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How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes

How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes

Morphcat Games
6 HN recommenders · discussed 2019–2026
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About this video

Morphcat Games explains how they fit Micro Mages, a full-featured NES game, into 40 kilobytes. It covers compression of sprites and level layouts and other space-saving tricks.

Why it appears in the archive

HN points to it whenever discussion turns to how old games were so small, as a clear tour of 8-bit optimization and creative work under hardware limits.

AI-generated summary and labels from the source dataset; verify important details against the video. Source & credits.

From the Hacker News discussion

splch · 2021-11 · strong rec

I love this video: [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.

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arnaudsm · 2023-11 · strong rec

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. [VIDEO]

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MrFoof · 2019-10 · rec

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. [VIDEO]

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alecco · 2019-12 · rec

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 [VIDEO]

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Timpy · 2020-10 · rec

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. [VIDEO]

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MrFoof · 2023-11 · rec

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: [VIDEO] Morphcat has done other great NES games as well, such as Space Gulls and Bobl.

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throwawayk7h · 2024-08 · rec

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

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nineteen999 · 2020-08 · reference

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

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