The Making of: ROM City Rampage (Retro City Rampage)
VblankEntertainment4 HN recommenders · 2014–2022
399K views · talk · evergreen · Uploaded 2013-02-27
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.
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8 comments from Hacker News
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 [VIDEO]
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: [VIDEO] Here's one for CHIP8: [LINK]
Here's a fun video on how a modern 8-bit style game was ported to actually run on an NES. [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]
In a similar vein, this video covers ROM City Rampage, which is the NES prototype of Retro City Rampage: [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): [VIDEO] (~11 mins) It offers insight into how old-school game developers worked within the limitations of the hardware they designed for.
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: [VIDEO]
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: [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)
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: [VIDEO]