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[adamsapple]

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I gotta say, something of a revelation for me today that the lead programmer for the original FF games was an Iranian American guy.

 

[Daneel Elijah]

Thanks for the thread adamsapple ! It surprised me too. I am little ashamed to say that my first instinct was to remember all the speedruners that played those games and insulted the programers for those old games ( FF, pokemon, old megaman...) because weird lines of code had huge ramifications for them. Still a great piece of gaming history. Hopefully he did part with Square in good terms. Never played them in the NES version, but I did play them on a emulated version on Gameboy advance like 15 to 20 years ago.

 

[cireza]

Coding on these old 8 bits system is extremely challenging, and they had to work around strong ROM size constraints on top of it. A really fantastic experience for anyone seriously interested in game development.

 

[Boss Mog]

I often saw "programmed by Nasir" on the title screens of those early SE games, I often wondered who he was cause nobody ever talked about him and it wasn't a Japanese name.

 

[SidViscous]

Coding on these old 8 bits system is extremely challenging, and they had to work around strong ROM size constraints on top of it. A really fantastic experience for anyone seriously interested in game development.

Both yes and no, you coded to the hardware, the lack of abstraction meant it was easy to make it do what you wanted it to do, the only downside was there wasn't as much transferable knowledge between systems. Nasir worked a lot on Apple 2 games so already knew the 65C816 instruction set, so it sounds like he just had a fun time making these, but he was definitely a great coder!

Modern game development is much more complicated, just to make a simple ass game you need to know C/C++, a shader language, a rendering pipeline, plus all the SDK libraries, networking/online stack, honestly, if I had a choice I'd go back to making SNES games.

 

[Rat Rage]

Thanks a lot adamsapple! So fucking cool! Nasir Gebelli, what a legend! I hope somebody uploads it on youtube with subtitles for the japanese parts.

 

[cireza]

Both yes and no, you coded to the hardware, the lack of abstraction meant it was easy to make it do what you wanted it to do, the only downside was there wasn't as much transferable knowledge between systems. Nasir worked a lot on Apple 2 games so already knew the 65C816 instruction set, so it sounds like he just had a fun time making these, but he was definitely a great coder!

Modern game development is much more complicated, just to make a simple ass game you need to know C/C++, a shader language, a rendering pipeline, plus all the SDK libraries, networking/online stack, honestly, if I had a choice I'd go back to making SNES games.

So you are already talking 3D and online here lol. Also SNES. Definitely what I was talking about...

I highly doubt that making a 2D game in the same style as the NES is that difficult with modern tools. Actually, you can even make it without knowing how to code with tools like Pixel Game Maker or RPG Maker. Which I have both personally used. And now I code on Game Gear / Master System, and believe it or not, it is much more challenging. You work on a super tight VRAM budget, ROM size is small so you have to rely on various levels of compression, you can't dump your mp3 and call it a day, you have to manage both data and code banking, scrolling has to be done in small chunks of 8 pixels, you have real limitations on colors, every picture has to be carefully palettized etc... You don't have any of these constraints with modern tools, you can simply power your way out.

So yes, I stand by my position that it is challenging, and a great intellectual exercise. You can learn a lot by working on these heavily constrained systems. And the comparison to modern games that have a ton of abstraction, various other disciplines, and most certainly require teams, feels out of place. Nobody stops you from making SNES games.

 

[DeVeAn]

Man, how cool is this. The most interesting part of gaming is the history from 80's 90's. All we had were magazines to eat up all the info behind the scenes.

 

[AJUMP23]

Bookmarked to watch later.

 

[Hudo]

Coding on these old 8 bits system is extremely challenging, and they had to work around strong ROM size constraints on top of it. A really fantastic experience for anyone seriously interested in game development.

Yes and no. It was challenging because of the really tight hardware constraints but cognitively speaking, there wasn't as much "overhead" as you have nowadays. There's just really a lot more to keep track of and be aware of when you're programming shit these days. In fact, I do program in Motorola 68K assembly to "relax" from time to time.

 

[cireza]

Yes and no. It was challenging because of the really tight hardware constraints but cognitively speaking, there wasn't as much "overhead" as you have nowadays. There's just really a lot more to keep track of and be aware of when you're programming shit these days. In fact, I do program in Motorola 68K assembly to "relax" from time to time.

Ok, but you are already talking 16 bits hardware though. Banking is not an issue anymore, VRAM budget is much larger, ROM size as well, scrolling is trivial and you have a lot of room to stream the data in whatever chunks you want, not that limited in sprites per scanline, much larger palette, more individual palettes, several planes etc...

Implement parallax scrolling on an 8 bits console and keep it smooth while the action takes place for example, and you will see

 

[Hudo]

Implement parallax scrolling on an 8 bits console and keep it smooth while the action takes place for example, and you will see

I actually did for the 6502B once. It was a really interesting challenge. But maybe that is "cheating" as well? Because you pretty much can keep a model of the 6502 in your head.

 

[cireza]

I actually did for the 6502B once. It was a really interesting challenge. But maybe that is "cheating" as well? Because you pretty much can keep a model of the 6502 in your head.

My point was that developing on 8 bits consoles was an interesting challenge, which you finally just agreed with. Are you just trying to be a contrarian ?

 

[Jack Package]

I'm so glad Nasir is getting some love. Years back when I first got to play those games he worked on I found old interviews with him on the likes of shmupulations. Very talented guy!