Live data from Hacker News

How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

phoboslab.org

51–60 of 312 posts

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just not the same. I made games for the PSP and Vita and it's "different" than making games for Windows or Playstation/Xbox. There's something about seeing your creation on a tiny handheld. I guess maybe nowadays we got desensitized to it because our phones are actual supercomputers which can run Fortnite without breaking a sweat, but making a device with 2MB of ram play your game as you imagined it is just hype…

If you enjoy this sort of thing I’d highly recommend pico-8 and tic-80. Both have pretty full featured dev environments and have a set of restrictions that make developing for them fun.

Yep, I made several games for the Pico-8, it's really really fun.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#54

if I am not wrong, the game described in this article, is presented in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gOJUEcKYRk , from Palmer Luckey[1]. Wild this guy find time and energy for this side quest. That's passion. References: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Luckey

Each person that dies by his weapons of war makes him stronger.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#55
post #24

Tried to see if it was possible to buy the Rom itself. But it seems like you would need to buy a physical copy at this point: https://modretro.com/products/xibalba-64

Does compatibility with M64 imply N64 compat?

Yes. The game was mostly developed with an original N64.

The cartridges from Modretro only work on NTSC N64s, though. I'm told the next production run should work on PAL, too.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is something so charming about the N64/PS1 era. They were so unique in their own right and you could tell at a passing glance which system was displaying on the screen even if you didn't know what game it was. Two radically different systems at the dawning of 3D console games. I bought a MiSTer for me and my son and we played the heck out of Mario Kart 64 and Mario Golf. I think he picked up my "gaming is dead…

I love that. My wife and I are hopefully having kids soon and that's one thing I really want to encourage. Not to say that modern games aren't any good, but there's an increasing lack of respect for the player's time and wallet. The goal is shifting to maximizing value because they're getting more expensive to produce, but increasing the game price itself is a cardinal sin. Not to mention that live service games just…

Let your kid go over to their friend's house to play Fortnite or Valorant. And let your kid's friend come over to yours to play Mario Kart.

I think as adults we get locked into a few things. I remember as a kid I would play anything I had access to and liked. Now it's more of one or two games at a time.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#57
post #22
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did they do it back in the day? Was basically everything from the tooling etc. just created inhouse from scratch?

They had stuff, but it was all proprietary. The N64 was a stripped-down implementation of the technology used on (high-end) SGI graphics workstations of the time. SGI certainly had all the required tools.

The N64 SDK docs, if not the SDK itself, leaked at one point. I would expect that by now the whole thing has leaked long ago.

Come to think of it, it must have, because the bit-perfect recompilation projects are using the exact compilers from the SDK.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#58
post #3

I'm tinkering with a PlayStation homebrew (voxel space renderer) and development for fifth generation consoles has never been easier. Modern toolchains, programming languages, dev cartridges and libraries from the community makes all the difference. Outside of some niceties like ICE (gotta write that GDB stub for target hardware at some point), it's not that different from what you'd experience with modern embedded w…

I am still amazed my own minimalist PS1 tutorial series [1] became as popular as it did, given that prior to it basically all learning material on the internet was written around the decent-for-the-time-but-horrible-now Sony SDK and often based on 30-year-old example code full of 30-year-old C practices (in particular the complete disregard for aliasing and concurrency, which resulted in plenty of headaches once people started using those ancient libraries and example code with modern GCC). We even have bleeding-edge C++ SDK options [2] complete with an STL and coroutine support, so if anybody here wants to try their hand at PS1 homebrew development I would highly encourage checking out the modern tooling we have now.

[1] https://github.com/spicyjpeg/ps1-bare-metal

[2] https://github.com/grumpycoders/pcsx-redux/tree/main/src/mip...

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#59
post #49
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be counterintuitive at first, but why wouldn't be possible? It's one of the perks of "offline" hardware without subscriptions or DRM. You build a piece of hardware (cartridge) that attaches to another one (console) and it works. As long as the console works, there shouldn't be a problem.

> It may be counterintuitive at first, but why wouldn't be possible? For the same reason it wasn't possible at the time for a third-party to make N64 cartridges themselves to avoid Nintendo's fees. But I assume these lockout chips are replicated or circumvented by now.

Fairly recently the chip was studied in detail and replicated. But like most systems of that era, I believe it was circumvented fairly quickly by pirates. The easiest way would be to piggyback a licensed cartridge - unlike the NES, it has to be one with the same region and bootloader as there are several lockout chip variants, but that basic technique still works.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#60
post #3

I'm tinkering with a PlayStation homebrew (voxel space renderer) and development for fifth generation consoles has never been easier. Modern toolchains, programming languages, dev cartridges and libraries from the community makes all the difference. Outside of some niceties like ICE (gotta write that GDB stub for target hardware at some point), it's not that different from what you'd experience with modern embedded w…

There is something so charming about the N64/PS1 era. They were so unique in their own right and you could tell at a passing glance which system was displaying on the screen even if you didn't know what game it was. Two radically different systems at the dawning of 3D console games. I bought a MiSTer for me and my son and we played the heck out of Mario Kart 64 and Mario Golf. I think he picked up my "gaming is dead…

> "gaming is dead now"

One gets the impression that gaming is dead when one's only contact with modern gaming consists of reading headlines about a handful of AAA games.

In reality, the gaming landscape has never been better, as game production has expanded in several directions:

- The barrier to entry into game development has been lowered; People who are talented in design but not programming now have the opportunity to create games

- AAA budgets have increased; those who enjoy large-scale productions will find increasingly large games

- There is still a market for old-school games, so plenty of (especially smaller) companies produce retromodern games

Heck, they even still produce commercial Commodore 64 games o_O

Of course, there is less room for radical innovation, but people do not play only radically innovative games. And regardless, innovation still exists today, especially in smaller-scale productions.

Post reply on HN