From PS4 to 1.44 MB Floppy: Porting Retro City Rampage to MS-DOS [video] | Hacker News Reader

From PS4 to 1.44 MB Floppy: Porting Retro City Rampage to MS-DOS [video]

gamasutra.com

204 pointsadgasf25 comments

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):

https://youtu.be/Hvx4xXhZMrU (~11 mins)

It offers insight into how old-school game developers worked within the limitations of the hardware they designed for.

Brian Provinciano is a coding machine. Addicted to running things on constrained environments.

Wow, there's a name I haven't seen for awhile. He made an entire suite of apps for editing or rolling your own Sierra adventure games about 15 years ago. He got quite mad at my "helpful" coding suggestions back in the day... sorry, I was 12 O_O

Please tell me you have the original suggestions :D

I just had a look and the mega-tokyo.com forum seems to be gone forever. Basically someone asked for help about a syntax error, and I said something like 'if you get a "no closing brace error" just insert right curly braces at the very end if your code until it compiles.'

I think I even included a "code sample" }}}}}}}}}}. Brian did not like that at all!!

Once my 12 year old hubris ran out, I gave up on trying to make "AAA" games by myself :-)

/edit here is my old shame. So much cringe, but I was a kid so whatever. http://l-s-d_studios.tripod.com

Haha. I love it.

Wow Tripod still exists and they still have your website contents? Impressive.

Also, love that "Sign my guestbook"/"View my guestbook", brings back old-internet memories.

haha I will never post my old internet presence.

It's reassuring to know that I wasn't the only 12 year old coder full of hubris and idiocy :D I tried to find some of the old coding forums to apologise, but most of them have disappeared from the internet...

Reminds me of this comic: http://i.imgur.com/e9GZtxX.jpg

Stop linking to unofficial copies, here is the original:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-02-17

I love writing code for old PCs. A couple of years ago i wrote a 3D maze engine in C that i wanted to run in the original IBM PC i was building (here is a video from running on a 286 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfbQIvRYph4 with turbo turned off, i also managed to make it run in the IBM PC but that was some months later after i built it and didn't took a video). The renderer basically rasterizes sideways trapezoids in a column edge (top bottom) array and then draws it (the height also acts as an one dimensional depth buffer). It took me a while to make it run in interactive speeds, originally needing several seconds to draw each frame. I tried a bunch of methods and i ended up generating machine code for drawing 4 columns (CGA packs 4 pixels in one byte) for different heights in one go with a small post step to fix (clear/draw) the few individual pixels for each column in the batch and keeping the height and colors for the previous frame so that only changed columns are being drawn. I wanted to make some sort of turn-based dungeon crawler, although it would be a sci-fi one set on the moon :-P. I moved since then and my IBM PC is still in boxes since i do not have much space available (and i might move again soon so i don't want to unbox it because i had some professionals package it to avoid any damages).

I also made a small "hunt the wumpus"-ish game for CGA too http://runtimeterror.com/games/cgacave/ - this time the shots are from my IBM PC and not the 286. Also as a bonus a small program i wrote in Delphi 1.0 in Windows 3.1 to create the tiles :-). I've actually done a bunch of stuff in Delphi 1.0 because is a nice middle road between retro and modern (considering that i do a lot of "serious" stuff in Lazarus anyway). Last year i wrote a 3D editor for Windows 3.1 on it (http://i.imgur.com/eG34QXV.png and http://i.imgur.com/BZz6f9l.png the second one took a 486 laptop i have here some hours to render :-P).

I have a bunch of other stuff on my YouTube channel, most are random things i'm working on but i also have a few retrocoding works like another 3D maze in VB1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxhXjkogahs (i extended that a bit later http://imgur.com/gJXwCoj but got bored after a while) and an ultima-like engine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXRjdbUjZX0 (this one has its own scripting language, image editor and map editor too - you can see them here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W70_G9LeByE) which i've managed to run in my 286 too with an IBM CGA monitor (the 286 has an EGA compatible graphic card with a CGA compatibility mode... sadly it is 16bit ISA and it doesn't work on the IBM PC because i'd like to have an IBM EGA card - and an IBM EGA monitor, but those are very rare and even more expensive).

Bonus photos from my IBM PC (without the monitor, i took those before i finished building it):

http://i.imgur.com/506cuFP.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/4tEvp24.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/8bz9IdR.jpg

Also i have and collect a bunch of old development software (mainly from ebay), including Borland C++ 5, C++ Builder 1, Visual Basic 4, Visual Basic 5, Klik&Play (including the manual), Delphi 2, JBuilder and some other things i forget. I usually image those to play around in VMs and keep the disks on my shelf.

Interestingly enough i found a couple of those actually useful (specifically Borland C++ 5 and C++ Builder) and i'm now using for beyond just playing around (mainly Borland C++ 5 because the IDE is lightning fast for compiling C code). Also i wrote a few patches for old games with C++ Builder which made it deal because of the small executable size and being able to design the window visually :-).

Borland used to make some fantastic IDEs. For a long time I would always lean towards Borland over Microsoft.

You've inspired me to pick up Turbo Pascal again and write some DOS software just for fun.

> For a long time I would always lean towards Borland over Microsoft.

Me too, I only switched after they lost many of their key developers like Anders, sold their developer division and went enterprise.

Turbo Vision, Object Windows Library and Visual Components Library were all way better than MFC ever was.

And of course, Turbo Pascal 6.0 and 7 on MS-DOS were already great Pascal dialects. Oh well....

Have you tried FreePascal?

Really reminds me about the kind of programming we're tackling building small games on the diy bitbox console, dealing with real hardware platform.

You might enjoy PICO-8 (http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php). Although its not a real old computer, there is an active community with a good amount of users and it has it's own set of weird constraints that encourage making small things.

I know about it, but there are several old systems i could mess with (i have a ZX Spectrum somewhere around here) and TBH i prefer PCs :-P.

If someone made a tiny IBM PC or IBM XT clone (in FPGA or something) i'd be all over it though.

I'd love to see this rewritten in C++ using that transpiler written for that talk at the last CppCon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkNBP00wJE

I was trying to figure out which transpiler he was using, but I wasn't successful. I remember hearing about it on HN but can't remember the name!

Really great to see someone doing this. Games developers often fail to consider performance constraints.

um.. thats like 50% of game programming? (esp on consoles)

Lots of knowledge on this video, amazing work! wish i had the time to pursue these kind of projects.

From PS4 to PS/2

If only the game was fun :P

Reply on news.ycombinator.com