echelon a day ago

The amount of indie N64 development happening right now is wild. The platform is flourishing.

The system has seen a dozen of its most popular games decompiled [1] into readable source files, which enables easy porting to PC without an emulator. It also enables a ton of mods to be written, many of which will run on the original hardware.

There are numerous Zelda fan remakes [2]. Complete games with new dungeons and storylines.

The Mario 64 scene is on fire. Kaze has deeply optimized the game [3], and is building his own engine and sequels. If you like technical deep dives into retro tech, his channel is literally golden.

Folks are making crazy demos for the platform, such as Portal [4], which unfortunately brought Valve's lawyers' attention.

Lost games, such as Rare's Dinosaur Planet [5], have leaked, been brought up to near production ready status, been decompiled, and have seen their own indie resurgence.

[1] https://wiki.deco.mp/index.php/N64

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bZl8xKDUryI

[3] https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCuvSqzfO_LV_QzHdmEj84SQ

The whole channel is gold. He has dozens of deep dives like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DdXLpoNLywg

And his game and engine are beautiful: https://youtu.be/Drame-4ufso

[4] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yXzoZ2AfWwg

[5] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s0QSiPRmWaI

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  • anthk a day ago

    I'd love Perfect Dark backported to GL 2.1, but sadly some effects require GL 3.3 at minimum.

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    • echelon a day ago

      A 60 fps Perfect Dark with online play would be fun.

      Curious - why the desire to have it run on GL 2.1?

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      • Levitz 8 hours ago

        I've played multiplayer goldeneye online.

        Turns out that perfect precision weapons on a m+kb setup are actually not much fun to play with. The movement is so limited compared to the brutal precision a mouse offers that everything just dies really really fast.

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      • anthk 13 hours ago

        I have an old GL 2.1 netbook which still works and renders the game perfectly fine minus the GL 3.3 FX's which are kinda like the framebuffer FX's in the N64, mappable to current day shaders. Without GL 3.3 shader effects, menus are unreadable and you loss some translucid effects. If they did a GL 2.1 backport it would be great.

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