How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026 • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#231

Post by CMay » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 9:07 PM UTC

dabluecaboose wrote: post #105

nonethewiser wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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…

This propaganda against Palmer Luckey completely lacks any critical thinking. Then again, I guess all propaganda is targeted at people who aren't critical thinkers to start with, so that's why it ends up working.

I've seen this astroturfing and spreading of lies increase since he delivered weapons to Taiwan so they can defend themselves. Probably the CCP amping up their influence campaign against him.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#232

Post by orangedog » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 9:13 PM UTC

CMay wrote: post #226

eltondegeneres wrote: post #87

[flagged]

He's not a war profiteer, he's a peace profiteer. His philosophy is peace through strength, not profit through death. He even strongly emphasizes saving lives through weapons with better precision, which has been the trajectory of US weapons design for many decades. Russia is over there killing everything in sight and leveling entire cities including thousands of schools. Your claim is similar to saying nobody should…

Starting a weapon company is different from owning a gun. You have control over that gun. Your weapons company, those weapons will be used to kill innocent people, there is no doubt. Weapons don't only get used for clean operations in war and there is almost always collateral damage.

It is a decision to start producing regardless of how well-intentioned it is. You will be profiting off of people being maimed and killed. Various people thought they solved war through new weapons only to create more effective killing machines. That's what WW1 was.

Palmer does not have to work on weapons nor justify making them. Building tech that will be used to murder people (and yes, it will happen) is a decision. Not funding his other hobby when he's getting money off US military contracts is hardly breaking his bank. He wants to build weapons? I don't want to buy his products. Easy.

Building more efficient weapons does not make us safer. Every dollar saved through "strength" and better weapons matters little to the parents who lost their kid when the most precise weapon in the world kills a bunch of schoolchildren like it did at the start of the Iran war. If you can't gaurantee your weapons won't get used for that, why would you build them? You cannot.

I thought Tony Stark already made this point.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#233

Post by wat10000 » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

CMay wrote: post #226

eltondegeneres wrote: post #87

[flagged]

He's not a war profiteer, he's a peace profiteer. His philosophy is peace through strength, not profit through death. He even strongly emphasizes saving lives through weapons with better precision, which has been the trajectory of US weapons design for many decades. Russia is over there killing everything in sight and leveling entire cities including thousands of schools. Your claim is similar to saying nobody should…

We're talking about a company whose primary customer is the US military. Said military is currently involved in a pointless war of aggression. It has carried out unprovoked attacks on at least two other countries just this year alone. When was the last time the it was used in self defense?

"Peace through strength" is a fine motto, but you can't claim that motto and then turn around and base your business on selling to an entity that routinely starts non-defensive wars.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#234

Post by CMay » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 9:26 PM UTC

orangedog wrote: post #232

CMay wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not a war profiteer, he's a peace profiteer. His philosophy is peace through strength, not profit through death. He even strongly emphasizes saving lives through weapons with better precision, which has been the trajectory of US weapons design for many decades. Russia is over there killing everything in sight and leveling entire cities including thousands of schools. Your claim is similar to saying nobody should…

Starting a weapon company is different from owning a gun. You have control over that gun. Your weapons company, those weapons will be used to kill innocent people, there is no doubt. Weapons don't only get used for clean operations in war and there is almost always collateral damage. It is a decision to start producing regardless of how well-intentioned it is. You will be profiting off of people being maimed and kill…

The problem is that China, Russia, Iran and so on have all been accelerating their weapons manufacturing. Go complain to them.

If nobody in the world was manufacturing any weapons and it was fully observable from space, nobody would have cause to manufacture these kinds of weapons. We do not live in that world.

At some point, any reasonable person should agree that if a country exists in an environment that contains many threats it might need to defend itself or others from, then it makes complete sense for it to develop weapons towards that aim. Countries are not people, people are people. So people make the weapons.

It just so happens that Palmer Luckey is a person. He can't sell weapons to any random person or country he wants, he can only sell them to the US or with permission of the US to a country that the US has a strategic interest in defending.

Precision weapons have helped reduce casualties. This is a fact. Please try to contradict this fact in the face of napalm bombing and nuclear bombs of yesteryears. Please try to tell me that precision weapons aren't better than just randomly aiming artillery at the sky and letting'er rip. Please do. I want to hear your well founded argument for this.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#235

Post by ColdStream » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 9:27 PM UTC

pizza234 wrote: post #60

shoobiedoo wrote: post #21

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…

> "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 opportuni…

My take is a bit reductionist but I have found that there is this huge divide nowadays between the AAA top of the town and the indie games at the bottom.

AAA you know what you are getting, big brash but usually really polished cutting edge stuff but also designed by commitment.

Then you have indie games that are high ambition but also very limited in what they can achieve. So you get a lot of things with brilliant ideas but dont always stick the landing. Two recent ones I have been going through are Skate story and Gecko gods. Both have wonder ambition but you keep hitting those issues when you realise, yeah it is an indie title.

There is a middle ground but it is so hard to find in between those two extremes.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#236

Post by CMay » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 9:29 PM UTC

wat10000 wrote: post #233

CMay wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not a war profiteer, he's a peace profiteer. His philosophy is peace through strength, not profit through death. He even strongly emphasizes saving lives through weapons with better precision, which has been the trajectory of US weapons design for many decades. Russia is over there killing everything in sight and leveling entire cities including thousands of schools. Your claim is similar to saying nobody should…

We're talking about a company whose primary customer is the US military. Said military is currently involved in a pointless war of aggression. It has carried out unprovoked attacks on at least two other countries just this year alone. When was the last time the it was used in self defense? "Peace through strength" is a fine motto, but you can't claim that motto and then turn around and base your business on selling t…

If you don't understand history or what's going on in the world, everything will seem pointless and you will fall easy prey to anyone telling you what you should believe.

You have so many tools at your disposal for learning, you really have no reason to just have no idea what is going on unless you just don't prioritize your time that way. In which case, it's ok to understand that you don't know, but why hold your opinion so strongly then?

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#237

Post by rightbyte » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 9:29 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #151

kridsdale1 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Scum…

Zork comes to mind. I am pretty sure there are plenty more really early.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#238

Post by wat10000 » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 9:31 PM UTC

CMay wrote: post #236

wat10000 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about a company whose primary customer is the US military. Said military is currently involved in a pointless war of aggression. It has carried out unprovoked attacks on at least two other countries just this year alone. When was the last time the it was used in self defense? "Peace through strength" is a fine motto, but you can't claim that motto and then turn around and base your business on selling t…

If you don't understand history or what's going on in the world, everything will seem pointless and you will fall easy prey to anyone telling you what you should believe. You have so many tools at your disposal for learning, you really have no reason to just have no idea what is going on unless you just don't prioritize your time that way. In which case, it's ok to understand that you don't know, but why hold your op…

Come out and say what you want to say. Don't give me this nonsense about how I have no idea what's going on and you won't even deign to explain where you disagree.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#239

Post by pizza234 » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 9:32 PM UTC

officeplant wrote: post #82

pizza234 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 opportuni…

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…

> 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.

The production ethics and the product are two distinct aspects.

Regarding the product itself, definitely the AAA gaming industry is, like Hollywood, a dysfunctional production model, but that doesn't mean that it's dead in terms of quality - some franchises do maintain high quality (Doom has been exceptional in this sense) but even in terms of new IP, in average, there at least couple of high quality entries in average, every year. Things could go better, but they're certainly far from "dead".

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#240

Post by orangedog » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 9:33 PM UTC

CMay wrote: post #234

orangedog wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting a weapon company is different from owning a gun. You have control over that gun. Your weapons company, those weapons will be used to kill innocent people, there is no doubt. Weapons don't only get used for clean operations in war and there is almost always collateral damage. It is a decision to start producing regardless of how well-intentioned it is. You will be profiting off of people being maimed and kill…

The problem is that China, Russia, Iran and so on have all been accelerating their weapons manufacturing. Go complain to them. If nobody in the world was manufacturing any weapons and it was fully observable from space, nobody would have cause to manufacture these kinds of weapons. We do not live in that world. At some point, any reasonable person should agree that if a country exists in an environment that contains…

Hey, if your argument is that somebody has to build weapons, then that's your argument. I don't believe that's the situation and building weapons only encourages other countries to do the same. Notice virtually all of Russia's justifications are about US aggression, rightly or wrongly.

Is it more efficient than napalm? Great. It still will be used to kill people which I find to be gross, especially when innocents will die, too. If somebody has to build weapons and somebody has to fund said weapons maker, I'm glad it doesn't have to be me. Doesn't have to be Palmer either.