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N64 Static Recompilation, turning N64 Roms into Native PC Ports

nkarafo

Member
This looks great but Goldeneye, Perfect Dark and AKI wrestling games. That's all I want.
Perfect Dark already exists


Pretty sure in terms of poly counts the PSX was the faster of the two. Lack of z buffer and texture filtering obviously introduced their own issues, but it could draw polygons fast
On average PS1 games had more polygons, yes. But with the usage of microcodes, the N64 could beat it. I can't be sure for the numbers but games like World Driver Championship do this.

The N64 was also more efficient with poly usage. Because of the perspective correction, it didn't need as many polygons to draw flat surfaces. Each polygon was rock solid and stable, so to draw a wall it only needed the minimum amount of polygons for such task, no matter how huge that wall was. PS1 polygons were unstable so to draw the same wall it needed to break it down to smaller ones (like puzzle pieces) and basically draw a sheet of polygons. So the bigger the flat wall, the more polygons it needed, otherwise imagine the whole wall breaking down and glitching when changing the camera/perspective. But if it's made of many small polygons, the unstable ones close to the camera can break but the rest of the surface can still remain stable.


As a finance guy I Would love to see Nintendo's internal projections on why it's better to keep their I.P's walled off rather than to release it like this
I assume it's because people still buy them and they generate profits as is. So Nintendo figures why should they put the extra man hours and production cost to improve them when people still buy their overpriced, barebones roms? When people get sick of the same N64 games and stop buying them, then they can start remastering them but there is no reason for them to do it now.
 
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Perfect Dark already exists
Is there any more of these decomps? I found this list, but not sure if it's only these select few available at the moment. Really cool stuff!
 

Jinzo Prime

Gold Member
Is there any more of these decomps? I found this list, but not sure if it's only these select few available at the moment. Really cool stuff!
Paper Mario:

Here's a very good list of general decomp projects:
 

nkarafo

Member

tkscz

Member
Love this idea.

How long until Nintendo DMCA's the fuck out of everyone involved?
8qbpi6.jpg


When these guys reverse engineer the code, they are re-writing it in a way that Nintendo can't claim it like with a ROM. They remove the parts of the code that Nintendo has rights over.

They also make no claim to the IP in the games nor are they making a penny off it. Nintendo has nothing here. It's why you can still install and play the PC port of Mario 64.
 
8qbpi6.jpg


When these guys reverse engineer the code, they are re-writing it in a way that Nintendo can't claim it like with a ROM. They remove the parts of the code that Nintendo has rights over.

They also make no claim to the IP in the games nor are they making a penny off it. Nintendo has nothing here. It's why you can still install and play the PC port of Mario 64.
Maybe that gets around copyright, but that doesn't get around trademark. They are still trying to distribute (free or not - that's irrelevant) games that feature characters, stories, logos, and artwork that are Nintendo trademarks in a format that Nintendo has not approved. If Nintendo wanted to, they could shut this down. I promise you.
 
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Yeah, not true. Even assuming that using different code and assets could get around copyright, which I very much doubt, that doesn't get around trademarks. Nintendo will shut this down and every court of law will side with them, clear as day.
How though? Unless I misunderstood this is moreso akin to an emulator - you provide the rom and it does the relevant work to create the result.


Side note, these 64 games look astonishing with this. I would love to have something like this for PSX and Ps2. Why aren't these billion dollar companies creating products akin to this and providing their old catalogues ?
 
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deriks

4-Time GIF/Meme God
So basically it sorta works like an emulator but instead of reading the game's code and emulating it within the constructs of an N64 (with enhancements) it just straight up makes it into a regular windows program? Or am I missing something here?

This approach seems awesome, but limited- you can't port to other platforms besides Windows and Linux. A cool alternative to a full decomp though
Since you can toggle some stuff in the configurations, it's a great thing after all

They did some amazing work with Mario 64. You can fucking play with the Silicon Graphics stuff
 

Danknugz

Member
How though? Unless I misunderstood this is moreso akin to an emulator - you provide the rom and it does the relevant work to create the result.


Side note, these 64 games look astonishing with this. I would love to have something like this for PSX and Ps2. Why aren't these billion dollar companies creating products akin to this and providing their old catalogues ?
lawyers are very crafty, cunning people and given the right amount of money will generally find a way to build an arguments for whoever gave them that money.
 
How though? Unless I misunderstood this is moreso akin to an emulator - you provide the rom and it does the relevant work to create the result.


Side note, these 64 games look astonishing with this. I would love to have something like this for PSX and Ps2. Why aren't these billion dollar companies creating products akin to this and providing their old catalogues ?
Because while this method might get rid of code and somehow get around the copyright aspect, someone is still attempting to distribute a product, free or not, that is still based on multiple trademarks. Nintendo owns the name The Legend of Zelda. Nintendo owns the characters Zelda, Link, and Gannon. You can't just distribute a game using those trademarks without the trademark holder's approval, even if it's in a different format (N64 vs. .exe).

By analogy, do you think Disney would let you make your own cartoon starring Mickey Mouse? "Well, it's a completely original story/scenario/script that Disney doesn't own, therefore I own the copyright" doesn't work because you're using the Mickey Mouse trademark.

I guarantee you, when this shit gets more widely known and it makes sense for Nintendo to shut it down, they fucking will.
 
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LRKD

Member
When I see things like this it makes me wonder why people get so upset about digital games and rights. 25 years later if you reallllly want to play something you purchased, you likely can, and in a greatly enhanced form too.
Because gaming is different now 25 years later. The easiest example is any video game that is server reliant, when the server goes down, it doesn't matter if you have a rom and emulator. You also need to reverse engineer and recreate the back end of the servers which for the majority of games will not happen.
 
Wow! So this could open the gates to have, for example, Killers Instinct Gold, GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, among many others, with enhancemens similar to the Render 96 with SM 64? Also, would be viable to port the N64 games to other consoles current, last gen and retro? i mean, imagine n64 native ports on switch with enhacements, but also why not, on PS Vita, 3ds, OG Xbox and... PS2 and Dreamcast, just like happened with Mario 64 when the source code was unleashed....And even demakes...Why not maybe a SM 64 or any N64 game adapted to PS1? A man can dream! I mean, they managed to port part of Tomb Raider to GBA!
 
Because while this method might get rid of code and somehow get around the copyright aspect, someone is still attempting to distribute a product, free or not, that is still based on multiple trademarks. Nintendo owns the name The Legend of Zelda. Nintendo owns the characters Zelda, Link, and Gannon. You can't just distribute a game using those trademarks without the trademark holder's approval, even if it's in a different format (N64 vs. .exe).

By analogy, do you think Disney would let you make your own cartoon starring Mickey Mouse? "Well, it's a completely original story/scenario/script that Disney doesn't own, therefore I own the copyright" doesn't work because you're using the Mickey Mouse trademark.

I guarantee you, when this shit gets more widely known and it makes sense for Nintendo to shut it down, they fucking will.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but isn't he simply distributing the program that does the work? Ie just like Project64 or Duckstation? The end user has to procure or provide the ROM. In that case I fail to see a difference as neither are distributing the ROM itself and creating emulators is legal. I grant that this is "more" than an emulator but still I would say it's close to such. And if that's an incorrect understanding then maybe not, but that's what I got from it.
 

THE DUCK

voted poster of the decade by bots
Because gaming is different now 25 years later. The easiest example is any video game that is server reliant, when the server goes down, it doesn't matter if you have a rom and emulator. You also need to reverse engineer and recreate the back end of the servers which for the majority of games will not happen.

Most games are not back end reliant and only do a simple authentication for ownership, something easily bypassed. If it's an online game like fornite or cod multiplayer, no one has an expectation of ownership 25 years later for the online multiplayer.
 

Soodanim

Member
Because while this method might get rid of code and somehow get around the copyright aspect, someone is still attempting to distribute a product, free or not, that is still based on multiple trademarks. Nintendo owns the name The Legend of Zelda. Nintendo owns the characters Zelda, Link, and Gannon. You can't just distribute a game using those trademarks without the trademark holder's approval, even if it's in a different format (N64 vs. .exe).

By analogy, do you think Disney would let you make your own cartoon starring Mickey Mouse? "Well, it's a completely original story/scenario/script that Disney doesn't own, therefore I own the copyright" doesn't work because you're using the Mickey Mouse trademark.

I guarantee you, when this shit gets more widely known and it makes sense for Nintendo to shut it down, they fucking will.
These ports are explicitly stated to be a specific transaction: you have to provide the game and therefore all IP and assets. The various decomps only provide the code to make a game work. To this day Nintendo are going after ROM sites, because that's the actual distribution of Nintendo IP.

Recomps are even less questionable from what I understand, because they're just translating on the fly. If you don't provide it something to translate, it won't translate.

As people have said, that's what emulators do. Emulators themselves are completely legal, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with you taking roms that have been included with a game - let's say Sega Classics for example - and running those roms in software designed to read it. Yuzu was taken down because they did things they shouldn't have done - things other emulator teams weren't doing.

That's why the Disney analogy doesn't work.
 

00_Zer0

Member
This will not be taken down. You see rom hacks, texture packs for regular Nintendo licensed games all the time from NES to Switch. Why hasn't Nintendo taken them down, because they have no legal right to do so. Right now I can take my legally owned Mario 64 cart and put it in a program that gives me a native PC port. I can choose to add texture packs, or hacks to it without issue. This decompilation has been out for a few years now and there is nothing Nintendo can do about it. If they had a legal way to remove this from the Internet they would have done it already. If you provide your own rom on any game that you dumped and choose to add a hack or texture pack to it, there's nothing Nintendo can do. Period. That's with emulators, decompilations, and recompilations.
 

CamHostage

Member
An interview with Wiseguy about the project.


(Its buried in there a bit, but there is some good semi-nontechnical stuff in here about previous Static Recompilation attempts and why lots of others wrote it off as an unviable solution in the past. N64 is kind of a goldilocks situation, so this both might change everything and may change very little beyond. Hopefully though the success here will spurn more good news in this method to follow, saving archivist hackers from the aching gruntwork that goes into manual decompilation.)

A relevant snippet, for those wondering if this opens the floodgates to other platforms too...

I also don't know enough about other platforms to know which others this approach will work for, so it may be that only some fall into the sweet spot where static recompilation is viable."
 
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MAX PAYMENT

Member
This native pc port thing is insanely cool. Been messing around with ocarina of time mods and gameplay improvements all weekend.
 

Holammer

Member
Nintendo should take it like a man and use the software to compile native Switch versions of N64 games. It's a win-win for everyone.
Contribute any code they add if the license demands it, of course.
 
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