Metroid Source Code Expanded
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Metroid Source Code Expanded
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Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded
#2If you like this, then you may also want to check out http://nesdev.com/. NES programming is alive and well, I assure you.
Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded
#3It has always amazed me that so many quality games were made with assembly alone, both on NES and SNES. I built small SNES games in school, and man that's a lot of work.
Gamedev these days is so easy in comparison.
Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded
#4For those who don't want to download: it's 1.7 MiB of assembler instructions with comments. Looking at this you start to understand how hard game development was in 80's (this game is from 1986).
Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded
#5It has always amazed me that so many quality games were made with assembly alone, both on NES and SNES. I built small SNES games in school, and man that's a lot of work. Gamedev these days is so easy in comparison.
Many arcade games were done entirely in assembly.
Everything that came out of Williams/Midway for example (From Defender all the way to Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Crusin', basically everything not on PC-based hardware) were all completely done in assembly. Wrap your noggin around that one.
Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded
#6I'm guessing games built upon previous ones? I'm wondering to what extent they borrowed from previous prototypes/work. Also, I wonder what the total dev time for the game was.
Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded
#7It has always amazed me that so many quality games were made with assembly alone, both on NES and SNES. I built small SNES games in school, and man that's a lot of work. Gamedev these days is so easy in comparison.
Many arcade games were done entirely in assembly. Everything that came out of Williams/Midway for example (From Defender all the way to Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Crusin', basically everything not on PC-based hardware) were all completely done in assembly. Wrap your noggin around that one.
Yeah, but generally arcade games tend to be a lot simpler than some of the more complex offerings on SNES, say. The systems were more powerful, but the gameplay itself tended to be simpler, owing as much to the need to play for quarter increments as anything. Less state to keep track of, generally, at the very least.
Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded
#8I'm guessing games built upon previous ones? I'm wondering to what extent they borrowed from previous prototypes/work. Also, I wonder what the total dev time for the game was.
Most definitely. There's another really good doc on Super Mario World that compares a lot of similar chunks of code to their counterparts in the Super Mario Bros. 3 code, which SMW was based off of.
Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded
#9It has always amazed me that so many quality games were made with assembly alone, both on NES and SNES. I built small SNES games in school, and man that's a lot of work. Gamedev these days is so easy in comparison.
Many arcade games were done entirely in assembly. Everything that came out of Williams/Midway for example (From Defender all the way to Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Crusin', basically everything not on PC-based hardware) were all completely done in assembly. Wrap your noggin around that one.
RollerCoaster Tycoon (released in 1999) is well known for being written almost entirely in x86 assembly.
Re: Metroid Source Code Expanded
#10It has always amazed me that so many quality games were made with assembly alone, both on NES and SNES. I built small SNES games in school, and man that's a lot of work. Gamedev these days is so easy in comparison.
Gamedev is simpler today than it was by then, but games (we are talking about AAA titles, as Metroid was at the time) have escalated in complexity by several orders of magnitudes.
Today is simply impossible for a single person/small team to create a rival to Call of Duty 4 or Fallout 3, while back then it was relatively simple for someone with the skills and talent to emerge.