I watched this on YouTube the other day. Another beautiful example of the creative power yielded from building within constraints.
msephton•Mar 28, 2026
Such a clever way to approach the problem! I'd say only possible with a detailed understanding of the N64 constraints.
azertify•Mar 28, 2026
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•Mar 28, 2026
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•Mar 28, 2026
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•Mar 28, 2026
> 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.
AdmiralAsshat•Mar 28, 2026
Somewhat annoyingly, the actual homebrew z64 seems to crash both of the N64 cores that RetroArch supports. :(
b00ty4breakfast•Mar 28, 2026
At the end of the video he says it needs real hardware or a "highly accurate emulator like Ares".
x0re4x•Mar 28, 2026
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•Mar 28, 2026
That means they are not accurate cores since it works fine on real hardware.
cubefox•Mar 28, 2026
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•Mar 28, 2026
Like in id softwares RAGE?
cubefox•Mar 28, 2026
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•Mar 28, 2026
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•Mar 28, 2026
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•Mar 28, 2026
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.
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•Mar 28, 2026
Hey! It also had a barely working physics engine.
Then again the dinosaurs were physics entities, so maybe you already mentioned it. :)
dcrazy•Mar 28, 2026
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•Mar 28, 2026
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.
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•Mar 28, 2026
You know that 1985 was when 50-year-olds were starting high school right?
LarsDu88•Mar 28, 2026
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•Mar 28, 2026
They have a very complicated and robust pipeline that generates all of those LODs automatically. The artists aren't manually creating them.
oliwary•Mar 28, 2026
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•Mar 28, 2026
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•Mar 28, 2026
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.
jmkni•Mar 28, 2026
Comments like this are why I just love Hacker News
ErroneousBosh•Mar 28, 2026
> Plus, the reality coprocessor fog had a brutal hardware bug that made it really tricky to use.
What was the bug?
jdironman•Mar 28, 2026
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.
x0re4x•Mar 28, 2026
There is a nice video by Kaze Emanuar demonstrating N64 easily pushing 300k shaded triangles per second without special optimizations in a game engine:
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.
11 Comments
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.
Valve are the 200kg gorilla of the gaming industry and can throw their weight around.
However Nintendo are a 250kg gorilla.
[0] http://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64
Then again the dinosaurs were physics entities, so maybe you already mentioned it. :)
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.
> "The N64 is very memory bound"
> Aren't we all these days?
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
What was the bug?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC_jLsxZ7nw