How well understood is the N64 understood now? Is most of the knowledge of how it works from reverse engineering or is there actually stuff from nintendo explaining it that's now available?
It is pretty much understood in most aspects that pertain regular software development, though there are still corners that are investigated.
The most accurate and fast emulator right now is Ares (https://ares-emu.net), which bundles the Vulkan-accelerated RDP emulation with a recompiler for both CPU and RSP. It is extremely accurate in many regards and in general much closer to the real hardware than any other emulators (with cen64 being a close second). Other emulators manage to run most of the game library but using several hacks, while Ares keeps a zero-hack approach, so not everything works, but it is for instance far more compatible with advanced home-brew stuff which use the hardware in ways that the Nintendo SDK did not.
The most advanced open source library for N64 development is libdragon (https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon) which is currently growing very advanced RSP ucodes that do things that are not possible with Nintendo SDK. For instance, it was recently merged a command list support to send commands from CPU to RSP without any lock in the happy path, and fully concurrent access from both the processors. Another example would be its DMA support for fetching data from ROM that exploits undocumented partially-broken features of the RCP that were previously unknown to allow for misaligned memory transfers.
The most accurate source of hardware documentation is the n64brew wiki, which is slowly gathering accurate, hardware-tested information on how the whole console works. https://n64brew.dev/wiki/Main_Page. Unfortunately, it's still lacking in many areas (eg: RSP). It's a painstaking long work because there are many many documents floating around with partial or completely wrong information.
A lot of the knowledge is from patents and dev kit leaks. Also, it was built by Silicon Graphics and uses similar tech to their indigo workstations so some knowledge from those apply.
[+] [-] LAC-Tech|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giovannibajo1|4 years ago|reply
The most accurate and fast emulator right now is Ares (https://ares-emu.net), which bundles the Vulkan-accelerated RDP emulation with a recompiler for both CPU and RSP. It is extremely accurate in many regards and in general much closer to the real hardware than any other emulators (with cen64 being a close second). Other emulators manage to run most of the game library but using several hacks, while Ares keeps a zero-hack approach, so not everything works, but it is for instance far more compatible with advanced home-brew stuff which use the hardware in ways that the Nintendo SDK did not.
The most advanced open source library for N64 development is libdragon (https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon) which is currently growing very advanced RSP ucodes that do things that are not possible with Nintendo SDK. For instance, it was recently merged a command list support to send commands from CPU to RSP without any lock in the happy path, and fully concurrent access from both the processors. Another example would be its DMA support for fetching data from ROM that exploits undocumented partially-broken features of the RCP that were previously unknown to allow for misaligned memory transfers.
The most accurate source of hardware documentation is the n64brew wiki, which is slowly gathering accurate, hardware-tested information on how the whole console works. https://n64brew.dev/wiki/Main_Page. Unfortunately, it's still lacking in many areas (eg: RSP). It's a painstaking long work because there are many many documents floating around with partial or completely wrong information.
[+] [-] unit01|4 years ago|reply
N64 is well understood, and there are low level emulators now available that emulate the RSP and RDP on modern GPUs implemented with compute shaders. https://www.libretro.com/index.php/category/parallel-n64/
[+] [-] skhr0680|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Narann|4 years ago|reply
I think now all ucode are now properly documented[0][1][2].
[0]: http://gliden64.blogspot.com/2019/02/hle-implementation-of-b...
[1]: http://gliden64.blogspot.com/2018/05/hle-implementation-of-m...
[2]: http://gliden64.blogspot.com/2017/08/star-wars-rogue-squadro...
[+] [-] msk-lywenn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingcharles|4 years ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/20220329011051/https://alinacier...
[+] [-] LAC-Tech|4 years ago|reply