
From PS4 to 1.44 MB Floppy: Porting Retro City Rampage to MS-DOS [video] - adgasf
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/275482/From_PS4_to_144_MB_floppy_Porting_Retro_City_Rampage_to_MSDOS.php
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broahmed
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](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.

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

~~~
rangibaby
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

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sleepychu
Please tell me you have the original suggestions :D

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rangibaby
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](http://l-s-d_studios.tripod.com)

~~~
nacs
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.

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badsectoracula
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](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/](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](http://i.imgur.com/eG34QXV.png) and
[http://i.imgur.com/BZz6f9l.png](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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxhXjkogahs)
(i extended that a bit later
[http://imgur.com/gJXwCoj](http://imgur.com/gJXwCoj) but got bored after a
while) and an ultima-like engine
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXRjdbUjZX0](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](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/506cuFP.jpg)

[http://i.imgur.com/4tEvp24.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/4tEvp24.jpg)

[http://i.imgur.com/8bz9IdR.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 :-).

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laumars
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.

~~~
pjmlp
> 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....

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gravypod
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkNBP00wJE)

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mmastrac
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!

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

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

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n1tro
Lots of knowledge on this video, amazing work! wish i had the time to pursue
these kind of projects.

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glhaynes
From PS4 to PS/2

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vlunkr
If only the game was fun :P

