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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

#151

Post by monocasa »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #139
pjmlp wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put this into perspective for youngsters, that horrible Sony SDK was considered a wonder for its time, and what kickstarted the movement away from Assembly into C for home console development, as main language. Until then, only arcades had already made the switch. On PS2, PS2Linux, Dreamcast there was already C++ support, by the way.

I’ve started to adapt my historic accounting of gaming away from hardware centric (console generations) and toward languages and compilers, and the force-multiplication they provided to developers which is tangibly evident in the products. Though these do correlate strongly with orders of magnitude of RAM being made available. - Physical logic gate era of gaming. - Assembly era - C era - OOP era - Interpreted languag…

FWIW, interpreted languages living on top of a native code engine has been a pretty common theme throughout. It goes back to early PC days (when PC meant IBM, Apple II, etc), where it was common that engine would be written in ASM, but it would implement a VM with all of the game business logic would exist to ease porting to very differnt systems. Almost all the early LucasArts games were written this way (hence ScummVM), Another World, the Sierra Games, etc.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#153

Post by officeplant »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #86
officeplant wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it should instead say "AAA gaming is dead now" All we see out of mainstream AAA gaming is abused devs, private equity scalping, and mindless remaster regurgitation. Basically going through the same problems as Hollywood is with major films. You get a massive banger of a production every few years, and the rest is just endless money burning and developer harm. Meanwhile the good indie devs are a dice roll on if they a…

This is a very rose tinted take. AAA game development was far more brutal in the 90s. Go look up the development of Sonic Xtreme in the 90s. A brutal development process in the 90s that led to more thsn half the development team camping out in Redwood City Sega office building for months until they all got so sick half the team went on medical leave. Or Quake, where the game development process literally broke the te…

>Or Quake, where the game development process literally broke the team.

Going by interviews with the team over the decades, they had clashing personalities and poor leadership.

> AAA game development was far more brutal in the 90s.

Honestly it's probably always been brutal going back even to the early days of Atari. Companies like EA have spent three decades destroying beloved studios for profit, only to now be chewed up and spit out by PE/VC bastards themselves. A fitting end really.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#154

Post by monocasa »

inigyou wrote: post #57
inigyou wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, the full SDK leaked decades ago when the system was still economically relevant to Nintendo.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#155

Post by munk-a »

spankibalt wrote: post #126
dabluecaboose wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine did posit the quandary that an "unpalatable" individual such as Luckey appears to be one of the few making consumer-friendly products: Removable, swappable battery packs, AA battery support, standard USB-C charging, easy interoperability, open sourced designs, exposed screws, teardown instructions, etc. Apparently ModRetro is even looking into making dumb TVs for gaming. It's ironic, in another world…

> It's ironic, in another world HN commenters would be lauding Luckey and ModRetro for all these virtues. Lot's of HN (and "social" media) commenters in this world evidently are; nothing ironic about it. It's just many people have a radically different set of ethics which, once they become principles, can't be easily, or at all, compromised on. And just to be fair, it's not just the what , but the how (which extends…

I am nuanced enough to appreciate that these qualities are present in the products being produced and still not buy from this producer because of their industry ties. Hopefully someone without such ridiculously unpalatable PR is able to copycat their design and sell a competitor - and hopefully the lead they've laid sets the standard for easily replaceable parts for the market (though, I'd mention that retro gaming hardware is intentionally made to be as modular as possible in most circumstances anyways).

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#156

Post by monocasa »

cubefox wrote: post #65
inigyou wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I never saw a piggyback cartridge at the time though, or one that was obviously unlicensed. Of course, this could have more to do with Nintendo's legal pressure than with technological possibility.

The main pirating route at the time (a device (oh which there were several) that sat under the N64 and had either an Iomega Zip drive or a CD drive for holding ROMs), had a port for inserting a real cartridge to use its lockout chip.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#157

Post by officeplant »

zuzululu wrote: post #123
officeplant wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it should instead say "AAA gaming is dead now" All we see out of mainstream AAA gaming is abused devs, private equity scalping, and mindless remaster regurgitation. Basically going through the same problems as Hollywood is with major films. You get a massive banger of a production every few years, and the rest is just endless money burning and developer harm. Meanwhile the good indie devs are a dice roll on if they a…

Main issue with AAA gaming was studios consulting people who wanted to tell gamers what they should want, using their capital on paying influencers and media to demonize said gamers for rejecting their games and so on. That's what pisses off the mostly straight hetrosexual male crowd that make up most of the gaming market. A big reason why many east asian game studios are doing so well by rejecting that tried and fai…

You don't have to go full GamerGate non-sense to find plenty of issues that are hurting the AAA market. Private equity, shareholders, and greed have been far more damaging to gaming.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#158

Post by spankibalt »

ifjeicjwidj wrote: post #145
dabluecaboose wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing a run-of-the-mill defense contractor to a serial rapist and murderer is certainly up there in the most unhinged justifications that I've seen on HN.

[flagged]

> So you know, either go all in and live like you mean it or stop pointing fingers at only very select individuals.

Careful. You're one step away from playing out the "Yet you participate in society. Curious!" meme. Besides, many people who are not in the Anduril fan club already boycott Microsoft for their ethical transgressions.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#159

Post by RankingMember »

lordfrito wrote: post #150

Wow the ModRetro units are really polished... Look great with more than a nod to the original system designs. Anyone know what Nintendo's stance is on the companies making these kind of "brand inspired" retro products?

> Anyone know what Nintendo's stance is on the companies making these kind of "brand inspired" retro products?

Undoubtedly their legal team is at work 24/7 finding every angle at which to unleash legal hell upon it.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#160

Post by yellowapple »

phoboslab wrote: post #81
cubefox wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Related to this, every ROM needs a "boot loader" that has to be signed and is verified by the lockout chip. Nintendo's boot code is under copyright and thus cannot be used. So the boot code distributed with Libdragon is signed by finding a hash collision with a brute force tool running on the GPU[1]. Fun stuff! [1] https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon/tree/trunk/boot#bu...

The “development” version of that is even crazier: it's a very tiny signed bootloader that does nothing but copies the “real” bootloader into memory, then trampolines into it, such that even developing your own IPL3 doesn't require having to re-brute-force the signature for every build.

And on top of that, libdragon's IPL3 doesn't just blindly copy the first megabyte of ROM code into RDRAM like the official Nintendo one does, but actually expects the ROM data after it to be a full-blown ELF executable, which it parses out and copies pieces of to the specified places.

Pretty slick stuff.

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