Comment on How to port any N64 game to the PC in record time
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I’m hoping this gets adapted to cross compiling for all the retro handhelds.
I went through crazy hoops to get a native compiled Mario64 running on my Anbernic and the results were amazing compared to emulation.
This could bring a large library of N64 to every low end handheld.
This is going to be important for maintaining the legacy of old video games.
Like, emulators are fine, but access to recompilation makes it much easier to keep things in a generally useful format.
Honestly one of the reasons I don’t play emulated games much is that the extra step of configuring and running the compiler is a hassle, and sometimes it straight up doesn’t work.
This is the worst format for that?
Binaries will never get bug fixes or improvements like an emulator. The rom is the only relevant archive of a game.
C code that reproduces a running binary on an up to date compiler is worse than a machine code binary for a legacy machine of which complete Emulation is not guaranteed?
Yes, because machine code for the legacy machine is how the game was made, you can’t be 100% sure that recompiling it for other platforms won’t introduce bugs because of the difference in platforms. For example, the original Space Invaders used the CPU to it’s maximum to render all of the invaders, they weren’t normalizing by the dt between one frame and the next like we do today for most games, so this results in the game running as fast as possible, which in turns translates to the less enemies on screen, the faster they move. If you recompile that binary for a modern system it’s game over in less than 1 second, because current hardware can handle all of those spaceships as if it were nothing.
Did you write about how you achieved it? Lots of other people with anbernic devices (new included) would be interested
I followed this guide:
Note that SM64 (and OoT, but I don’t think that’s on Android yet) are special cases. These have been reverse engineered by the community to the point that they’ve manually decompiled the entire game, and then separately ported to modern platforms. The project in the OP is different, as it’s made for games that don’t have this effort behind them
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I hope this technology is carried across all of Nintendo’s games. Won’t even need emulators anymore if we can just run it natively.
Nintendo in particular, but other consoles would be great too.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I bet like the emulator they “stole”, they will use this software without even acknowledging the author.