There is an explosion of decompilation projects spawning new ports, but was there something that enabled better decompilations? I see it across many retro games.
Perhaps AI has made it easier?
Super Mario 64 for the PS1
51–60 of 116 posts
Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1
#52Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
While this is cool, it is really hard to look at for me. Still bravo! I know getting it working and complete is the real goal and it is commendable.
> it is really hard to look at for me. What were you expecting?
Nothing. I have zero expectations. Giving an honest take on what I saw is all.
Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
The distorted textures and weird triangle clipping issues are exactly what you'd expect from an unoptimized port to a platform that doesn't support perspective correct texturing or depth testing.
It looks pretty decent but seeing the texture warping and glitching reminds me of why I was team N64
I had the opposite reaction. As someone who was on team PSX, the wobbly jank is pleasingly nostalgic. Didn't someone say that the limitations and artifacts of the obsolete media of the past become the sought-after aesthetics of the future?
Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1
#55Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1
#56If you like this port, you may also enjoy this ground-up effort to clone SM64 on the GBA https://youtu.be/nS5rj80L-pk
Interesting, I'm wondering if the GBA could handle a light version of a Minecraft style game, but the N64 looks like it could be great at it too. I need to get me a SummerCart64 one of these days and experiment with my old N64.
ClassiCube (https://github.com/ClassiCube/ClassiCube) exists, which is an open-source Minecraft Classic reimplementation with an N64 port among dozens of others. HN discussed it two years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37518874).
ClassiCube has a WIP GBA port, but according to commits it only hits 2 FPS as of now and is not listed in its README.
On a related tangent, there's also Fromage, a separate Minecraft Classic clone written for the PS1 (https://chenthread.asie.pl/fromage/).
Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1
#57There is an explosion of decompilation projects spawning new ports, but was there something that enabled better decompilations? I see it across many retro games.
It has been enabled mainly by the the advent of streamlined tooling to assist with 1:1 byte-by-byte matching decompilations (https://decomp.me/ comes to mind), which allows new projects to get off the ground right away without having to reinvent basic infrastructure for disassembling, recompiling and matching code against the original binary first. The growth of decompilation communities and the introduction of "porting layers" that mimic console SDK APIs but emulate the underlying hardware have also played a role, though porting decompiled code to a modern platform remains very far from trivial.
That said, there is an argument to be made against matching decompilations: while their nature guarantees that they will replicate the exact behavior of the original code, getting them to match often involves fighting the entropy of a 20-to-30-year-old proprietary toolchain, hacks of the "add an empty asm() block exactly here" variety and in some cases fuzzing or even decompiling the compiler itself to better understand how e.g. the linking order is determined. This can be a huge amount of effort that in many cases would be better spent further cleaning up, optimizing and/or documenting the code, particularly if the end goal is to port the game to other platforms.
Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks pretty decent but seeing the texture warping and glitching reminds me of why I was team N64
I had the opposite reaction. As someone who was on team PSX, the wobbly jank is pleasingly nostalgic. Didn't someone say that the limitations and artifacts of the obsolete media of the past become the sought-after aesthetics of the future?
They are certainly sometimes a key part of the retro look that makes things nostalgic.
But even during the PSX era I found it distracting and annoying to look at so I can't say I have any nostalgia for it even now in the way I do for N64-style low-poly 3-D games or good pixel art.
Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am probably misremembering but wasn’t super Mario 64 “flat shaded” ie no textures just colors?
You’re misremembering. SM64 was fully textured, outside of specific models. Also flat shading (vs. say gouraud shading) is isomorphic to the question of texture mapping, and concerns how lighting is calculated across the surface of the polygon. A polygon can be flat shaded and textured, flat shaded and untextured, smoothly shaded and textured, or smoothly shaded and untextured.
(Too late to edit but did not mean “isomorphic”, meant “orthogonal”. Wrong smart person word trying to look smart, how embarrassing, sigh.)
Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
The N64 definitely has the nicer GPU of the two. An N64 with a CD-ROM drive would have been amazing.
And a bit more texture memory!
The whole thing about the texture cache being the worst design decision in the N64 just gets parroted so much, but nobody can cogently explain which corner should have been cut instead to fit the budget.