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The Making of: ROM City Rampage (Retro City Rampage)

VblankEntertainment

7.5K subscribers • 1 video on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 4 people: 4 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2014 to 2019.
  • Presented by Brian Provinciano, creator of Retro City Rampage
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 13 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

398K views13 years ago4 recommendations

Game developmentSystems programmingGame programmingRetro games and consolesCPUs and computer architecture

Brian Provinciano explains how he crunched the core of Retro City Rampage to run on a real 8-bit NES hardware.

How Retro City Rampage's core was crunched down to a REAL 8-BIT game and how 8-BIT games are made. TWITTER: @BriProv / @RetroCR - vblank.com

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended for its insights into NES homebrew development and how to fit a modern game design into retro hardware constraints.

anon9001on Hacker News • Recommends

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: link to 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)
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bluedinoon Hacker News • Recommends

On “People Making New Games for Atari, Super Nintendo, and Virtual Boy”

…ow (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 link to this video…
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corysamaon Hacker News • Recommends

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. link to 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
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broahmedon Hacker News • Recommends

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): link to this video (~11 mins) It offers insight into how old-school game developers worked within the limitations of the hardware they designed for.
View on Hacker News

Scaevoluson Hacker News • Mentions

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: link to this video Here's one for CHIP8: link
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ZenoArrowon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Breaking the NES (2014)”

In a similar vein, this video covers ROM City Rampage, which is the NES prototype of Retro City Rampage: link to this video
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Scaevoluson Hacker News • Mentions

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: link to this video
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dividuumon Hacker News • Mentions

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: link to this video
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u/0xeffed0ffin r/C_Programming • Mentions

On “Creating a NES-like game in C, what are the minimum dependencies I need?”

This is out of my wheelhouse, and I just starting to get into C, but I recall this video from the production of Retro City Rampage on how he set up is NES development environment for the game. Maybe things have changed this video, but I thought I'd share in case it's still helpful.
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