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Super Mario 64 for the PS1

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Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1

#91

Post by musha68k »

Amazing feat. I was a very happy owner of both consoles back in the day, and this port clearly shows how much the N64 brought that "SGI at home" feel in mid‑1996; at least until Voodoo 1 / QuakeGL, maybe even up to Unreal (Glide) or Sonic Adventure on DC?

I still remember gasping when I first saw the basically unattainable (for me) Japanese‑import N64 running Mario 64.

Such an interesting and varied gaming landscape back then; for example, the Wipeout experience on PSX was beyond the N64 port in that particular niche, for its own set of reasons.

Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1

#92

Post by pmarin »

kibwen wrote: post #24
zamadatix wrote: post #7

If you like this port, you may also enjoy this ground-up effort to clone SM64 on the GBA https://youtu.be/nS5rj80L-pk

Given that this is HN, I'm contractually obligated to mention that the GBA port is written in Rust: https://www.digitec.ch/en/page/the-impossible-port-super-mar...

That sound more like a demake than a port. Very cool anyway.

Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1

#93

Post by extraduder_ire »

mywittyname wrote: post #13

Obligatory mention of Kaze, who has spent the past several years optimizing Mario64 using a variety of interesting methods. Worth a watch if your interests are at the intersection of vintage gaming and programming. https://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64

I was just about to post his video from August explaining how much excess ram mario 64 uses and where, which was the first serious mention I saw of a ps1 port being possible. He uses the ps1's smaller ram size as a kind of benchmark.

I did not expect it to happen so soon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZcbgNdWL7w - Mario 64 wastes SO MUCH MEMORY

Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1

#94

Post by alexisread »

takantri wrote: post #56
giancarlostoro wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Mi…

Related to this is the Atari Falcon port of Minecraft using a sparse voxel octree, might work for the GBA seeing as the Quake ports are similar performance-wise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHsgdZFk22M

Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1

#95

Post by malucart »

eru wrote: post #75
indigo945 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The N64's CPU, with pretty much every single game released on the platform, is just sitting there idling along at maybe 30% load tops, and usually less than that. It's a 64 bit CPU, but Nintendo's official SDK doesn't even support doubles or uint64! Of course, Nintendo clearly cared about the CPU a lot for marketing purposes (it's in the console's name), but from a purely technological perspective, it is wasteful. Mo…

> It's a 64 bit CPU, [...] Only really in the marketing material. It's a bit like calling a 386 with an arithmetic co-processor an 80 bit machine, when it was still clearly a 32 bit machine by all metrics that matter. However, I agree in general that the N64 CPU sits idle a lot of the time. It's overspecced compared to the rest of the system.

no, it really is a true 64 bit CPU. it's just that that fact is useless and it usually runs in 32 bit mode because games don't need that.

Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1

#96

Post by malucart »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #93
mywittyname wrote: post #13

Obligatory mention of Kaze, who has spent the past several years optimizing Mario64 using a variety of interesting methods. Worth a watch if your interests are at the intersection of vintage gaming and programming. https://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64

I was just about to post his video from August explaining how much excess ram mario 64 uses and where, which was the first serious mention I saw of a ps1 port being possible. He uses the ps1's smaller ram size as a kind of benchmark. I did not expect it to happen so soon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZcbgNdWL7w - Mario 64 wastes SO MUCH MEMORY

I've been working on it since mid 2024, so that video was a funny coincidence :)

Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1

#97

Post by greeniskool »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #40
bluedino wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks pretty decent but seeing the texture warping and glitching reminds me of why I was team N64

The N64 definitely has the nicer GPU of the two. An N64 with a CD-ROM drive would have been amazing.

There was actually an unauthorized third-party CD-ROM drive for it, the Bung Doctor V64[1]. It didn't actually expand the available ROM space beyond what was possible with cartidges, but its still interesting in that it was allegedly used by licensed Nintendo devs as a lower-cost alternative to the devkits officially provided to them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_V64

Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1

#98

Post by pezezin »

indigo945 wrote: post #72
president_zippy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The N64's CPU, with pretty much every single game released on the platform, is just sitting there idling along at maybe 30% load tops, and usually less than that. It's a 64 bit CPU, but Nintendo's official SDK doesn't even support doubles or uint64! Of course, Nintendo clearly cared about the CPU a lot for marketing purposes (it's in the console's name), but from a purely technological perspective, it is wasteful. Mo…

> So, getting a much smaller CPU would have been a big corner to cut, that could have saved enough resources to increase the texture cache to a useful resolution like 128x128 or so.

How? The texture RAM (TMEM) is in the RSP, not in the CPU.

Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1

#99

Post by pezezin »

eru wrote: post #86
dole wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imho, Nintendo had a hard enough time with preventing piracy and unlicensed games with the NES and SNES and saw the PS1 got modded within a year, even with the special black coated discs to hide the tracks. There wasn’t a lot of optical/compact disc copy protection magic at the time and, cd-rs and writers started getting popular quickly as well. ps1 in 1994, n64 in 1996, backwards Dreamcast GD-ROMs and beginnings of…

The discs being black was a marketing gimmick, the actual magic was in the 'wobble'. > Nintendo had a hard enough time with preventing piracy and unlicensed games with the NES and SNES [...] Yes, so I'm not sure that the cartridge drawbacks bought them that much in terms of piracy protection? I agree that the PS1 had more piracy, but I'm not sure that actually diminished its success?

> I agree that the PS1 had more piracy, but I'm not sure that actually diminished its success?

At least in my corner of the world (Spain), piracy improved its success. Everybody wanted the PSX due to how cheap it was, I think it outsold the N64 10:1.

Re: Super Mario 64 for the PS1

#100

Post by mghackerlady »

bluedino wrote: post #33
ginko wrote: post #10

Earlier 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

Personally I'd take it over the N64s muddy textures, the playstations wobbly but I can at least make out what something's supposed to be
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