Earlier quoted context omitted.
Video incoming.
[flagged]
Executing rm- rf /home/sophia5070node/*' beep boop.
Happy Zelda's 40th first LLM running on N64 hardware (4MB RAM, 93MHz)
31–33 of 33 posts
Re: Happy Zelda's 40th first LLM running on N64 hardware (4MB RAM, 93MHz)
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the source code in the GitHub repo generates the ROM in the corresponding screenshots, but it seems quite barebones. It feels very much like it’s cobbled together from the libdragon examples directory. Or, they use hardware acceleration for the 2D sprites, but then write fixed-width text to the frambuffer with software rendering.
Partially correct. The value is not the game interface right now. Its proof you can do actual inference on an LLM the surprise I am developing is a bit bigger than this, just have to get the llm outputs right first!
Can you elaborate on the “partially correct” bit? I’d like to understand the programming of the ROM better.
Re: Happy Zelda's 40th first LLM running on N64 hardware (4MB RAM, 93MHz)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Partially correct. The value is not the game interface right now. Its proof you can do actual inference on an LLM the surprise I am developing is a bit bigger than this, just have to get the llm outputs right first!
Can you elaborate on the “partially correct” bit? I’d like to understand the programming of the ROM better.
You’re right that the graphics layer is mostly 2D right now. Sprites are hardware-accelerated where it makes sense, and text is written directly to the framebuffer. The UI is intentionally minimal.
The point of this ROM wasn’t the game interface — it was proving real LLM inference running on-device on the N64’s R4300i (93 MHz MIPS, 4MB RDRAM).
Since the original screenshots, we’ve added:
• Direct keyboard input
• Real-time chat loop with the model
• Frame-synchronous generation (1–3 tokens per frame @ 60 FPS)
So it’s now interactive, not just a demo render.
The current focus is correctness and stability of inference. The graphics layer can evolve later.
Next step is exposing a lightweight SDK layer so N64 devs can hook model calls into 3D scenes or gameplay logic — essentially treating the LLM as a callable subsystem rather than a UI gimmick.
The value isn’t the menu.
It’s that inference is happening on 1996 silicon.
Happy to answer specifics about the pipeline if you’re interested.