Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 182 posts

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

#161

Post by [deleted] »

coolmitch wrote: post #131
kilburn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, Thabeast is beating every N64 game, and he means ALL of them. [1] He has already completed all games, but the videos are waaay behind (he's releasing one video/game a week). [1] https://www.youtube.com/@Thabeast721/videos

if you're interested in this kind of thing, The Mexican Runner beat every NES game (over 700 of them [1]) including such gems as Miracle Piano Teaching System, which took 91 hours to beat and required him to become quite proficient at actual piano playing [2] [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KDNGI76HoMNyYLL6RqWu... [2] https://youtu.be/PB_LMW72crY?t=3997

[deleted]

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

#162

Post by doublepg23 »

coolmitch wrote: post #131
kilburn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, Thabeast is beating every N64 game, and he means ALL of them. [1] He has already completed all games, but the videos are waaay behind (he's releasing one video/game a week). [1] https://www.youtube.com/@Thabeast721/videos

if you're interested in this kind of thing, The Mexican Runner beat every NES game (over 700 of them [1]) including such gems as Miracle Piano Teaching System, which took 91 hours to beat and required him to become quite proficient at actual piano playing [2] [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KDNGI76HoMNyYLL6RqWu... [2] https://youtu.be/PB_LMW72crY?t=3997

Wow that was incredible, I love internet stories like that.

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

#163

Post by sixothree »

tristor wrote: post #116
kwanbix wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are probably fewere games that are worth doing. Maybe 100? 200?

I really liked the N64, but if we're being charitable it's probably like 30-40 games. For any given console, even those that achieve legendary status, the game quality follows a Pareto distribution, 80% is crap, 20% is worth playing after the console has left the public mind.

And for consoles like PS2 or OG Xbox or newer, so so many games have newer versions on other platforms

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

#164

Post by acchow »

tristor wrote: post #116
kwanbix wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are probably fewere games that are worth doing. Maybe 100? 200?

I really liked the N64, but if we're being charitable it's probably like 30-40 games. For any given console, even those that achieve legendary status, the game quality follows a Pareto distribution, 80% is crap, 20% is worth playing after the console has left the public mind.

20% seems far too generous

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

#165

Post by ClassyJacket »

hot_gril wrote: post #100
skrrtww wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, SM64 is weird because a lot of '3d' objects used billboarding, it was actually just a flat object always facing the camera, so they don't scale up well. Anything spherical (chain chomp for example).

Hilarious proof: https://imgur.com/gallery/Xw4tN#FoRAGl7

The characters in Mario Kart 64 were like that too, they just prerendered a heap of different angles and inserted the appropriate one.

With recompilation we could change those things, but I'm not sure how much work it would be and how many people who care to play those games would want to alter them that much.

Early 3d games will always have those rough edges sadly.

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

#166

Post by thejazzman »

anthk wrote: post #153
derefr wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't get "ROMs" officially. You have to extract them from the cartridge with specialized equipment, or maybe in some other way, but it is not as simple as reading from a CD. Nintendo has, in fact, sold the public ROMs before (and I don't just mean custom emulator executables wrapping ROM payloads that get delivered encrypted onto DRMed consoles.) Specifically, I'm talking about the NES Classic and SNES Classic…

The license of the ROMs it's to play them, not to exploit them.

I'm pretty sure all roads lead to either playing the game or otherwise not doing anything of value to Nintendo whatsoever (ie who cares if you bury a box of roms in your yard)

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

#167

Post by 38 »

ambyra wrote: post #124
skrrtww wrote: post #21

To operate this tool, you still need to disassemble the ROM up front and annotate it heavily before it can be recompiled. This tool is very nice, to be sure, but the hyperbole about anything close to one-click generation of standalone executables for an arbitrary ROM is getting out of hand.

What is the process, and can any of it be chatgpted?

[flagged]

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

#168

Post by Hamuko »

ldjb wrote: post #155
ars wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's legal if the recipient owns the game, it would be covered under fair use for compatibility purposes.

Note that this is not true in many jurisdictions.

Is it in any? Because I don't think just adding a "You need to own the game to download this binary" text to your GitHub repo is going to do a lot legally.

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

#169

Post by advael »

skrrtww wrote: post #21

To operate this tool, you still need to disassemble the ROM up front and annotate it heavily before it can be recompiled. This tool is very nice, to be sure, but the hyperbole about anything close to one-click generation of standalone executables for an arbitrary ROM is getting out of hand.

I think "but using the tool takes time and effort" is a good but not perfect criticism of a tool that purports to reduce time and effort spent. As many asinine CEOs are making outsized claims about generic "productivity" improvements from various tools in this space and similar ones all the time, I get this instinct. However, it does not make sense when the use of the tool is anything other than "something you could already do, just faster"

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

#170

Post by Cloudef »

lcnmrn wrote: 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.

libretro kinda is this by providing runtime where the game runs inside. You still need to compile the game/core for the correct architecture.
Post reply on HN