[HN Gopher] I Built an Open-World Engine for the N64 [video]
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I Built an Open-World Engine for the N64 [video]
Author : msephton
Score : 316 points
Date : 2026-03-28 11:49 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| gryfft wrote:
| I watched this on YouTube the other day. Another beautiful
| example of the creative power yielded from building within
| constraints.
| msephton wrote:
| Such a clever way to approach the problem! I'd say only
| possible with a detailed understanding of the N64 constraints.
| azertify wrote:
| In case anyone is interested, this creator built a remake of
| Portal for the N64, uploading a really cool set of videos
| describing the work that went into building it.
|
| He's since stopped to work on his own IP, I believe that the
| issue was that Valve couldn't allow it because they'd never get
| Nintendo to agree to it. Something along those lines, anyway.
| Frenchgeek wrote:
| I think the main issue was he used Nintendo owned tools and
| libraries to make his game instead of the GPL ones, making the
| release of the port dependent on Nintendo's approval too. I
| guess even Valve didn't want to deal with their lawyers.
| throwawayk7h wrote:
| In principle he could use alternative tools, like libdragon,
| but he said even if he did that it was unlikely Valve would
| permit it, as Nintendo would still be antagonized somehow.
| And Valve it seems wants to improve their relationship with
| Nintendo (See: Valve blocked Dolphin on steam, and took down
| a video showing yuzu installed on the steam deck).
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > And Valve it seems wants to improve their relationship
| with Nintendo
|
| Valve are the 200kg gorilla of the gaming industry and can
| throw their weight around.
|
| However Nintendo are a 250kg gorilla.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| A very vindictive, petty 250kg gorilla at that
| tertle950 wrote:
| If I recall correctly, there was also the issue that a
| Nintendo 64 ROM of their game would be fundamentally
| incompatible with Steam, which (as many forget) is
| technically their DRM solution. I could be wrong, of
| course.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| The emulator thing is less "improve relationship" more
| "avoid appearing complicit" just basic avoidance of
| liability.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Somewhat annoyingly, the actual homebrew z64 seems to crash both
| of the N64 cores that RetroArch supports. :(
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| At the end of the video he says it needs real hardware or a
| "highly accurate emulator like Ares".
| my-next-account wrote:
| Does anyone know what it means for something to be a "multi-
| core emulator" like Ares is? Like, is there some underlying
| benefit to developing emulators for multiple systems under
| the same name? Is there some shared code or what?
| x0re4x wrote:
| It might be because he is not using nintendo's sdk anymore,
| particularly the "microcode" for RSP "coprocessor". Most N64
| emulators usually do not emulate RSP properly, but detect which
| specific nintendo's microcode is used and then emulate it's
| behavior.
| Narishma wrote:
| That means they are not accurate cores since it works fine on
| real hardware.
| giovannibajo1 wrote:
| Correct, both of them are really really old, accuracy wise.
| N64 emulation has improved a lot in the past 4-5 years, but
| old emulators haven't caught up
| cubefox wrote:
| The same guy, James Lambert, also implemented texture streaming
| (which would not be invented until two console generations later)
| in an N64 demo. The textures look uncharacteristically high res:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=Sf036fO-ZUk
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Like in id softwares RAGE?
| cubefox wrote:
| Yes, id invented it, but I think they published one slightly
| earlier game which also had texture streaming. The technique
| (virtual textures) would not become ubiquitous in most
| engines until the PS4 era though.
| Narishma wrote:
| Enemy Territory: Quake Wars used an earlier version of it
| but only for the terrain. I think Rage was the first to use
| it for everything.
| cubefox wrote:
| Unfortunately nowadays id Software doesn't seem to be at
| the cutting edge of engine technology anymore. Most
| interesting new developments now come from Unreal Engine
| as far as I can tell. Like virtual geometry (Nanite) or
| efficient ray traced direct illumination (MegaLights).
| user____name wrote:
| This is really cool. Kaze Emanuar[0] seems to be able to hit 60hz
| consistently with his Mario 64 rework, I wonder if such perf is
| achievable for these wide open landscapes. Iirc Shadow of the
| Collosus rendered distant geometry into the skybox, which always
| struck me as a neat trick.
|
| [0] http://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Yeah I remember hearing that SOTC's "SuperLow" LOD was a 2D
| image. Trespasser also did that, but only for trees and props,
| not for terrain objects. Trespasser being basically a heightmap
| with dinosaurs dropped in
| estebank wrote:
| Hey! It also had a barely working physics engine.
|
| Then again the dinosaurs _were_ physics entities, so maybe
| you already mentioned it. :)
| dcrazy wrote:
| Even modern games replace distant geometry with billboards.
| Simplygon is one middleware that does this. The Remedy folks
| talked about how Alan Wake 2 used it at GDC last year or the
| year before.
| smithcoin wrote:
| VRAM goes vroom vroom.
|
| I emailed him the video from OP and he mentioned they've done
| some collaboration. I'm assuming there's a retro programming
| discord that I'm not worthy of.
| uyjulian wrote:
| A lot of stuff is happening on the n64brew discord.
| https://discord.gg/WqFgNWf
| charcircuit wrote:
| VRAM on the n64 is notoriously slow.
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| It's RAM that is notoriously slow. VRAM is fast, but
| there's only 4K...
| amelius wrote:
| The first comment:
|
| > "The N64 is very memory bound"
|
| > Aren't we all these days?
| ill_ion wrote:
| This is awesome!
| TomatoCo wrote:
| This reminds me of Magicore Anomala, a side scrolling game being
| made for the 1985 Atari. I wish there was a way to know how
| people contemporary to the release of the Atari or the N64 would
| react to seeing these modern engines.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| You know that 1985 was when 50-year-olds were starting high
| school right?
| egypturnash wrote:
| Magicore Anomala seems to actually be a sideview non-scrolling
| bullet hell game for the Amiga, which came out in 1985. Teen me
| owned one of the first Amigas in my city and the in-progress
| videos I can find of Magicore don't feel too out of place with
| the games I was seeing on it by the early nineties. It's moving
| around a couple of sprites and rendering a single-bitplane
| image of projectiles, and has some basic copper list tricks to
| get a 3-plane background image to have more than eight colors,
| which was pretty normal for the Amiga.
|
| Here's a dissection of the title screen of Shadow Of The Beast
| (1989), for instance: https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-
| tricks/shadow-of-the-bea... - you can find a ton of video of
| this game very easily, go have a look.
|
| Magicore is generally a bit zippier than most Amiga games, so
| many of them were kind of chunky and sluggish when I look back
| at them. Also the dev notes on using modern compression schemes
| that use what would be apocalyptic amounts of RAM and CPU by
| 1990 standards to crunch the data are amusing, but it's not
| like 1990 me wasn't used to chilling out for a few minutes
| between levels for a disc load, it was still worlds faster than
| the horrible load times of the C64 that was my first computer.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| I actually used similar camera draw distance trick in my game
| Rogue Stargun.
|
| The real way to optimize this stuff really well is for the artist
| to spend a lot of time making LODS for the distant objects. For
| the really distant objects, esp for a platform like n64, you can
| replace the distant objects with billboard imposters which are
| basically just flat poster textures that swap perspectives at
| certain angles.
|
| GTA V does this extremely well with many manually made LODs and
| its very costly
| vertexmachina wrote:
| They have a very complicated and robust pipeline that generates
| all of those LODs automatically. The artists aren't manually
| creating them.
| oliwary wrote:
| Another game that I find has very impressive draw distance is
| Just Cause 2. You can see objects very far away when flying
| etc, but they look very detailed and do not change when moving
| closer. Definitely blew me away the first time playing it.
| CoryOndrejka wrote:
| Very cool. In 1998 (oof) we built Road Rash 64 which was
| accidentally open world -- even though you had race on a
| particular road, with a start and finish line, you could drive
| anywhere, see traffic all over the map, jump off of mountains,
| etc. The r4k plus reality coprocessor was quite potent -- we got
| to over 750k shaded triangles per second in optimized testing --
| though finicky because you had to manage audio during vblank,
| etc. Plus, the reality coprocessor fog had a brutal hardware bug
| that made it really tricky to use.
| everdrive wrote:
| Road Rash 64 is a really underrated game. As you say, the
| environment is alive, and nearly every race has a lot of
| potential for wacky slapstick fun. The driving feels really
| nice and is rewarding to learn.
| CoryOndrejka wrote:
| Thank you! We had an absolute blast building it and we just
| kept playing it. I need to look up the full unlock cheat
| code.
| jmkni wrote:
| Comments like this are why I just love Hacker News
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > Plus, the reality coprocessor fog had a brutal hardware bug
| that made it really tricky to use.
|
| What was the bug?
| CoryOndrejka wrote:
| Well, in deeply technical terms, it didn't work at all and
| just had like one setting that almost worked. The hardware
| engineers working on the ASIC tried to slam it in at the last
| minute and they almost pulled it off. Except the didn't.
| jdironman wrote:
| if you were on the development team of that game I send my
| biggest thanks out to you. it was one of the few things me and
| my (hard to bond with) father bonded over growing up. We would
| play I think ..course 2 or 3 with the insanity level bikes ALL
| night trying to get out times down to something like 1 1/2
| minutes. within ms of each other's times. run after run. so
| thanks.
| CoryOndrejka wrote:
| Thank you! I'm cracking up because that's something we all
| did while building it, too. It's part of how the insanity
| bikes ended up so hilariously overpowered.
| x0re4x wrote:
| There is a nice video by Kaze Emanuar demonstrating N64 easily
| pushing 300k shaded triangles per second without special
| optimizations in a game engine:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC_jLsxZ7nw
| muggesmuds wrote:
| Massive fan, would love to hear some details about the culture
| in the office at that time!
| CoryOndrejka wrote:
| We were subleasing from 3Dfx at the time, working on JetMoto,
| RR64, and Nuke Strike at the same time. It was old school
| game development -- dumb hours, too much coffee, grabbing
| tubes of Oreos from the 3Dfx micro kitchen, late night In N'
| Out runs for animal style and fries well done. Mix of ex-EA,
| ex-arcade, and all of us thinking how smart we were to not be
| leaving games to go to Internet startups. Oops.
| dd_xplore wrote:
| I just loved road rash, I had the demo version initially, I
| used to call it demo rash. Once in a race I accidentally jumped
| on a building, it was first open world experience for me!
| CoryOndrejka wrote:
| The THQ testers figured out you could launch bikes out to the
| sailboats, too
| kennywinker wrote:
| A super impressive feat, but also the games art style is like
| having bleach poured into my eyes. Am I just the wrong age for
| this specific retro nostalgia? Probably.
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(page generated 2026-03-28 23:00 UTC)