Drawing Triangles on N64
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Drawing Triangles on N64
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Re: Drawing Triangles on N64
#2Site was hugged to death for me. Mirror:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220329011051/https://alinacier...
Re: Drawing Triangles on N64
#3Site was hugged to death for me. Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20220329011051/https://alinacier...
Thank you your majesty
Re: Drawing Triangles on N64
#4How well understood is the N64 understood now? Is most of the knowledge of how it works from reverse engineering or is there actually stuff from nintendo explaining it that's now available?
Re: Drawing Triangles on N64
#5How well understood is the N64 understood now? Is most of the knowledge of how it works from reverse engineering or is there actually stuff from nintendo explaining it that's now available?
A lot of the knowledge is from patents and dev kit leaks. Also, it was built by Silicon Graphics and uses similar tech to their indigo workstations so some knowledge from those apply.
N64 is well understood, and there are low level emulators now available that emulate the RSP and RDP on modern GPUs implemented with compute shaders. https://www.libretro.com/index.php/category/parallel-n64/
Re: Drawing Triangles on N64
#6How well understood is the N64 understood now? Is most of the knowledge of how it works from reverse engineering or is there actually stuff from nintendo explaining it that's now available?
http://ultra64.ca has many leaked documents and software
Re: Drawing Triangles on N64
#7How well understood is the N64 understood now? Is most of the knowledge of how it works from reverse engineering or is there actually stuff from nintendo explaining it that's now available?
A lot of the knowledge is from patents and dev kit leaks. Also, it was built by Silicon Graphics and uses similar tech to their indigo workstations so some knowledge from those apply. N64 is well understood, and there are low level emulators now available that emulate the RSP and RDP on modern GPUs implemented with compute shaders. https://www.libretro.com/index.php/category/parallel-n64/
The Verilog source code for the N64 ASICs leaked at some point, it's been floating around the internet for a while. So there's very little you couldn't figure out by looking at that, at this point.
That's relatively recent, though; the vast majority of the emulation knowledge was from reverse engineering, patents, and typical devkit leak stuff as you say.
Re: Drawing Triangles on N64
#8How well understood is the N64 understood now? Is most of the knowledge of how it works from reverse engineering or is there actually stuff from nintendo explaining it that's now available?
“We won’t tell you how to use our console to its full potential because you might use it to its full potential” - Nintendo circa 1996
Re: Drawing Triangles on N64
#9How well understood is the N64 understood now? Is most of the knowledge of how it works from reverse engineering or is there actually stuff from nintendo explaining it that's now available?
There have been a huge improvement in implementing (and so, reversing) obscure ucodes (RDP, Reality Display Processor aka “N64 GPU”).
I think now all ucode are now properly documented[0][1][2].
[0]: http://gliden64.blogspot.com/2019/02/hle-implementation-of-b...
[1]: http://gliden64.blogspot.com/2018/05/hle-implementation-of-m...
[2]: http://gliden64.blogspot.com/2017/08/star-wars-rogue-squadro...
Re: Drawing Triangles on N64
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of the knowledge is from patents and dev kit leaks. Also, it was built by Silicon Graphics and uses similar tech to their indigo workstations so some knowledge from those apply. N64 is well understood, and there are low level emulators now available that emulate the RSP and RDP on modern GPUs implemented with compute shaders. https://www.libretro.com/index.php/category/parallel-n64/
The Verilog source code for the N64 ASICs leaked at some point, it's been floating around the internet for a while. So there's very little you couldn't figure out by looking at that, at this point. That's relatively recent, though; the vast majority of the emulation knowledge was from reverse engineering, patents, and typical devkit leak stuff as you say.
Verilog RDP leak is overrated, IMHO. It helps to shape “broadly” how the black box (for the time) RDP works so RE work can starts.
TBH, most peoples still prefer to RE on dedicated N64 hardware (hand crafted physical CPU interrupt/inspection). The problem is Verilog source alone is not that useful as you need to “plug” it to CPU with the N64 interface.