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Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis

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Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis

#51

I gave a talk not too long ago about running Rust on a Nintendo 64, with the slide deck written in Rust and running on an N64. https://twitter.com/DebugSteven/status/1054903603985559553 So I guess what I'm saying is that I have pretty hands on knowledge with the system and would be happy to answer any questions I can. One thing I'll throw out there, is that one of the biggest limitations of the N64 (its 4KB texture m…

Amazing. Is there somewhere I can watch this talk?

Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis

#52

I gave a talk not too long ago about running Rust on a Nintendo 64, with the slide deck written in Rust and running on an N64. https://twitter.com/DebugSteven/status/1054903603985559553 So I guess what I'm saying is that I have pretty hands on knowledge with the system and would be happy to answer any questions I can. One thing I'll throw out there, is that one of the biggest limitations of the N64 (its 4KB texture m…

Amazing. Is there somewhere I can watch this talk?

It wasn't recorded unfortunately.

The source behind the text of the most recent slides starts here if you'd like to read it: https://github.com/monocasa/n64-slides-apr/blob/caae25f397c5...

I should probably save off pictures and put it into a pdf or something where it could be more easily accessible.

Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis

#53
post #49
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DK64 required the expansion pak due to a bug (it was intended to work in either 4MB or 8MB modes and they couldn't fix a crashing bug in the 4MB version) and then Rare spent an obscene amount of money shipping an expansion pak with every copy of the game. That was probably responsible for a large fraction of the units shipped, with most of the rest accounted for by Zelda (which did not include the pak even though it…

The truth of this claim is disputed: https://www.reddit.com/r/n64/comments/ft63zn/dk64_memory_lea... The lead artist claims they’d always been planning to make use of it. There’s compelling evidence of a memory leak or similar issue since the released version of the game apparently crashes if you leave it running for some amount of time over 10 hours (which wasn’t usually a problem in practice except for very long sp…

I've heard the the lead programmer confirm it, and I trust him more than the lead artist.

I _think_ it was on the documentary clips shipped with Rare Replay, but I'm not 100% on that.

Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing. Is there somewhere I can watch this talk?

It wasn't recorded unfortunately. The source behind the text of the most recent slides starts here if you'd like to read it: https://github.com/monocasa/n64-slides-apr/blob/caae25f397c5... I should probably save off pictures and put it into a pdf or something where it could be more easily accessible.

I’d certainly watch it if you made a video by giving the talk again, if you still have your notes :)

Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis

#55

I gave a talk not too long ago about running Rust on a Nintendo 64, with the slide deck written in Rust and running on an N64. https://twitter.com/DebugSteven/status/1054903603985559553 So I guess what I'm saying is that I have pretty hands on knowledge with the system and would be happy to answer any questions I can. One thing I'll throw out there, is that one of the biggest limitations of the N64 (its 4KB texture m…

> The crazy hacks that Rare did to subdivide their geometry on texture boundaries wouldn't be necessary for instance.

I would love to know more about this. Is their texture format tomfoolery written up somewhere?

Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing. Is there somewhere I can watch this talk?

It wasn't recorded unfortunately. The source behind the text of the most recent slides starts here if you'd like to read it: https://github.com/monocasa/n64-slides-apr/blob/caae25f397c5... I should probably save off pictures and put it into a pdf or something where it could be more easily accessible.

Would it be possible to provide a rom Image that would run in an emulator?

Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis

#57

I gave a talk not too long ago about running Rust on a Nintendo 64, with the slide deck written in Rust and running on an N64. https://twitter.com/DebugSteven/status/1054903603985559553 So I guess what I'm saying is that I have pretty hands on knowledge with the system and would be happy to answer any questions I can. One thing I'll throw out there, is that one of the biggest limitations of the N64 (its 4KB texture m…

> The crazy hacks that Rare did to subdivide their geometry on texture boundaries wouldn't be necessary for instance. I would love to know more about this. Is their texture format tomfoolery written up somewhere?

I don't think anything is written up, but you can see it if you put Project64 into wireframe mode. The most clear I've seen it is in the intro cut scene of Conker's Bad Fur Day where the camera's slowly backing up from Conker's throne.

So TMEM is only 4k. If you want mippmapping, that eats half of it, down to 2k practically. That leaves you with enough room for 1 32x32x16BPP texture at most. So I think what they did in some cases was to take a mesh with a larger texture, and run it through a processor to tesselate the mesh on smaller texture block boundaries in UV space, so they can render each tile of geometry with the same texture block at once, then swap to the next subtexture and render all it's geometry. That'd give you an apparent larger texture than you could fit into TMEM, and is one reason (of many) why their games look so good. They also might not have had tooling for that and just brute forced it by hand, I can't tell just from looking at the wireframe.

Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis

#58
Did Rambus have a dossier of compromising photos on industry executives in the mid 90's? Why did Intel and Nintendo go all in on such an expensive and technically inferior memory technology? The latency is such a killer, especially if you're on an architecture with really deep pipelines (ahem, P4).

Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis

#59
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't recorded unfortunately. The source behind the text of the most recent slides starts here if you'd like to read it: https://github.com/monocasa/n64-slides-apr/blob/caae25f397c5... I should probably save off pictures and put it into a pdf or something where it could be more easily accessible.

Would it be possible to provide a rom Image that would run in an emulator?

I uploaded the build into a github release on the repo just now.

https://github.com/monocasa/n64-slides-apr/releases/tag/v0.1...

I've only tested it with cen64 and real hardware with a 64drive.

A is forward through the slides, B is back.

Re: Nintendo 64 Architecture – A Practical Analysis

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing. Is there somewhere I can watch this talk?

It wasn't recorded unfortunately. The source behind the text of the most recent slides starts here if you'd like to read it: https://github.com/monocasa/n64-slides-apr/blob/caae25f397c5... I should probably save off pictures and put it into a pdf or something where it could be more easily accessible.

If you made a video of the slides with a recording of your voice over it and posted it on Youtube, I’m sure you’d get a great response
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