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

tomshardware.com

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

#41

Post by OnlyMortal »

whizzter wrote: post #39
pjc50 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes and no, with the 8bits and probably 16bits like the C64, NES, etc you really want cycle accuracy and emulating something like the PS2 really well would probably need a fair bit of accuracy. HOWEVER.. writing an recompiler (not feasible for 8bits due to the amount of self-mod code) you could probably insert pattern checks to detect writes to DMA-starting locations,etc (thinking back to our PS2 games) and transform…

Good point about 8bit self modifying code.

The UK C64 disk for “Skate or Die” had copy protection that did exactly that, as an example.

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

#42

Post by zamadatix »

ranger_danger wrote: post #2

Jamulator did this for NES way back in 2013 but nobody really seemed to care... https://andrewkelley.me/post/jamulator.html There is also Winlator for running Windows programs on Android: https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator Also is the youtube video linked in the article using an AI voice?

Jamulator didn't take it farther than what NES emulators could do beyond the way it ran. If Jamulator had released with similar enhancements for Zelda it probably would have been a lot more popular. I.e. the interest is more from what is now available with it than about how it does it.

That's just Nerrel, a real person, narrating. It's crazy (in an interesting way, not necessarily a doom and gloom way) how we have AI voices these days so good we start to suspect people who don't speak like we expect are AI.

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

#43

Post by terramex »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #13

One 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.

There is emulator hack for Goldeneye that add WASD + mouse support and I heard that it works great.

https://github.com/Graslu/1964GEPD/releases/tag/latest

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

#45

Post by toastercat »

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.

[flagged]

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

#47

Post by refracture »

ranger_danger wrote: post #2

Jamulator did this for NES way back in 2013 but nobody really seemed to care... https://andrewkelley.me/post/jamulator.html There is also Winlator for running Windows programs on Android: https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator Also is the youtube video linked in the article using an AI voice?

That's just Nerrel; his narration is so flat that he's always sounded like an AI. I enjoy that mix with his humor.

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

#49

Post by [deleted] »

speps wrote: post #34
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.

Except this work can be done once, stored somewhere and shared. Take a ROM (it means read-only after all) and get native port out...

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by mrguyorama »

jjice wrote: post #9
izzydata wrote: post #5

I 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.

The N64 had a fully unified memory architecture, and weird custom silicon that also happened to be a fully programmable GPU kinda device. For decades, all N64 emulation was done by translating calls to that GPU (called the RDP) to openGL or DirectX calls, and that works horribly, but anything else would have had awful performance. Several years ago however, someone decided "Fuck it" and created a fully emulated version of the RDP that you could run, ie feed it real N64 instructions and it spits out pixel values. It was significantly slower than the translation approach, so you had to have like a powerful 8 or more core CPU to run it well.

Some other madlad then took that approach, and ported it to a GPU Shader, because fuck yeah thousands of cores! It actually greatly improved the situation, as you didn't need a super powerful GPU, just a somewhat modern GPU.

That development means devices like the steam deck actually have zero issues running awesome N64 emulation, including allowing for upscaling to much higher rendering resolutions without artifacts because you are literally telling a virtual RDP to do it, and it happily complies.

Before AngryLion and ParaLLEl, we were stuck with basically the same graphics plugins, glitches, and tweaks as the late 90s.

https://www.libretro.com/index.php/category/parallel-n64/ for a more detailed description of how this changed things.

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