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.
Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports
21–30 of 182 posts
Re: Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports
#22I hope this eventually also works for Linux so that N64 games can be reliably played on very low end portable handhelds. N64 is notoriously tricky to emulate, but building them for the platform natively removes all performance problems.
That will likely require full decompilation. This is akin to wrapping the emulator up with the rom, with a few common functions (found via decompilation) being updated to support more modern rendering approaches. This isn't so much "native" as it is a patched container in an executable form. EDIT - But hey, you can always just add another layer of emulation via Proton to run it in Linux.
I don't think that's true, it really does recompile the N64 games into native executables, you can compile them using any C compiler like msvc, gcc and clang.
Re: Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports
#23I hope this eventually also works for Linux so that N64 games can be reliably played on very low end portable handhelds. N64 is notoriously tricky to emulate, but building them for the platform natively removes all performance problems.
> N64 is notoriously tricky to emulate Huh, I wouldn't have expected that. I don't know much about the specifics of N64 emulation, but I've had N64 emulators running perfectly since the early 2010s. I played mostly the big classics, so I'm unfamiliar with more niche title performance.
I think part of the issue is that some purists believe anything less than pixel perfect fidelity is unacceptable. I recall reading a report on N64(?) Wii(?) about how the flame flicker in one level of one game was off.
Re: Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports
#24One thing this could be cool for is games like Goldeneye, which is hard to play on PC because it expects that weird joystick input. It would be awesome to have a native Goldeneye port with normal mouse behaviour like other FPSes.
Wouldn't it still expect a weird joystick?
Well I was hoping there'd be a way to translate mouse input into the joystick input in a straightforward way that isn't available on emulators.
Re: Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports
#25I hope this eventually also works for Linux so that N64 games can be reliably played on very low end portable handhelds. N64 is notoriously tricky to emulate, but building them for the platform natively removes all performance problems.
> N64 is notoriously tricky to emulate Huh, I wouldn't have expected that. I don't know much about the specifics of N64 emulation, but I've had N64 emulators running perfectly since the early 2010s. I played mostly the big classics, so I'm unfamiliar with more niche title performance.
Many games were very playable with UltraHLE back in 1999, on the hardware of the time (~ Pentium 133 IIRC)
Re: Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
> N64 is notoriously tricky to emulate Huh, I wouldn't have expected that. I don't know much about the specifics of N64 emulation, but I've had N64 emulators running perfectly since the early 2010s. I played mostly the big classics, so I'm unfamiliar with more niche title performance.
I think part of the issue is that some purists believe anything less than pixel perfect fidelity is unacceptable. I recall reading a report on N64(?) Wii(?) about how the flame flicker in one level of one game was off.
Any Dolphin progress report will be full of these one-off quirks with an exhaustive deep-dive on how the issue was diagnosed and solved.
Setting aside the part about purists finding it unacceptable, I appreciate the tenacity of the devs that find these problems worth solving.
Re: Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports
#27I saw this when it came out, and as someone that doesn't follow the ROM hacking scene, I'm wondering - why did this approach take so long to come up with? Translating the assembly instructions to C and then recompiling them seems like an obvious method to try early on, but I'm wondering if there was some other breakthrough that made this possible in a way it wasn't before?
Re: Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports
#28One thing this could be cool for is games like Goldeneye, which is hard to play on PC because it expects that weird joystick input. It would be awesome to have a native Goldeneye port with normal mouse behaviour like other FPSes.
WASD with mouse aim control doesn't really work with the game though.
The modal aspect of aiming combined with the travel time/return-to-center of the cursor is a really fun part of the game. If you could just free-aim while running a la PC FPS it would kind of ruin the campaign since everything is designed around this. Picking your spots and keeping cool while aiming are the appeal.
That said, if you keep the modal aspect and have the mouse just 1) rotate Bond like left/right on the stick does and 2) control the cursor only in "aim mode" (hit R)..then I think that could be fun.
Tbh, I wish shooters didn't go straight to Quake-style WASD+mouse free-aim across the board. The modal aspect makes gives Goldeneye a certain physicality I really like.
Re: Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports
#29I hope this eventually also works for Linux so that N64 games can be reliably played on very low end portable handhelds. N64 is notoriously tricky to emulate, but building them for the platform natively removes all performance problems.
I tried this out on my Ubuntu PC and it works great. Played it for around an hour without any issues.
Re: Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports
#30I saw this when it came out, and as someone that doesn't follow the ROM hacking scene, I'm wondering - why did this approach take so long to come up with? Translating the assembly instructions to C and then recompiling them seems like an obvious method to try early on, but I'm wondering if there was some other breakthrough that made this possible in a way it wasn't before?
Emulating the hardware usually requires cycle-accurate emulation of things running in parallel, so it's not quite so simple as just the program in the ROM.