31–40 of 205 posts
This completely blows my mind, but also seems a natural fit considering the SGI lineage of the N64. It's like a super budget IRIX workstation ;P
But the N64 only has 4MB of ram, I think a GUI would be beyond it's capabilities. Still a cool project though.
This completely blows my mind, but also seems a natural fit considering the SGI lineage of the N64. It's like a super budget IRIX workstation ;P
But the N64 only has 4MB of ram, I think a GUI would be beyond it's capabilities. Still a cool project though.
Certainly a modern GUI a la KDE, Gnome and friends would be well outside of its abilities, but a functional GUI is possible on a shockingly small amount of memory!
Is it possible to use the texture memory/cache (including the Expansion Pak) as additional (albeit limited) system RAM? If so, is that the case here?
The expansion pak would double the effective memory from 4MB to 8. But, there is no separate memory for textures to take advantage of. Just a 4k cache that textures were loaded into from main RAM one at a time while rendering. There were some games that manually implemented their own virtual memory paging system to map the cartridge ROM to RAM address space. But, in general a feature that distinguished the N64 from t…
> Differing memory countings are due to the 9th bit only being available to the RCP for tasks such as anti-aliasing or Z-buffering.
afaik there is no way of manually using this ram, its hardwired to fixed function pipeline stages of RCP.
How does a Linux port make it easier to port emulators or console games?
Is this a step towards getting an N64 on a modern (?) stack like qemu+linux?
Is it possible to use the texture memory/cache (including the Expansion Pak) as additional (albeit limited) system RAM? If so, is that the case here?
Expansion Pak is regular RAM both to this and the normal games. The texture memory would be difficult to use as RAM though since it's not directly addressable.
how do you even interact with the N64 ... ?? controller????
https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Nintendo_64_Keyboard
No idea how realistic it'd be to get it working with Linux.
I never had a relationship with the N64. After the Super Nintendo I was deep into computers and programming. The place I used to go to rent video games also started to rent CD ROMS. I went down there one time to rent a CD ROM and saw the N64. Back then video games stores also worked as an arcade, where you could play a system for 30 minutes paying a small fee. So I decided to try this new system, the N64. The game I…
Until now however;
La Noire
Outer Wilds
Command and Conquer Remastered
Broken Sword
And so on
What a time to be alive
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Expansion Pak is regular RAM both to this and the normal games. The texture memory would be difficult to use as RAM though since it's not directly addressable.
texture memory would be difficult to use because n64 doesnt have any, its unified memory arch.
That's one of the major reasons the N64 has a reputation for being 'blurry'. 4k gives you a max of (with mip maps) one 32x32 16-bit texture at a time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the N64 only has 4MB of ram, I think a GUI would be beyond it's capabilities. Still a cool project though.
Fascinatingly, quite the opposite! For example, the original Macintosh had only a small fraction of that to work with, at 128 Kilobytes![1] Certainly a modern GUI a la KDE, Gnome and friends would be well outside of its abilities, but a functional GUI is possible on a shockingly small amount of memory! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K