Board 8 > Absolutely insane breakthrough with N64 decompilation

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://youtu.be/ywWwUuWRgsM

TLDW people have been doing N64 decomp projects for years that have resulted in native PC versions of Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time, which is amazing, but they're insanely time consuming so we've only seen a couple of them finished. Well, there's now a new tool that can create a native port from a ROM in mere minutes, which can then be modded for ray tracing, higher resolution, higher frame rate, texture packs etc etc.

I'm looking more into it myself tomorrow but this is an absolutely ludicrous breakthrough that might change N64 game preservation and playability as we know it.

Im sorry but how is this possible

Takedown incoming.

Please someone make a PC port of Star Fox 64 with good framerate and the uncompressed audio. I don't want anything else, just that.

Grand_Kirby posted...

Please someone make a PC port of Star Fox 64 with good framerate and the uncompressed audio. I don't want anything else, just that.

This is also the one I want to see the most now that Majora is already done

i'm... genuinely confused on how this is even doable.
like he mentioned how it works, i don't understand how somebody figured out how to make it work like that. hell, this is the kind of thing you wonder if Nintendo knew how to do/could know how to do within a few years.

emulation turning into just skipping the emulating and just making the game change systems is just not something i figured would be doable. and with this happening does that mean that this could be possible with other systems too?

Wanglicious posted...

and with this happening does that mean that this could be possible with other systems too?

This is the part I don't understand and want to learn more about since the implications could be enormous. I figure there must be some reason that we've only been seeing decomp projects for N64 even before this when people were doing it the old fashioned way, but maybe it's just a case of the right tools not existing yet? Not sure and will definitely be studying up on the topic.

N64 always has the wild stuff. That megatexture thing I saw recently(?) on the 64 is also cool.
Wonder why that is.

What the fuck

This absolutely does not pass the bullshit smell test coming out of nowhere like this, what the fuck

AND YET it appears to function, at least the easily accessible MM piece (I'm not going to get into the weeds with the generic recomp part, since the docs basically say it's not easy to use and I don't feel like learning it)

This seems like actual black magic

Wanglicious posted...

and with this happening does that mean that this could be possible with other systems too?

this isn't even the first recompile project. There's one for NES

I'm playing the Majora recomp now and I legitimately can't believe it - I feel like a giddy school kid.

Setup took literally seconds and the fact that I'm playing this at 144 fps in widescreen and perfect fidelity, everything works so ridiculously smoothly and this could be done for any N64 game is ridiculously exciting. And this is before they've even started with raytracing, texture packs and all that other juicy modding stuff - though the auto save feature is huge accomplishment to just burst out the gate with.

same. I am amazed at how seamless and accurate everything is. It feels exactly like the original game. I have not seen any glitches or hiccups that have broken that illusion. Im also surprised at how good the low-res textures look, all things considered. I suppose MM not having a bunch of prerendered backgrounds like OOT helps a lot,

How does it work making it widescreen? Shouldn't changing aspect ratios require a lot of manual fixes?

MacArrowny posted...

How does it work making it widescreen? Shouldn't changing aspect ratios require a lot of manual fixes?

there were a lot of manual fixes. I think people are downplaying how much work actually went into the port. the guy spent over a a year tweaking things for release.

This is really awesome. The dev explains it's like Proton on Steam Deck so that should give you an idea of how it works. It's translating from one type of code to another. You need to figure out how to translate every little individual code, but after that, you can translate anything in general that uses those codes. They also mention having to manually translate special game-specific code, since that can't be generally translated.

It seems like the key thing here was to get accurate behavior, which requires fully understanding all the original codes. The manual Zelda decompilations did most of the work for that, so the Zelda games are still the most complete examples. But other games can reuse that work as long as they don't do anything too special.

oneofcircles posted...

there were a lot of manual fixes. I think people are downplaying how much work actually went into the port. the guy spent over a a year tweaking things for release.

Gotcha, that makes sense. I assume that means every other N64 game will still take a fair amount of work?

MacArrowny posted...

Gotcha, that makes sense. I assume that means every other N64 game will still take a fair amount of work?

Even optimistically this is probably true, but it's orders of magnitude better than how it's worked until now, which is each individual game requiring years of dedicated work to even reach the "fair amount of work" stage.

i look forward to Superman 64 getting mods that turn it into an actually good game.

So ideally games from the same dev team(s) will have enough overlap that it reduces the amount of work for lets call them "adjacent" titles, and hopefully adding additional understanding that will apply to even further titles?

Digital Foundry made a video on this subject, using Majora's Mask.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1wlTOvn2y0&ab_channel=DigitalFoundry

spoilers, they love what's happening.