The Making of: ROM City Rampage (Retro City Rampage)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a fascinating look at fitting a modern game into NES constraints.
What it is
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 by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2014 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec anon9001 · 2019-09 · on “Technical Breakdown of a new NES game written in Lisp”
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)
Recommends bluedino · 2014-03 · on “People Making New Games for Atari, Super Nintendo, and Virtual Boy”
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
Recommends corysama · 2014-12 · on “Post mortem of my one game a month”
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]
Recommends broahmed · 2017-02 · on “From PS4 to 1.44 MB Floppy: Porting Retro City Rampage to MS-DOS [video]”
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.
Cites Scaevolus · 2014-11 · on “Fun with Lisp: Programming the NES (2012)”
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]
Cites ZenoArrow · 2016-05 · on “Breaking the NES (2014)”
In a similar vein, this video covers ROM City Rampage, which is the NES prototype of Retro City Rampage: [this video]
Cites Scaevolus · 2018-09 · on “How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes [video]”
Retro City Rampage for NES did something similar (32KB program ROM, 256KB graphics ROM), but the author also developed a High Level Assembler so you he could write structured code more directly: [this video]
Cites dividuum · 2022-04 · on “Euro Truck Simulator 2: ZX Spectrum Edition”
The closest to a real and official demake by a company itself is probably ROM City Rampage, a version of Retro City Rampage for the NES. Here's a video going through the process: [this video]