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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

#261

Post by inigyou »

kjs3 wrote: post #137
kevinminehart wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I dug out the Wii I bought for my daughter for my 6yo grandson. He thinks it's great...it's about the only thing that he'll put down Roblox for.

I heard that Roblox is itself a slop platform to the point where someone AI copies every single popular game onto Roblox full of micro transactions, and the Devs of these games are saying they'd rather you pirate the game than play the crappy Roblox knock-off of it.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#262

Post by charcircuit »

inigyou wrote: post #245
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.

Wait, Ted Bundy was a defense contractor? I didn't know that.

He meant Anduril as the defense contractor.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#263

Post by charcircuit »

wat10000 wrote: post #243
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.

It's funny how retail versus wholesale death is seen so differently. Kill a few dozen people with your own hands and people are (rightfully) horrified. Run a business that enables the killing of orders of magnitude more people, and you can be a respected pillar of society. Killing instantly becomes respectable if it's done legally and for profit.

I suggest you look into the perception of self defense. Saving yourself and others via killing compared to killing to commit a crime are perceived very differently.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#264

Post by inigyou »

actionfromafar wrote: post #96
spicyjpeg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It may actually be helpful to emulation. There's a technique called High-Level Emulation, where instead of emulating the hardware registers that are twiddled by the SDK function, you recognize the call to the SDK function itself and emulate the whole function in one go. This can provide a massive speedup over low-level emulation, but relies on the game primarily using the SDK. This was also used to emulate the N64 on Windows 95.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#265

Post by inigyou »

yellowapple wrote: post #174
RankingMember wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Companies have been building and selling clones of Nintendo consoles for many years now. I suspect if Nintendo had a legal angle against this they would've exercised it a long time ago.

Just because they haven't found one doesn't mean they aren't looking.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#266

Post by inigyou »

jackb4040 wrote: post #211
101008 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be counterintuitive at first, but why wouldn't be possible? It's one of the perks of "offline" hardware without subscriptions or DRM. You build a piece of hardware (cartridge) that attaches to another one (console) and it works. As long as the console works, there shouldn't be a problem.

Agree. There is a wall coming for "retro" video game nostalgia once we reach the end of the purpose-specific hardware era. Like, you can build an emulator for WiiWare games, but what does it mean to release a "new" WiiWare game when they're just built using an API like OpenGL which is still being used in new games today? What does following the constraints of an older system like that result in besides just another,…

Well, one thing is that it would run on a Wii.

The NDS graphics processor takes binary-encoded OpenGL commands through a FIFO, didn't stop anyone writing NDS homebrew.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#267

Post by wat10000 »

charcircuit wrote: post #263
wat10000 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how retail versus wholesale death is seen so differently. Kill a few dozen people with your own hands and people are (rightfully) horrified. Run a business that enables the killing of orders of magnitude more people, and you can be a respected pillar of society. Killing instantly becomes respectable if it's done legally and for profit.

I suggest you look into the perception of self defense. Saving yourself and others via killing compared to killing to commit a crime are perceived very differently.

That’s not it. There are plenty of industrialists who have killed far more than any serial killer just for profit and they don’t get anything like the opprobrium given to serial killers.

Re: How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

#268

Post by inigyou »

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...

They might be able to get around it with an affirmative defense in court, but they obviously don't want to, lest they lose.

But it's legal to use the Sony and Nintendo trademarks in a similar way. The court ruled that since they are checked by the console, there was no way not to use them, and Nintendo lost their protection by doing so.

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