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.
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.
Being a teenager, I honestly viewed the N64 (Ultra 64) as being an unstoppable force during the early news. We even had a 486 PC running Doom since the early-to-mid 90s. LOL. I couldn't wait to see what Doom would be like on the N64.
In typical fanboyism, I viewed the main SGI systems are the superior systems to the N64.. but they were for the office.. not the home. The other was Panasonic M2.
Of course.. either the N64 was released in the UK or not far away, I remember walking into PC World (a cool computer shop at the time) with a demo of Tomb Raider. I believe it was running a Voodoo1 card and the realisation kicked in. The N64 is already surpassed.
Wasn't long before we had a Voodoo2 card and the first game we played was a demo of Turok:Dinosaur Hunter. It was much better than the N64 version (which I owned)
Once I started playing GLQuake it was a PC master race.
It was at this point I snapped out being a Nintendo 'fanboy' and accept that hardware gets you so far... its the games that make a console.
I still think the N64 was a great console. Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time, etc. Great memories. Also got a Gamecube, Wii, and Switch.
As I got older and snapped out of the fanboyism, I realised the Playstation was a good console. I am on the fence with the Cartridge vs CD argument. There are cases for both. If we look at Mario 64, many aspects worked well on Cartridge. I guess faster load times and transition of music. With CD.. you have CD quality music and more variation of textures and level design (generally speaking)
Putting all the aside, Playstation is just as much capable of doing a good Super Mario 64 port despite the (many like) PS1 jaggy polygons.
> Tessellation (up to 2x) to reduce issues with large polygons
From the videos I've watched there is still insane amounts of affine transformation texture warping, is that because it's not enable or because 2x is not enough?
I guess they will need to also redo all level geometry to be more amenable to tesselation... I guess that's why many ps1 games had blocky looking levels.
right now there is basically no preprocessing of level polygons and they are copied as is, but when it is implemented, the largest polygons will be split to solve this
this is also necessary to fix the occasional stretched textures, as texture coordinates are also limited to a smaller range per polygon on PS1
I see a lot of texture warp like you mentioned but I'm not seeing the geometry popping (wobble?) that was a hallmark of ps1 games, I'm guessing they're using soft floating point for the geometry and doing perspective-correct texture mapping would just be too expensive for decent frame rate
It notes in the Known Issues section that "Tessellation is not good enough to fix all large polygons".
Maybe it just needs more tessellation or something else is going on, because you're right - even as someone who grew up on the PS1 and is accustomed to early 3D jank, it looks painfully janky.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] zamadatix|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kibwen|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ddtaylor|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] no_wizard|3 months ago|reply
Still bravo! I know getting it working and complete is the real goal and it is commendable.
[+] [-] musha68k|2 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] masfoobar|2 months ago|reply
In typical fanboyism, I viewed the main SGI systems are the superior systems to the N64.. but they were for the office.. not the home. The other was Panasonic M2.
Of course.. either the N64 was released in the UK or not far away, I remember walking into PC World (a cool computer shop at the time) with a demo of Tomb Raider. I believe it was running a Voodoo1 card and the realisation kicked in. The N64 is already surpassed.
Wasn't long before we had a Voodoo2 card and the first game we played was a demo of Turok:Dinosaur Hunter. It was much better than the N64 version (which I owned)
Once I started playing GLQuake it was a PC master race.
It was at this point I snapped out being a Nintendo 'fanboy' and accept that hardware gets you so far... its the games that make a console.
I still think the N64 was a great console. Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time, etc. Great memories. Also got a Gamecube, Wii, and Switch.
As I got older and snapped out of the fanboyism, I realised the Playstation was a good console. I am on the fence with the Cartridge vs CD argument. There are cases for both. If we look at Mario 64, many aspects worked well on Cartridge. I guess faster load times and transition of music. With CD.. you have CD quality music and more variation of textures and level design (generally speaking)
Putting all the aside, Playstation is just as much capable of doing a good Super Mario 64 port despite the (many like) PS1 jaggy polygons.
[+] [-] amlib|3 months ago|reply
From the videos I've watched there is still insane amounts of affine transformation texture warping, is that because it's not enable or because 2x is not enough?
I guess they will need to also redo all level geometry to be more amenable to tesselation... I guess that's why many ps1 games had blocky looking levels.
[+] [-] malucart|3 months ago|reply
this is also necessary to fix the occasional stretched textures, as texture coordinates are also limited to a smaller range per polygon on PS1
[+] [-] mewse-hn|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wk_end|3 months ago|reply
Maybe it just needs more tessellation or something else is going on, because you're right - even as someone who grew up on the PS1 and is accustomed to early 3D jank, it looks painfully janky.
[+] [-] ranger_danger|3 months ago|reply
https://github.com/CharlotteCross1998/awesome-game-decompila...
[+] [-] bena|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Larrikin|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] platevoltage|3 months ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kscCFfXecTI
[+] [-] ranger_danger|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mywittyname|3 months ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64
[+] [-] extraduder_ire|2 months ago|reply
I did not expect it to happen so soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZcbgNdWL7w - Mario 64 wastes SO MUCH MEMORY
[+] [-] eru|2 months ago|reply
I wonder what someone who has PS1 knowledge equivalent to Kaze's N64 knowledge could do on that console---perhaps using Mario 32 as the benchmark.
(Mario 32 = Mario 64 on PS1.)
[+] [-] wodenokoto|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] schlauerfox|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] spicyjpeg|3 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] barbs|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] coro_1|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] peterbozso|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] BugsJustFindMe|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] SpaceManNabs|3 months ago|reply
edit: whoever did the gameplay video is really good at mario n64. They were playing to and reacting to stuff that had rendered very late, if at all.
[+] [-] itomato|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] aussieguy1234|3 months ago|reply