoy the book Racing the Beam [LINK] For a collection of (mostly consumer-oriented) behind-the-scenes material, check out [LINK] Or, if you want to get really technical [LINK]
There's also a fascinating video of him getting the core of the game to run on NES spec constraints (think 8-bit CPU, 10KB of RAM): this video (~11 mins) It offers insight into how old-school game developers worked within the limitations of the hardware they designed for.
High-level assemblers can greatly reduce the tedium of programming for older systems. Just a small amount of structure -- loops, conditionals, symbolic definitions -- improves assembly immensely. Here's one dev's experiences making a GTA-like game for the NES, using his own high level assembler: this video Here's one for CHIP8: [LINK]