We Can't Quite Believe That Former Dawn Is Running On Real NES Hardware

Their custom mapper must be a beast to be getting images like that from the NES. Those enemy sprites are phenomenal (technically and artistically).

I need to look into this. I wonder if it will work on a RetroUSB AVS.

It's always cool to see what people can do with old tech after decades of programming experience and console documentation. Kaze Emanuar doing a full video of all the ways he's rebuilt and optimised Mario 64 for his upcoming romhack was SUPER enlightening.

Genuinely, I would have believed this was a Genesis game if I hadn't been told otherwise, both the visuals and audio.

Apparently these guys plan on making a SNES game next. And if that happens, I cannot wait to see what they do there.

It's bonkers that this game isn't funded on Kickstarter already, especially with some of the games that got all their money in hours-days on there.

PS. I think this game also shows that a lot of what makes many modern games on these old consoles look so dang impressive actually often comes from them being made in modern times rather than somehow the specific system being this magical device capable of feats beyond all others. We have a NES game here that could pass as a Genesis title imo, so it's made it clear to me that many of the new games and demos I'm seeing on some of these other retro systems are a result of the same conditions of having extra time, experience, sheer dedication, and new tools and even ways to enhance the hardware that simply weren't a realistic option in the past. It makes me wonder what some of those other systems would truly be capable of under the same conditions. And I'm thinking of the SNES here personally, and just how far it could be pushed in the right hands by that same standard.

It looks very good so far. Not only does it look good in stills, the character animation is surprisingly smooth. I'm curious about their custom mapper and what it allows. It sounds like it's adding sound capability, among many other things it probably does. I'm sure it helps with the scrolling and probably the way to text window operates. You can see from the graphics it still has color limitations you'd expect since the NES is not the PC Engine, Genesis, or SNES, but the art is very well planned and the color choices are very good. It's clear there's a lot of effort going into it and the developers have enthusiasm for this project.

Edit: The Kickstarter page provides some detail on what the mapper does. There's expansion audio, FMV capability, vastly increased data storage, and a clever palette-switching ability. They also go into some detail on their process of porting to the PC which will be enhanced with widescreen, but will remain NES authentic in most ways. It's worth reading about it on their page for those interested in all that.

This game's visual style is incredible. That said, I do think it's less the game running on NES hardware, and more the game running on the modern custom cartridge and just using the NES as a pass through though. Still a really cool trick, but something like this never would have been possible on the NES back in the day with the mapper chips of the time. Which kind of makes me feel that they should have just made it for the SNES or Genesis instead to show what those console's could do. Still looks amazing regardless, and I'll definitely get it when it releases.

@MARl0

First of all, thank you for the compliment! We do take the art of this game very seriously and it's nice to know that our efforts have paid off.

Regarding the rest of what you said — some correction is in order. It's understandable why someone on the outside would draw the conclusions that you have, but they're simply inaccurate.

All of Former Dawn's game logic, background animation handling, sprite handling, enemy AI, world loading, dialogue rendering, portrait rendering, etc. is being run on the NES's CPU. Our mapper is not a coprocessor like the SA-1 and SuperFX chips were in the SNES era. It is a hard requirement of the project not to do the kind of thing that you think we're doing. We're not even driving the expansion audio from a coprocessor! (E.g. the way that the Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, and SNES all did.) We spend quite a large portion of every frame's CPU time just handling the track data and telling the expansion audio subsystem what to do, just as was the case with Famicom cartridges with expansion audio like the Japanese version of Castlevania III.

The truth is, our mapper could have existed around 1990 because it is not doing anything fundamentally different than what conventional mappers did by 1989. It's not very far off from combining MMC5 and Namco 163 into a single chip and then giving that chip a few more address lines to access more memory.

It is nothing like using the NES as a pass through. We never would've spent the last few years developing our game engines and memory mapper if we were willing to do that, because it would be a trivial exercise (by comparison) to offload everything onto a coprocessor board and use the NES as a pass through device.

-SNS

This is the same game as the pseudo mode 7 jetpack demo? I have to say I am very impressed at the use of colour managing to make it seems like the colour palette is much more varied. One of the things limiting old cartridge based systems was there was a limit to how large the room size could go even with the mappers used it was normally only expanded to what size rom chips that could be afforded by the publisher.

I was a little interested with that jetpack stuff but this has got me much more curious.

Alright, looks like another reason to pull out the old NES and get it restored. Games like Batman and Willow had pretty good "graphics" too. The battle screen reminds me of Final Fantasy.

It looks amazing, but sad to see they send their stuff to "streamers" and "content creators" first before the plebs are allowed to have a go. Maybe that's how things work in 2024 but I'm not sure that's something I can get behind.

This looks really great. I hope they manage to reach their funding goal.

@hste Studios used to send advance copies to journalists for exposure and much needed cheap advertisement.
Now they use "Influencers", I don't think it's that surprising.

That demo looks phenomenal. When the character ran out of the town and smoothly into the forest with enemies, I was in disbelief. Not even the Mega Drive and SNES was doing that.

When they say "new mapper", I have to wonder if it's an FPGA or something. (something FAR more powerful than the base console)
It does like nice, but using hardware too technologically removed from the original hardware does take a bit from the feel of the original game.

@KingMike

From the way it’s described, I get the impression that it would have been possible to do it back then, just very expensive due to the amount of memory required. No one back then was going to spend money on R&D to create such a cartridge when it would never have sold due to commanding an exorbitant price. From their kickstarter:

“The most advanced NES games of the original commercial era were almost entirely MMC3 or MMC5 games, which meant that their ROM sizes were capped at 768KiB - 2,048KiB. MXM-1 allows direct access to many times more than this, and indirect access to CD-ROM quantities of data.“