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Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports

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Re: Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports

#92
post #88
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except this work can be done once, stored somewhere and shared. Take a ROM (it means read-only after all) and get native port out...

Shared legally?

You can share the prepared binary because it contains no trace of the rom. The rom is still required to play the game.

Re: Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports

#93
post #79

I wish all game executables would be OS agnostic, something similar to WebAssembly: GameAssembly. For example you can no longer play 32-bit games on new macOS version, neither 32-bit Windows games under Wine. It's almost impossible to find 64-bit .exe files so they can run under fine under Wine/Crossover.

.NET would probably be as close as you can get given it allows you to have portable assemblies with pointers, structs and simd code which is very relevant to games.

It models statically-typed compiled languages in a much superior way to WASM, there are projects showcasing how well e.g. Rust maps to it[0], and C++/CLI existed for a long time (although it's not cross-platform, and is considered cursed).

C and C++ could be mapped in a perfect manner to IL and then AOT compiled in ways that GraalVM's Truffle can only dream of (given that .NET exposes a very wide set of intrinsics allowing a lot of code to be ported that way).

[0] https://github.com/FractalFir/rustc_codegen_clr

Re: Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports

#95
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised, even Nintendo doesn't get it perfect themselves. When N64 games were first made available on the Nintendo Switch Online platform, there were several problems with graphical effects and input lag. Here's an MVG video from the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSyBMSOfPxg

Haha I remember this launch and how awful it was an thinking about how a bunch of fans have done such a better job. Hell, even Nintendo did a better job for the Wii's Virtual Console.

Yeah it's an interesting pattern. Even the GameCube had decent N64 emulation early in its lifecycle. But the Wii U Virtual Console also had issues with N64 emulation. Specifically it added a dark filter for no reason, which could be removed with homebrew thankfully. You'd think Nintendo would have the best emulation of their own systems on their systems, considering how long people stick around you probably have people who developed for the N64 still there

Re: Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports

#97

One thing this could be cool for is games like Goldeneye, which is hard to play on PC because it expects that weird joystick input. It would be awesome to have a native Goldeneye port with normal mouse behaviour like other FPSes.

There is emulator hack for Goldeneye that add WASD + mouse support and I heard that it works great. https://github.com/Graslu/1964GEPD/releases/tag/latest

Something's wrong with it, maybe related to the framerate. I can run and shoot a lot faster than before, but enemies take just as long as the old version to aim. I was able to beat levels on 00 mode with ease, mostly by sprinting past enemies.

Re: Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WASD with mouse aim control doesn't really work with the game though. The modal aspect of aiming combined with the travel time/return-to-center of the cursor is a really fun part of the game. If you could just free-aim while running a la PC FPS it would kind of ruin the campaign since everything is designed around this. Picking your spots and keeping cool while aiming are the appeal. That said, if you keep the modal…

Weirdly Goldeneye did have a control layout where you could move with one joystick and aim with the other using 2 controllers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZaEpugk3hY

That's how I played, and while the N64 joysticks aren't very good, it was alright. The much bigger problem was lag.

Re: Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports

#100
post #62
post #55

What's the advantage over an emulator? This is after all, a form of an emulator - one where you translate ahead. This sort of thing has been done in the past with things like Bleem so it can be more performant but on a modern PC any good emulator is going to perform well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem !

The goals of this project and the goals of N64 emulation are fairly different. The goal of N64 emulators (generally) is to accurately recreate the behavior of the original console. Conversely, there is a large crowd of people who just want to play SM64, OOT and MM with a bevy of "graphical enhancements" like 60fps, widescreen, texture packs, randomizers, etc. For these people, the fact that these games originally ran…

Honestly SM64 with new graphics in those demo videos looks worse than the original game. But Gamecube games running in an emulator look amazing because they use a lot more vector graphics, which the emu can scale up and apply antialiasing to.

What interests me more about recompilation is it can produce very efficient binaries instead of having to emulate everything. And also makes it easier to add new features.

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