Super Mario 64 has been decompiled • Hacker News Board

Re: Super Mario 64 has been decompiled

#41

Post by apacheCamel » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 8:44 PM UTC

bri3d wrote: post #4

As an amusing side-effect, the team working on this effort also implemented IRIX userland support for QEMU since the original N64 toolchain ran on IRIX on the SGI Indy, and they need the original compilers to verify functional equivalence of their source: https://github.com/n64decomp/qemu-irix .

I honestly love coming to HN to see posts like this and comments like yours. It is always so neat to see the other sides of software engineering. You listed 4 acronyms and I have no idea what any of them are or how they fit into this story but all I want to do is deep dive into each one. It is also awesome to see people so interested in things that I've never even encountered before.

Re: Super Mario 64 has been decompiled

#42

Post by canjobear » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 8:45 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #9

One thing I've always been curious about: is there any sort of clear continuity of architecture or design patterns between the games in the Super Mario series? Yes, they're probably all from-scratch rewrites of the engine, but could each successive engine be said to be a "descendant" of a previous one, on a design level? One thing I know (and can be seen in this repo) is that SM64 emulates a version of the NES/SNES "…

Zelda OoT was based on the Mario 64 engine

Re: Super Mario 64 has been decompiled

#43

Post by shawnz » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 8:45 PM UTC

tempsolution wrote: post #26

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as any other impractical-but-fun project that gets featured on HN. It's weird to me that people keep being surprised.

It's more an indicator that apparently either not many meaningful things happen (which I doubt) or somehow people use this a some retro-wanking where they imagine "Uh yeah back in high school I was also working on stuff like this, those were the days". What I am saying is that it doesn't surprise me people do these projects, what surprises me is that enough people care about them for it to make the front page of HN.

I don't get it... If you acknowledge that there are reasons why people would be interested in participating in this project, then why wouldn't people be interested in reading about it?

Re: Super Mario 64 has been decompiled

#44

Post by temac » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 8:48 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #5

bla3 wrote: post #3

Nintendo will request a takedown the second they see this, no?

What for? There's no copyrighted material in this repo.

There is pretty-much only copyrighted material in this repo.

Copyright is not purely literal, especially when it's copyright of computer code...

Re: Super Mario 64 has been decompiled

#45

Post by duskwuff » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 8:53 PM UTC

lostgame wrote: post #24

kelnos wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't look through the repo, but given that the linked README talks about needing an original version of the ROM in order to extract assets, I would guess they're not in there?

The models certainly are. Don't think the textures are.

A number of assets, including textures, audio, and prerecorded demos, have been stripped out of this release.

Re: Super Mario 64 has been decompiled

#46

Post by hayleox » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 8:57 PM UTC

tempsolution wrote: post #7

Still amazes me that people actually spend time on such things :D. Decompiling 100 year old software whose source code most likely didn't look much different from what the decompiler spits out. What's the point?

They've gone a lot further than that: assigning names to tons of stuff, adding comments, organizing all the files, and setting up a full build process so you can recompile a new ROM with modifications.

Re: Super Mario 64 has been decompiled

#47

Post by urda » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

ortusdux wrote: post #22

I am looking forward to the mods that this will enable. I highly recommend trying mario 64 on dolphin EMU at 1080P with a texture pack. A HD mod that added a few more polygons would really round out the experience.

Is a raspberry pi a good-enough platform to run N64 1080P games on?

Re: Super Mario 64 has been decompiled

#48

Post by Relys » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

canjobear wrote: post #42

derefr wrote: post #9

One thing I've always been curious about: is there any sort of clear continuity of architecture or design patterns between the games in the Super Mario series? Yes, they're probably all from-scratch rewrites of the engine, but could each successive engine be said to be a "descendant" of a previous one, on a design level? One thing I know (and can be seen in this repo) is that SM64 emulates a version of the NES/SNES "…

Zelda OoT was based on the Mario 64 engine

That makes a lot of sense as it's not like they had a lot of 3D engines for the N64 during launch lol. Wonder if Pilot Wings (for example) also shares similar rendering pipeline.

Re: Super Mario 64 has been decompiled

#49

Post by enneff » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

tempsolution wrote: post #7

Still amazes me that people actually spend time on such things :D. Decompiling 100 year old software whose source code most likely didn't look much different from what the decompiler spits out. What's the point?

One wonders what the point is of publicly shitting on people’s work, like you just did.

Re: Super Mario 64 has been decompiled

#50

Post by olyjohn » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

tempsolution wrote: post #7

Still amazes me that people actually spend time on such things :D. Decompiling 100 year old software whose source code most likely didn't look much different from what the decompiler spits out. What's the point?

The point is that it's awesome!