How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes

Love to see new stuff on ancient platforms. Surprised I couldn't find a post about Micro Mages on HN, only comments. ▶ this video Spoiler, when the time will come you'll never see something like this on the play station 4.

Incredible. I love these stories of kb games. For those interested, there's a great video for this 40 kb nes game, micro mages: ▶ this video

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

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.

Let’s take pixel art on console gaming as an example. In the early days, games used pixel graphics due to technical constraints. Artists were limited in what they could achieve and had to get creative within the limitations to push the software and hardware to its limits in pursuit of a specific vision. Everyone had the same set of restrictions but thanks to creative technical decisions some rose above as exceptional. There is a particular kind of enjoyment in creating a lot with very little. If your digital art can be hundreds of GBs in size, your 3D rendition of the Sistine Chapel will be judged by its faithfulness; but if you’re only allowed a handful of KBs and everyone believes any kind of 3D graphics are impossible at that size, your dinky little rotating cube becomes an impressive technological feat. Context matters. A tractor pulling a plane is not impressive; a man pulling a plane is. Most people could do the former but not the latter. Furthermore, not all limitations are equally interesting. Nostalgia and popularity also play a role. Today, pixel graphics are an aesthetic choice. Developers and artist can go beyond what was possible when they were a necessity and create something entirely new. Yet some still derive enjoyment and pride from following the limitations of yore to the letter: there are games created in the 2000s which work on the NES. link ▶ this video

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.

I'm absolutely blown away by some of the games they managed to make in under 13kb. This video "How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes" is an interesting illustration of just how small these games are. ▶ this video

I remember seeing this video on that about the clever compression tricks used to cram the sprites and map layouts into 40K. ▶ this video

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

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