Impressive hombrew NES game

[Ichinisan]

"Micro Mages" doesn't use any of the fancy memory mapper chips that most NES games used to get past the addressing limitations of the NES. The developers (just two guys) deliberately worked within that limitation and achieved impressive results.

It's fascinating to see how well they optimized it.

 

[whm1974]

I thought the NES had 128K RAM available to it?

 

[Ichinisan]

I thought the NES had 128K RAM available to it?

Onboard RAM was just 2KB. Like other cartridge based systems of the era, ROM was added directly to the memory map and addressed as if it was RAM. Most games cartridges had two ROM chips, with dedicated pins to connect one ROM directly to the CPU and another directly to the PPU (graphics chip). That's what made the NES special compared to all the other systems using basically the same 6502 CPU. Some games were even made with a RAM chip in place of the graphics ROM, so graphics data could be loaded there dynamically from the the program ROM chip (copied there by the CPU). Even the total memory map with the system's RAM + cartridge ROM/RAM had addressing size limitations. Memory mapper chips worked around the NES system's addressing limits by dynamically switching the banks of graphics data connected to the graphics chip.

"Micro Mages" doesn't do any of that fancy in-cartridge mapper bank-switching stuff. The two guys that made it worked within the original limitations of the NES and achieved results that are much more impressive than the early NES games that were made under the same limitations.

 

[whm1974]

Onboard RAM was just 2KB. Like other cartridge based systems of the era, ROM was added directly to the memory map and addressed as if it was RAM. Most games cartridges had two ROM chips, with dedicated pins to connect one ROM directly to the CPU and another directly to the PPU (graphics chip). That's what made the NES special compared to all the other systems using basically the same 6502 CPU. Some games were even made with a RAM chip in place of the graphics ROM, so graphics data could be loaded there dynamically from the the program ROM chip (copied there by the CPU). Even the total memory map with the system's RAM + cartridge ROM/RAM had addressing size limitations. Memory mapper chips worked around the NES system's addressing limits by dynamically switching the banks of graphics data connected to the graphics chip.

"Micro Mages" doesn't do any of that fancy in-cartridge mapper bank-switching stuff. The two guys that made it worked within the original limitations of the NES and achieved results that are much more impressive than the early NES games that were made under the same limitations.

Well I was highly impressed by what they managed to squeeze out 40KB. I want to see what they could do if they used the fancy programming techniques and extra ram chips.