Former Dawn - crazy-looking sci-fi RPG that runs on real NES hardware on kickstarter (2025)

I stumbled my way upon this game online:

View: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/something-nerdy/former-dawn

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIII6CXFCek&pp=ygULZm9ybWVyIGRhd24%3D

View: https://x.com/SomethinNerdy/status/1848434690102894610

They even have their own Mode 7 equivalent because why not (they have some technical demos up on their website for anyone to try on NES hardware)

View: https://x.com/SomethinNerdy/status/1849216389678076287

They developed their own custom chip to make it all work (it was the norm for NES games to have a variety of chips inside the cartridges).

Memory Mapper Development

Classical NES games were limited by the memory capacities made available by the memory management chips that were soldered onto the circuit boards inside the cartridges. Despite modern technology providing vast improvements on what such chips can do, the modern NES homebrew scene has never seen a paradigm shift related to those improvements...until now.

MXM-1

Our custom memory mapper, MXM-1 (Memory eXpansion Module) is the most significant innovation in NES cartridge hardware since Nintendo's MMC5 (Memory Management Controller) which debuted in 1989. 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.

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Also coming to PC and they are saying all the right things.

Because of the fact that the core game has been developed on the NES from the outset, we are able to keep the PC version of the game in line with it. So it's OK to play the PC version of the game -- you will get the true Former Dawn experience, but with many of the rough edges smoothed over without sacrificing the 8-bit nature of the game. Here are some examples of what we get right that most other pixel art games in the indie scene neglect, either intentionally or unintentionally:

• Our sprite movement and scrolling snaps to the native pixel grid instead of being "impossibly smooth".
• We provide integer scaling in widescreen mode to avoid fuzzy pixel boundaries.
• When we achieve a parallax scrolling effect, it is a genuine one that can actually work on NES hardware instead of being a strange mish-mash of 8-bit and 16-bit aesthetics.
• When enemies (especially bosses) are large, it's because it's actually possible to make them that large on the original hardware.
• The amount of activity on the screen never exceeds what the NES's CPU can handle; i.e. the game is never "impossibly complex".
• All of the meaningful graphical restrictions are kept in place:
  • Color palette of the NES (these 54 very specific colors and some of their blends)

    

  • Number of colors per sprite (3 + transparency)
  • Number of colors per background tile (3 + backdrop)
  • Number of palettes (4 for sprites and another 4 for background tiles)

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It sounds so ambitious I do wonder when or if it will ever come out but sure is neat to see something like this come to life. This is what 8 bit dreams are like.

I love stuff like this.

It's one of the things we miss due to generations. I do love generations and 16 bit generation was amazing and came at the right time.

But it's hard to get coding craftsman due to this. Plus these projects don't have the same deadlines as commercial software did at the time.

And finally, engineering innovation that would not be financially feasible at the time.

When you have time you can work magic!

I really hope this gets funded.

Unfortunately, they fumbled their launch of the kickstarter by only offering 200 carts. They've since course corrected, but I think they lost a lot of momentum in the first day or two which was crucial.

Everything about their custom mapper:

Wrexis said:

Very impressive. But is this actually running on a normal NES cart or is it some kind of chip in a cart? I wasn't clear on the mapper bit.

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It's a brand new type of cart in the most simplest terms.

NES used custom mappers to improve performance and add new graphical abilities. These were catalogued and used by Nintendo and its third parties. Some created their own like Konami.

entremet said:

It's a brand new type of cart in the most simplest terms.

NES used custom mappers to improve performance and add new graphical abilities. These were catalogued and used by Nintendo and its third parties. Some created their own like Konami.

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Thanks. I was aware of the Doom chip-in-a-cart port that even the dev admitted was basically cheating.
This seems a bit more legit.

View: https://youtu.be/vVcsaHgMEHI

Cross-gen has gone way too far!

(This looks fucking amazing!)

hsojlightfoot said:

Running on a stock NES? Whoa. Didn't even know the NES could even do mode 7.

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You can do a lot when the cartridge has the chips to support it, it's how they squeezed so much out of the NES (and later SNES) late in their lives. A barebones stock NES with only the absolutely bare minimum mapper on the cartridge would never be able to.

Jebusman said:

You can do a lot when the cartridge has the chips to support it, it's how they squeezed so much out of the NES (and later SNES) late in their lives. A barebones stock NES with only the absolutely bare minimum mapper on the cartridge would never be able to.

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Ah, I see. Pretty cool still. No longer have a NES or CRT so will play on PC if it gets funded.