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Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports to add proper ray tracing, ultrawide, high FPS, and more (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 5 months ago by SeaJ@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] PineRune@lemmy.world 30 points 5 months ago (3 children)

IIRC, the original cartridge had an extra chip in it that emulation hasn't been able to use. I'm not sure if any progress has been made on this and a few other games that used these.

[–] Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Nah it didn't have an extra chip -- but large portions of the game were written in microcode for the N64's processor specifically. It's part of what makes it and Rogue Squadron kind of a pain to emulate -- along with using their own audio drivers (MoSYS/MusyX that were later used as the basis for the GameCube sound systems).

IIRC there was an official Windows port at some point though. Not sure how well it worked or works on modern systems.

[–] MightBeAlpharius@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago

Wait... Y'all are talking about X-Wing: Rogue Squadron and Star Wars Episode 1: Battle for Naboo, right?

I owned those windows ports!

They worked great back in the day - I had such a blast with them that I begged my parents to get me a shitty Logitech joystick! If you want to check them out, it looks like Rogue Squadron is only $10 on Steam; and Battle for Naboo seems to be abandonware, but it seems to be hosted on a lot of "better spread than dead" game sites.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

SuperFX SNES games can be emulated, right?

[–] PineRune@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago

I'm pretty sure that has been able to be emulated and run through most emulation software now. These Star Wars games had specific code and drivers that, when I looked up why it wouldn't emulate years ago, had not been cracked open to get the source code to enable people to program it into emulation software.

[–] danc4498@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

Probably a lot of work for a single game.