Morphcat Games
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2019–2026
12:04 · 3.7M views · Sep 5, 2018
Morphcat Games explains how they fit Micro Mages, a full-featured NES game, into 40 kilobytes. It covers compression of sprites and level layouts and other space-saving tricks.
HN points to it whenever discussion turns to how old games were so small, as a clear tour of 8-bit optimization and creative work under hardware limits.
10 comments from Hacker News
I love this video: this video As part of a Kickerstarter campaign, Morphcat Games made this video explaining how they eked out a really incredible game with only 40 Kb (a lot like Super Mario Bros 2). I definitely recommend checking this out as they go over interesting compression methods and more general thought processes.
Here is my favorite video about 8-bit era optimisations. Makes you appreciate games from this era even more. This arcane magic survived in the demoscene to this day. this video
Very much agree with the parent. If you want a better idea on how you can cram everything into 40KB — using every trick in the book, including ones not considered 30+ years ago — take a look at a how a recently released NES game (Micro Mages) managed it. Their primary design constrain was that they restricted themselves to 40KB, despite wanting to do far more than the games that were done in 40KB back in the 80s. this video
A similarly interesting story is regarding the NES homebrew game, Micro Mages. The goal with Micro Mages was to get a full-featured game into the same footprint of the original, "Black Box" NES releases for the North American launch, where a fair number of games fit in 40KB of ROM or less. Video, but it's a good summary: this video Morphcat has done other great NES games as well, such as Space Gulls and Bobl.
ZFS for newbies [LINK] main ideas behind ZFS and why it blows out the competition in many scenarios Making C Less Dangerous in the Linux Kernel [LINK] NUMA optimizations in the FreeBSD stack (Netflix) [LINK] How we fit a NES game in 40KiB this video