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How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

phoboslab.org

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Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#91
post #35

[flagged]

what makes him/them a war criminal?

The whole point of Anduril is to create autonomous weapon systems that can kill people autonomously without human involvement. When you look at interviews and speeches that Palmer Luckey has given, they are always deeply unsettling. In a 2024 speech, he said "Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims. You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don't lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom." ( https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/01/palmer-luckey-every-countr... ). He's said in a Bloomberg interview that "there are actually things I would like to build that the DoD would not use and would not deploy, that they do think are beyond the pale" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItLFpYha6Wc ), and he's said in an Axios interview that he would be willing to build nuclear weapons, as well as chemical weapons "in a specific vertical". He elaborates by saying that it's a huge mistake that the US military isn't allowed to use tear gas in combat. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZfW3YTJ5Eg )

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#92
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nowadays you can make a video game by just downloading an engine and building everything using the included scripting language most of the time - no need to understand rendering, IO, input or anything else. I don't disagree, but I don't see it as a positive, looking at the current game releases and their performance being shockingly unoptimised, there is a lot of lost real world value in knowing the lower level det…

Hmmm look, I can offer you my perspective on this. I've been a low level engine programmer in video games all my working life. I worked on a few AAA games that sold 20M+ copies, I'm not saying this to boast, I'm saying this to say I know how the sausage is made. My literal day to day job is fixing issues like "The RHI thread on the Switch takes 0.5ms longer than it should" and optimizing things as much as possible. I…

You know thats completely fair. I'm not in the game industry but I see some friends and what they do and I do have to admit, I wouldn't be able for it so it's not really fair for me to critisise.

> it's kinda crazy that Epic lets you use UE for FREE until you start making serious money on the game that you made.

Thinking about how powerfull UE is, it is kind of insane.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#93
post #74

Anyone know a vendor that might sell SummerCart in amateur quantities? Doesn't need to do that specifically, but maybe there's custom low volume board makers, like with 3D printer economics.

Are you looking to make homemade homebrew carts? If the M64 carts are anything like ModRetro's chromatic carts, the boards will be flashable. ModRetro has also stated they're planning on open-sourcing the design, so if we're lucky there could be a large variety of people making flashable blank carts in the near future.

I'm really looking forward to the Epilogue 64 Operator. I have the GB Operator, and it's been amazing to be able to flash romhacks onto carts and play on bona-fide hardware.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#96
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?

The same way it's done now with current generation consoles: the manufacturer would provide you with SDKs and development hardware once you paid them a decent chunk of money and signed an NDA. Prior to the fifth generation it was common for the SDK to be just an assembler, debugger and register-level hardware documentation, leaving the implementation of a kernel and game engine up to the game developer. Sony however…

Crazy then that the Bleem and Bleemcast emulator were so early!

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#97
I consider all homebrew stuff very cool but the number of games emulating PS1 / N64 aesthetics is so massively oversaturated at this point that I'm kind of burned out on it.

But in general, the thing that really impresses me is what people come up with working within these various constraints. Less is more.

Megadrive / genesis homebrew is where it's at for me. But tbh I am honestly kind of clueless when it comes to this stuff. Still trying to get parallax scrolling and foreground occlusion figured out for my "game."

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#98

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…

As a lifer of gaming (with a wife with similar tastes), prior to having kids my friends and I would have the discussions about "raising our kids right on the old games". I can't claim to be some classic purist, my last 25 years of gaming has been 90%+ Halo, with other competitive shooters and hardcore racing sims, but we still own almost all of our old systems.

My oldest is 7, and my youngest almost 5, and they came into gaming in a round-about way. My sister was visiting when the oldest was 3 or 4, and asked to play "an old Sonic 3D game". So, I pulled the Dreamcast out of storage, hooked everything up, and she played for all of 15 minutes before getting bored. However, my daughter was enamored. Immediately asked to play and even knowing how janky old Sonic was, I obliged.

Honestly, the rest is history. I'm not exaggerating when I say that our living room TV currently has a Dreamcast, a Gamecube, an Xbox One, PS3, PS4, and Switch hooked up to it. Both girls are huge Sonic fans, and play everything from rereleases of the Genesis games, to every brand new Sonic game that comes out, along with a whole mix of other age appropriate games (3D Marios, Animal Crossing, Smash Bros, and Mario Kart all being staples in our household).

My point in all of this is that if you expose them to the older stuff at a young age and it clicks, they'll explore the gaming landscape in their own way. I've also got an 11 year old brother that plays Fortnite with his friends every day, but also is trying to collect every single Lego game that's come out since they started the Lego Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc. series of games. Kids will like what they're going to like, but having parents that are enthusiastic about the breadth of what the medium has to offer will encourage them to dig being the modern offerings.

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