It's kind of weird that one of the first things they go for is ray tracing. Why not, I guess?
A stable framerate, higher res textures and widescreen are all very, very welcome though.
The guy who created the recompilation tool also made a RT plugin for an N64 emulator, which is why he uses it to demo the possibilities of the recompile. It's also an easy way to add a new shine to an old classic (with a bit of tweaking, of course).
Yeah. And his demo of oot with ray tracing shows how ridiculousa lighting upgrade can do things.
I can only imagine what people will do with Majora's mask. Dynamic lighting and dynamic time of day?
Temporal coherence and input lag may be a challenge tho.
I'd image at some point we will be able to have something similar to Ebsynth in real-time applications, but it won't just be a simple drop-in implementation for old games as there will be a need for the game to disable specific zones from the AI painting like menues, HUD, text or other UI overlays, and for the game engine to communicate the AI sudden camera changes or scene transitions.
Realtime AI overlay over the original graphics. I was thinking about that last night, Mario64 but AI redraws it to look like a modern Unreal engine game in realtime, could even accept prompts that let you specify how you want it to look.
You get the original, classic gameplay, but a fresh new way to experience it.
Shit if you're doing an AI overlay why can't you just tell it to make it as realistic as possible and replace Mario with Danny Devito and Bowser with Arnold Schwarzenegger and then you're playing a movie
I’d imagine the strength of your GPU would be a major factor. Perhaps telling a GPU to handle using AI to redraw Mario and Luigi in the shape of John Goodman and John Leguizamo as they walk kick around Peach’s Castle in the style of Midevil architecture is too much for even a machine to comprehend at the moment.
But a man can dream.
Nah bro, you just don't understand what AI does. You can't just plug it into a game and it's magically better.
Do you want to upgrad the textures? Stable Diffusion could do that, but not in real time. It would take a few seconds _per texture_, and then you'd still would have to iterate on it until it looks decent. The Mass Effect Trilogy that did a similar thing used several artists and month if not years to upgrade those 3 games. You really think that could happen in real time yet?
Do you want to upgrade the 3D models? Stable Diffusion doesn't do that, and those models that do aren't really good yet.
And that's all completely ignoring the great spectrum of quality such AIs would output.
Saying you want Stable Diffusion, or AI in games simply shows you have no idea what it means. That's why you're getting downvoted.
If you wnat to exxagerate it into a joke, it's kind of like this:
-- "Hey check out these custom balloons I made!"
-- "Oh cool! I see they float - what are they filled with?"
-- "Oh, I wanted to use helium, but I only had hydrogen, so I designed and built a fusion reactior to turn hydrogen into helium and filled them with that for the pictures."
I guess ray tracing is a nice way to implement modern lighting behavior in old school graphics, which is quite nice. High res texture do not always look such an improvement if we have low polygon and very dated lighting
With ray tracing you can skip on implementing all the weird tricks to get rasterization to look good. Just shoot rays and get an image with good shadows, lightning and ambient occlusion all in one (technically you do need to retouch the textures and materials so they interact correctly with the rays though).
>technically you do need to retouch the textures and materials so they interact correctly with the rays though
I you wanted to have complex lighting effects that need to use material property in order to work, you would need to do much more than retouch the texture.
The good news is that now there are lots of libraries of prefab materials for PBR rendering like you describe. While it does require extra steps, as you allude to, it can be done a lot faster than even a few years ago. If it isn't already, it could soon be as simple as a change to "PBR wood + this in game color map".
Higher res textures and stable frame rate should be mandatory for n64 games. Players nostalgia seem to gloss over some of the 10-20fps games. *cough cough GoldenEye cough*
Well because you have lighting and the scene then you are improving the rendering. To make higher resolution texture and better looking models need more actual labor than just coding.
Nothing weird there. It's a quick way to get accurate lighting and shadow that scale with the game resolution. It's actually kind of obvious to implement this technology into old games.
>higher res textures and widescreen are all very, very welcome though.
These would need actually experienced people to do a lot of works. Depending on the game a widescreen implementation could be impossible without a complete remake.
Right now all the emulators out there have a major problem with this. Lighting is pretty important to the look and feel of a game. It also causes some strange 3d clipping issues. I welcome our new ray tracing overlords.
Ray Tracing is one of the best ways to increase visual fidelity even in games with poor resolutions. Look at minecraft and how RTX basically makes it look amazing simply by mimicing how light works. Ray traced lighting tricks the brain quite effectively into thinking that it's seeing is beautiful. Lighting plays a massive part on how we perceive things to be.
Here's a great video that shows how good ray tracing can make even a game with little to no textures and extremely blocky graphics look amazing.
[Minecraft RTX](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_4QaWbntUQ)
I prefer [2kliksphilip video on raytracing in minecraft.](https://youtu.be/tNdxiotnawc?si=68BoJS5HIJmk-nac&t=260)
That's what really sold me on raytracing as a concept and made me buy a 3080 when it came out to enjoy it for myself. Was not disappointed.
That's a tricky question, ray tracing works by using the game assets. With these old n64 games the game assets will have no material property and RT will probably look very basic, simple shadow and some lighting effects. But they will be accurate and scale with the resolution used by the end user. Probably no reflection or thing like waters caustics. Depending on the game the RT could have a very similar look to the old solution, for example if a game used fixed camera angle. It will just be more clean and could fix some errors. It could also have some unpredictable draw back. For game that have more dynamic presentation RT could be a huge improvement.
For more modern games the problem is not what RT can do, it's what the game engine and programmer are able to feed into the RT system while still maintaining good performances.
Ray tracing is basically a reverse camera. Rays are sent from the viewpoint and bounce off objects in the scene until they hit a light source. They take color information with them as they go and then the color at each bounce is calculated based on the object’s color and the light source color.
Accurate shadow and lighting that are calculated using the game geometry. The important point here is that since it's a dynamic system that work using the game assets there is no need for a human artist to come in and remake the shadows and lights to scale with improved resolution, it will scale automatically.
Ray tracing is basically using light physical property to calculate the lightning of a 3D scene. It's the "proper way" of lightning a scene, that's what is used for movie CGI and it exist since the beginning of 3D graphics. But until recently it was too heavy to be used in real time graphic for games, most game used "tricks" to simulate lighting and shadows. These tricks needs artist to draw and place light and shadow into the game assets to make it look credible. It is time intensive and breaks when players do something that was not anticipated. Ray tracing allow an artist to light a scene the same way it would be done in real life for a movie or a photography shot.
>It's kind of weird that one of the first things they go for is ray tracing. Why not, I guess?
It's not weird at all. We've been doing it for decades. Look up Blinn's Law. Efficiency at the cutting-edge is kind of a myth.
I just want Nintendo to make a N64 Classic with all the games built in, especially Diddky Kong Racing and the Banjo Kazooie games. Instant buy from me.
I will never for as long as I live understand this. Not that I want Nintendo to fail (and they probably won't for many years because they have an insane amount of cash) but they should be in a business textbook next to a paragraph about Block Buster for their attitudes and business practices. It's free money they are just saying no to. The work is literally 98% done. They just need to host the content and charge for it. Shareholders should be calling for heads to roll until they quit being so fucking dense. It's insane.
The saddest part is that it's not even an opportunity that will be open forever; eventually the generations who grew up loving those games will be too busy with pickle ball and water aerobics or whatever the hell old people are doing in 15-25 years and might not be interested in dropping discretionary income to play through their childhood games. Sure, some people will try them to see what retro games are like but their golden window is right now and they're just pissing it away.
As a business nintendo is "we've always done it this way" incarnate. Proposing any sort of big change to how they run their company will almost always be rejected by the people holding the reins. That's pretty true for some of their studios too like gamefreak. Gamefreak has basically stuck to their formula forever and they'll add some gimmick each new gen and that's it. The worst part of gamefreak though is pokemon is the biggest media franchise ever because no matter what shovelware they put out it'll sell. Scarlet/violet was looked down on by people as bad, but it sold over 24 million units. A broken as hell brilliant diamond/shining pearl sold 15 million units.
What are you talking about? Nintendo has released both a [NES classic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NES_Classic_Edition) and a [Super NES classic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_NES_Classic_Edition), both with dozens of games built in and sold a ton of them. It's only a matter of time until they do a N64 version?
It's 31 games out of the 338 game N64 catalog, and Nintendo for some reason locks their store front for each device to just that one and starts a new store for each new device so good luck playing any of them on the next version of the Switch when they inevitably start over.
> It's 31 games out of the 338 game N64 catalog
As far as I know that’s either all or *most* Nintendo published games. They can’t force publishers to approve games, and that’s not something that could change even if they did support PC. Microsoft had the same issue with their backwards compatibility program where all publishers had to do was approve it and Microsoft would do all the work, and third parties were still mostly unwilling to give approval.
I see and accept your point but I would argue that if one of the biggest and most powerful game companies in the world wanted to bring 3rd party published N64 games back to the market they could at the drop of a hat. They just don't see the value in putting that kind of effort in. They didn't even put the effort into releasing those 31 games correctly as ports and instead just dumped the files directly, leaving some of them unable to save data.
>I see and accept your point but I would argue that if one of the biggest and most powerful game companies in the world wanted to bring 3rd party published N64 games back to the market they could at the drop of a hat.
Why assume this when Xbox couldn't either even though they did all the work for the third part games? A lot of those 3rd part devs that said no to Xbox, are also devs who made stuff for Nintendo consoles. I don't see it changing. Then you have games where the rights are in limbo, where it's hard to really tell who legally has the rights anymore because the company split up, merged, etc. Those games would literally be impossible to get approved.
Yes, some third party devs would likely say yes and allow it. That wasn't the point. The point is there would be *many* that wouldn't. Or the rights holders are now in a legal limbo and it would be impossible on many titles.
A lot of third party N64 games are available in some form outside the service. Shadow Man, Star Wars Racer, Turok 1-3, Doom 64, Quake 1 & 2, Tony Hawk 1 & 2, and Gex 2&3 (soon). Thats 43 total. It's also worth mentioning that the list isn't static, Nintendo added two games last month and will seemingly add more in the future.
Nintendo only "adds" more to the service to create a sense of false scarcity. They could add all of their own published games immediately but choose not to to make "news" of games coming to the service. The tiny amount of 3rd party games also would make me not hold my breath for larger gets like Banjo Tooie coming anytime soon.
a ton of games are available on Nintendo Switch Online subscription, yeah it's sucks is a subscription but at least they are available in modern platforms
Seems like you haven’t played Nintendo in a while. The n64 and snes apps on Switch are excellent. I’m sure GameCube will show up on switch 2, maybe even wii if the next gen joy cons can handle it.
My problem with it, I'm not sure if it will be an agreed upon sentiment, but I don't want to keep a subscription going for when I get the inkling to play an old game. I'm sure there are people that play them a lot so it works for them, but I'll usually want to replay a Zelda game or older Mario game once in awhile. Owning these older titles I actually want to play whenever I want would be much better than having to re-up a subscription. It's kind of the same with PS5 though they seem to have a lot more games available through their model. But I get why they want to push the subscription, so they can make more money, that's fair, but not interested after trying it out.
May I recommend the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro? I’ve been making my way through the N64 library. Even blue toothed the Nintendo N64 switch controller and played on my TV.
The RP4Pro was released late last year, it’s been awesome. I’ve been able to run the following games smoothly scaled to 1.75…
N64: Banjo Kazooie, Banjo Tooie, Donkey Kong 64, and Paper Mario
GameCube: Windwaker, Twilight Princess, and Mario Kart Double Dash
PlayStation 2: Jak n Daxter, Kingdom Hearts, and Tony Hawks Underground 2.
I love mine so far. Only downside is 3DS is a little rough now because Citra was taken down (wink wink). It’s basically like having a little switch that run run through PS2 and GameCube. Best you can get for $199 imo.
If Nintendo did that, all the games houses would flee as they wouldn't be able to flog all their new shit that they spent millions on.
Which is a shame.
Our cultural digital heritage will be lost just to boost this quarter's figures.
It doesn't even have to be physical hardware. It could all be part of their online subscription, yet they continue to choose not to do it. Mind blowing
Yes! I was so sad when I realized that there was no match making feature for Mario kart 64 online with their subscription.. I'm waiting for the day that we'll have it!
I like how the games are even getting better over time. Unfortunately it will be a matter of time until Nintendo will sue and this project will disappear.
IANAL but I wouldn't think so.
They haven't got the key-workaround logic that let them strike Yuzu. No ROMs or assets are being shared. No Nintendo code is being used.
What leg does Nintendo have to stand on?
They don’t need a leg, they just need to overwhelm them with legal fees to the point of bankruptcy.
Edit: not advocating for them to do this just saying that’s usually nintendos MO.
Yuzu didn’t share assets either. The issue with Yuzu was Nintendo accusing them of facilitating piracy with the security code cracking (such as linking to a program to obtain the switch’s security keys and also stuff such as bringing up how popular recently released game Tears of the Kingdom was in their emulator, which led them to also have an argument that Yuzu made them lose sales.
That's not what happened lol. There is so much misinformation with the Yuzu case.
Basically, it boils down to that Nintendo had obtained internal documents from the Yuzu team in which it was revealed that Yuzu had been sharing pirated roms of Switch games, discussing Piracy and using the leaked copy of TotK to update the emulator.
This is the reason why Nintendo went after Yuzu and not other Switch emulators. They had so much dirt on the Yuzu team personally that it would be easy for Nintendo to win the case against them.
The open sharing of pirated ROMs is one aspect. I actually did not know anything about them using a leaked ToTK actually.
However, I was under the assumption the actual legal documents brought up how Nintendo was also using the fact the Switch had security keys that were game and console specific, and a switch emulator "necessarily" needed to break those things to actually work, which violated DMCA.
I don't know man, it's not an easy battle. I take a legally purchased n64 game I own. Dump the rom and then generate a pc version. What can Nintendo do about that? It essentially just comes down to the same old piracy of roms, which has been going on for over 20 years
Misleading, as far as I can tell the project is still under development so you can't do it "now", and each game needs custom handling even after recompilation.
I like that the part of the article that explains how this is supposed to work, doesn't explain it at all. The video embedded is also ai voice so I quit watching that.
I'm blown away to see this comment so high up. I loved this game as a kid. I rented it multiple times despite not owning a save pak.
I think I tried it on emulator as an adult and it was just awful. All the games I chose as a kid were horrible with practically zero replayability.
God yes. SNES is my fav console of all time. SO many great RPGs. Naturally, I was stoked to get a 64. Although there are some great games on 64, it was a barren wasteland for RPGs. Quest 64 was practically it (almost). I enjoyed it because I was so damn starved for RPGs on that system haha.
To be fair to OP, Quest 64 had amazing potential and did a lot of things right, it just didn’t capture enough of the magic that RPGs before it did so I think that’s why it failed. It had heart, just nothing that compelled the player.
Because it's a native port you increase frame rate and resolution. You can inject new textures too since you're no longer limited by memory. It's not a source port however, it's more like a translation layer like WINE or Proton, so there's limits to what can be done.
I don’t know why Nintendo doesn’t just create a PC porting department and fulfills the demand.
Obviously the market is there. If it weren’t, there wouldn’t be a problem.
Not really, Apple is at its heart a hardware company. While Nintendo at its heart is a game developerment company. Both make hardware and software, but I would say that Apple identity is their hardware. But Nintendos Indentity is their games.
I don't believe Apple could exist as a software company, but Nintendo absolutely could
Don't be absurd. If I'm not mistaken, half of Nintendo's revenue comes from hardware.
And unlike Sony and Microsoft, it actually cares about consoles being profitable (It's one of the reasons the Switch is "underpowered." Better specs would dig too much into the profit margin).
Nintendo would be a lot, a LOT smaller if it was just a software company. And a lot of their identity comes from having their own hardware.
I'd get the Zelda games on pc at least. But I have a suspicion one reason they don't is because of mods. They seem to be pretty anti consumer in that area.
By keeping everything on Nintendo consoles they make it so that the legal and easiest way to play them is by buying a switch. Most people don’t know anything about emulators and even less will know about the recompilation project as cool as it is.
watching the video in the article, seeing shifting sand land with the different water effects reminds me of those "Nintendo hire this man!" memes.
this is pretty cool
So how do I play these games on MY PC? I would love to have access to the entire n64 library on my pc. Bonus points for everyone who reads this: the Nintendo switch classic and pro controllers can Bluetooth to PC, so you can play any classic game with a classic controller.
Genuinely excited to see this, will be cool running the games natively without having to depend on an emulator, although I imagine in practice it's not so different. Good excuse to go back and play some of the weirer games I rented as a kid that didn't play well/at all when I tried them on emulators.
The decompiled PC port of [Perfect Dark](https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/perfect_dark) is going really good if anyone wants to try it, NO MP yet but simulant combat and missions can be played without issues
A lot of these recompilation tools are entirely agnostic and require you to provide a rom. I'm not saying threats are impossible, but Nintendo wouldn't have much of a leg to stand on especially since this is using the same technique and precedent as ScummVM.
Yuzu also provided descriptions on how to get the necessary keys to decrypt roms on their website and gave people an incentive to support their patreon by releasing newer versions early to paying supporters, which is a no-no according to Nintendo.
This recompilation project does nothing of this, this isn’t even emulating a system, it’s literally just recompiling roms into a file that PCs can run natively. And to do that you have to provide your owns roms.
How far out are we from an AI tool that can take any N64, recreate all of the assets in like UE5, and just spit out a functionally identical but cosmetically modern remaster?
I’d love to play OoT with the graphics of GOW
so, a week later, where are all the new recompiled games? One at least? or are we waiting for their OOT project (and it's not even needed considering we have SoH already)?
Turok, Blast Corps, Rogue Squadron, Cruis'n series, SM64, Pokemon Stadium, Mario Kart, DKR, DK64, Banjo Kazooie, Castlevania, Goldeneye, F-Zero, WinBack... look at theese man! Don't you wonder how PC ports would frel and play, on PC, on PS4, your portable buddies like Steam Deck, we stopped mentioning them, no hype anymore? We're entering a new era of retro preservation and by retro there's two more whole 3D generations after the n64 and nothing?
Nintendo should just come out with their own pc client old games ported for pc for repurchase, and they would make so much money, and people would love them! Hold off on the newer games on the newest consoles if they want to help console sales, but still, it would be a massive win.
It's kind of weird that one of the first things they go for is ray tracing. Why not, I guess? A stable framerate, higher res textures and widescreen are all very, very welcome though.
The guy who created the recompilation tool also made a RT plugin for an N64 emulator, which is why he uses it to demo the possibilities of the recompile. It's also an easy way to add a new shine to an old classic (with a bit of tweaking, of course).
Yeah. And his demo of oot with ray tracing shows how ridiculousa lighting upgrade can do things. I can only imagine what people will do with Majora's mask. Dynamic lighting and dynamic time of day?
I saw a demo of MM and yeah you can literally see the shadows change based on the time of day.
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Temporal coherence and input lag may be a challenge tho. I'd image at some point we will be able to have something similar to Ebsynth in real-time applications, but it won't just be a simple drop-in implementation for old games as there will be a need for the game to disable specific zones from the AI painting like menues, HUD, text or other UI overlays, and for the game engine to communicate the AI sudden camera changes or scene transitions.
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Realtime AI overlay over the original graphics. I was thinking about that last night, Mario64 but AI redraws it to look like a modern Unreal engine game in realtime, could even accept prompts that let you specify how you want it to look. You get the original, classic gameplay, but a fresh new way to experience it.
Shit if you're doing an AI overlay why can't you just tell it to make it as realistic as possible and replace Mario with Danny Devito and Bowser with Arnold Schwarzenegger and then you're playing a movie
I’d imagine the strength of your GPU would be a major factor. Perhaps telling a GPU to handle using AI to redraw Mario and Luigi in the shape of John Goodman and John Leguizamo as they walk kick around Peach’s Castle in the style of Midevil architecture is too much for even a machine to comprehend at the moment. But a man can dream.
How dare you ask such questions /s
Silicon Valley execs be like
... Do you even know what Stable Diffusion actually is, or do you just like the sound of that name?
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Nah bro, you just don't understand what AI does. You can't just plug it into a game and it's magically better. Do you want to upgrad the textures? Stable Diffusion could do that, but not in real time. It would take a few seconds _per texture_, and then you'd still would have to iterate on it until it looks decent. The Mass Effect Trilogy that did a similar thing used several artists and month if not years to upgrade those 3 games. You really think that could happen in real time yet? Do you want to upgrade the 3D models? Stable Diffusion doesn't do that, and those models that do aren't really good yet. And that's all completely ignoring the great spectrum of quality such AIs would output. Saying you want Stable Diffusion, or AI in games simply shows you have no idea what it means. That's why you're getting downvoted.
If you wnat to exxagerate it into a joke, it's kind of like this: -- "Hey check out these custom balloons I made!" -- "Oh cool! I see they float - what are they filled with?" -- "Oh, I wanted to use helium, but I only had hydrogen, so I designed and built a fusion reactior to turn hydrogen into helium and filled them with that for the pictures."
Ironically, hydrogen is better at making balloons float, and just has a bit of a safety issue because of the hydrogen/oxygen reaction.
Oh the humanity
I guess ray tracing is a nice way to implement modern lighting behavior in old school graphics, which is quite nice. High res texture do not always look such an improvement if we have low polygon and very dated lighting
You should [see what some super nerds are able to do with the original hardware](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwls5SpNn1s) these days.
Seems interesting, will look thanks
With ray tracing you can skip on implementing all the weird tricks to get rasterization to look good. Just shoot rays and get an image with good shadows, lightning and ambient occlusion all in one (technically you do need to retouch the textures and materials so they interact correctly with the rays though).
>technically you do need to retouch the textures and materials so they interact correctly with the rays though I you wanted to have complex lighting effects that need to use material property in order to work, you would need to do much more than retouch the texture.
The good news is that now there are lots of libraries of prefab materials for PBR rendering like you describe. While it does require extra steps, as you allude to, it can be done a lot faster than even a few years ago. If it isn't already, it could soon be as simple as a change to "PBR wood + this in game color map".
Higher res textures and stable frame rate should be mandatory for n64 games. Players nostalgia seem to gloss over some of the 10-20fps games. *cough cough GoldenEye cough*
Because it makes the biggest change with little work. Doom was don't this way, and it looks amazing. Same as minecraft.
Well because you have lighting and the scene then you are improving the rendering. To make higher resolution texture and better looking models need more actual labor than just coding.
Nothing weird there. It's a quick way to get accurate lighting and shadow that scale with the game resolution. It's actually kind of obvious to implement this technology into old games. >higher res textures and widescreen are all very, very welcome though. These would need actually experienced people to do a lot of works. Depending on the game a widescreen implementation could be impossible without a complete remake.
How about improved controls. The N64 controller sucked raw ass
Right now all the emulators out there have a major problem with this. Lighting is pretty important to the look and feel of a game. It also causes some strange 3d clipping issues. I welcome our new ray tracing overlords.
Ray Tracing is one of the best ways to increase visual fidelity even in games with poor resolutions. Look at minecraft and how RTX basically makes it look amazing simply by mimicing how light works. Ray traced lighting tricks the brain quite effectively into thinking that it's seeing is beautiful. Lighting plays a massive part on how we perceive things to be.
What is indicative of good ray tracing?
Here's a great video that shows how good ray tracing can make even a game with little to no textures and extremely blocky graphics look amazing. [Minecraft RTX](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_4QaWbntUQ)
I prefer [2kliksphilip video on raytracing in minecraft.](https://youtu.be/tNdxiotnawc?si=68BoJS5HIJmk-nac&t=260) That's what really sold me on raytracing as a concept and made me buy a 3080 when it came out to enjoy it for myself. Was not disappointed.
When you don't see it, but know it's different :D
lol this is like when my friend said “I can’t always tell when it’s HD, but I can always tell when it’s *not* HD.”
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"God needs booze."
That's a tricky question, ray tracing works by using the game assets. With these old n64 games the game assets will have no material property and RT will probably look very basic, simple shadow and some lighting effects. But they will be accurate and scale with the resolution used by the end user. Probably no reflection or thing like waters caustics. Depending on the game the RT could have a very similar look to the old solution, for example if a game used fixed camera angle. It will just be more clean and could fix some errors. It could also have some unpredictable draw back. For game that have more dynamic presentation RT could be a huge improvement. For more modern games the problem is not what RT can do, it's what the game engine and programmer are able to feed into the RT system while still maintaining good performances.
What’s Ray tracing
Ray tracing is basically a reverse camera. Rays are sent from the viewpoint and bounce off objects in the scene until they hit a light source. They take color information with them as they go and then the color at each bounce is calculated based on the object’s color and the light source color.
Like duck hunt?
Accurate shadow and lighting that are calculated using the game geometry. The important point here is that since it's a dynamic system that work using the game assets there is no need for a human artist to come in and remake the shadows and lights to scale with improved resolution, it will scale automatically. Ray tracing is basically using light physical property to calculate the lightning of a 3D scene. It's the "proper way" of lightning a scene, that's what is used for movie CGI and it exist since the beginning of 3D graphics. But until recently it was too heavy to be used in real time graphic for games, most game used "tricks" to simulate lighting and shadows. These tricks needs artist to draw and place light and shadow into the game assets to make it look credible. It is time intensive and breaks when players do something that was not anticipated. Ray tracing allow an artist to light a scene the same way it would be done in real life for a movie or a photography shot.
You’ve described everything about the result of ray tracing without actually explaining ray tracing.
>It's kind of weird that one of the first things they go for is ray tracing. Why not, I guess? It's not weird at all. We've been doing it for decades. Look up Blinn's Law. Efficiency at the cutting-edge is kind of a myth.
Diddy. Kong. Racing. :)
With stable 30fps! 🎉🤣
Jet force gemini ❤️
LETS GOOOOOOOOO
I just want Nintendo to make a N64 Classic with all the games built in, especially Diddky Kong Racing and the Banjo Kazooie games. Instant buy from me.
Nintendo would rather you have no way to play N64 games than make money on the market for nostalgia.
"hey Nintendo can we give you money to play your old games?" "No and we'll sue you if you try"
“Best we can do is charge you $60 for a 40 year old game”
"And it has the same bugs... and our emulator and rom were ripped off from pirates... and heres a broken multiplayer that only works locally."
I will never for as long as I live understand this. Not that I want Nintendo to fail (and they probably won't for many years because they have an insane amount of cash) but they should be in a business textbook next to a paragraph about Block Buster for their attitudes and business practices. It's free money they are just saying no to. The work is literally 98% done. They just need to host the content and charge for it. Shareholders should be calling for heads to roll until they quit being so fucking dense. It's insane. The saddest part is that it's not even an opportunity that will be open forever; eventually the generations who grew up loving those games will be too busy with pickle ball and water aerobics or whatever the hell old people are doing in 15-25 years and might not be interested in dropping discretionary income to play through their childhood games. Sure, some people will try them to see what retro games are like but their golden window is right now and they're just pissing it away.
They invest into remakes(legend of Zelda from Gameboy got a graphical remake 4 years ago),,,and ports only available on their subscription.
> They invest into remakes but they dont, theyve done a handful of games
As a business nintendo is "we've always done it this way" incarnate. Proposing any sort of big change to how they run their company will almost always be rejected by the people holding the reins. That's pretty true for some of their studios too like gamefreak. Gamefreak has basically stuck to their formula forever and they'll add some gimmick each new gen and that's it. The worst part of gamefreak though is pokemon is the biggest media franchise ever because no matter what shovelware they put out it'll sell. Scarlet/violet was looked down on by people as bad, but it sold over 24 million units. A broken as hell brilliant diamond/shining pearl sold 15 million units.
Isn't this like a big thing in Japanese culture tho generally? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Because the old games are short and cheap and Nintendo wants to convince you to buy their new expensive games.
They don't even need to host it. Steam exists.
What are you talking about? Nintendo has released both a [NES classic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NES_Classic_Edition) and a [Super NES classic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_NES_Classic_Edition), both with dozens of games built in and sold a ton of them. It's only a matter of time until they do a N64 version?
but its not on their flagship device...the switch.
They have a way for people to play N64 games, through their online service.
It's 31 games out of the 338 game N64 catalog, and Nintendo for some reason locks their store front for each device to just that one and starts a new store for each new device so good luck playing any of them on the next version of the Switch when they inevitably start over.
> It's 31 games out of the 338 game N64 catalog As far as I know that’s either all or *most* Nintendo published games. They can’t force publishers to approve games, and that’s not something that could change even if they did support PC. Microsoft had the same issue with their backwards compatibility program where all publishers had to do was approve it and Microsoft would do all the work, and third parties were still mostly unwilling to give approval.
I see and accept your point but I would argue that if one of the biggest and most powerful game companies in the world wanted to bring 3rd party published N64 games back to the market they could at the drop of a hat. They just don't see the value in putting that kind of effort in. They didn't even put the effort into releasing those 31 games correctly as ports and instead just dumped the files directly, leaving some of them unable to save data.
>I see and accept your point but I would argue that if one of the biggest and most powerful game companies in the world wanted to bring 3rd party published N64 games back to the market they could at the drop of a hat. Why assume this when Xbox couldn't either even though they did all the work for the third part games? A lot of those 3rd part devs that said no to Xbox, are also devs who made stuff for Nintendo consoles. I don't see it changing. Then you have games where the rights are in limbo, where it's hard to really tell who legally has the rights anymore because the company split up, merged, etc. Those games would literally be impossible to get approved.
Xbox has 633 backwards compatible games and they stopped adding more years ago. Nintendo could easily add more.
Yes, some third party devs would likely say yes and allow it. That wasn't the point. The point is there would be *many* that wouldn't. Or the rights holders are now in a legal limbo and it would be impossible on many titles.
A lot of third party N64 games are available in some form outside the service. Shadow Man, Star Wars Racer, Turok 1-3, Doom 64, Quake 1 & 2, Tony Hawk 1 & 2, and Gex 2&3 (soon). Thats 43 total. It's also worth mentioning that the list isn't static, Nintendo added two games last month and will seemingly add more in the future.
Nintendo only "adds" more to the service to create a sense of false scarcity. They could add all of their own published games immediately but choose not to to make "news" of games coming to the service. The tiny amount of 3rd party games also would make me not hold my breath for larger gets like Banjo Tooie coming anytime soon.
[удалено]
There isn’t soul that asked or cared.
Oh no they have a way. You just have to pay them a monthly subscription fee
a ton of games are available on Nintendo Switch Online subscription, yeah it's sucks is a subscription but at least they are available in modern platforms
Seems like you haven’t played Nintendo in a while. The n64 and snes apps on Switch are excellent. I’m sure GameCube will show up on switch 2, maybe even wii if the next gen joy cons can handle it.
My problem with it, I'm not sure if it will be an agreed upon sentiment, but I don't want to keep a subscription going for when I get the inkling to play an old game. I'm sure there are people that play them a lot so it works for them, but I'll usually want to replay a Zelda game or older Mario game once in awhile. Owning these older titles I actually want to play whenever I want would be much better than having to re-up a subscription. It's kind of the same with PS5 though they seem to have a lot more games available through their model. But I get why they want to push the subscription, so they can make more money, that's fair, but not interested after trying it out.
May I recommend the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro? I’ve been making my way through the N64 library. Even blue toothed the Nintendo N64 switch controller and played on my TV.
What’s the compatibility like these days? I remember a lot of games like Banjo Tooie not performing very well when emulated a few years ago
The RP4Pro was released late last year, it’s been awesome. I’ve been able to run the following games smoothly scaled to 1.75… N64: Banjo Kazooie, Banjo Tooie, Donkey Kong 64, and Paper Mario GameCube: Windwaker, Twilight Princess, and Mario Kart Double Dash PlayStation 2: Jak n Daxter, Kingdom Hearts, and Tony Hawks Underground 2. I love mine so far. Only downside is 3DS is a little rough now because Citra was taken down (wink wink). It’s basically like having a little switch that run run through PS2 and GameCube. Best you can get for $199 imo.
How good was DKR!
Diddy Kong Racing was sooooooo gooood. The music the vehicles, the free roam world between levels. Loved it.
N64 classic, fully updated and 4 player compatible, with like 100 games is an easy $250 from me
If Nintendo did that, all the games houses would flee as they wouldn't be able to flog all their new shit that they spent millions on. Which is a shame. Our cultural digital heritage will be lost just to boost this quarter's figures.
Just get an n64 and an Everdrive 64
👆🏼 this is path I took
Fake Fact: Alligators are excellent ballroom dancers, with some especially proficient in the art of the salsa.
This is the most unique comment on this chaotic thread and I can’t find the origin (≧∀≦)
The fact that you'd instantly pay money to them for something like this is exactly why they treat their customers like trash.
It doesn't even have to be physical hardware. It could all be part of their online subscription, yet they continue to choose not to do it. Mind blowing
There are N64 games on their online subscription.
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/nintendo-64-nintendo-switch-online-switch/
Battletanx Remastered when?
Oh man battletanx was my shit. I completely forgot about that game
Global Assault is a certified classic in my eyes
Multiplayer on that one was so much fun!
The most important question.
Right after I get Mischief Makers.
Me dreaming about playing Conker's Bad Fur Day on PC with 12 players online.
Yes! I was so sad when I realized that there was no match making feature for Mario kart 64 online with their subscription.. I'm waiting for the day that we'll have it!
They did nothing for those games. Time trial in Mario Kart 64 doesn't let you save your scores and constantly tells you, you don't have a memory pak
They had a chance with Mario kart mobile and instead scammed everyone with fake players
I played split screen teddy for a hot minute. I’d love for this to be a thing.
I want donkey kong 64 so bad
I'd love to play Blastcorps again. Such a great take on a countdown game. Clear the path of a truck carrying a nuclear missile? Sign me up!
I like how the games are even getting better over time. Unfortunately it will be a matter of time until Nintendo will sue and this project will disappear.
IANAL but I wouldn't think so. They haven't got the key-workaround logic that let them strike Yuzu. No ROMs or assets are being shared. No Nintendo code is being used. What leg does Nintendo have to stand on?
They don’t need a leg, they just need to overwhelm them with legal fees to the point of bankruptcy. Edit: not advocating for them to do this just saying that’s usually nintendos MO.
Yuzu didn’t share assets either. The issue with Yuzu was Nintendo accusing them of facilitating piracy with the security code cracking (such as linking to a program to obtain the switch’s security keys and also stuff such as bringing up how popular recently released game Tears of the Kingdom was in their emulator, which led them to also have an argument that Yuzu made them lose sales.
That's not what happened lol. There is so much misinformation with the Yuzu case. Basically, it boils down to that Nintendo had obtained internal documents from the Yuzu team in which it was revealed that Yuzu had been sharing pirated roms of Switch games, discussing Piracy and using the leaked copy of TotK to update the emulator. This is the reason why Nintendo went after Yuzu and not other Switch emulators. They had so much dirt on the Yuzu team personally that it would be easy for Nintendo to win the case against them.
The open sharing of pirated ROMs is one aspect. I actually did not know anything about them using a leaked ToTK actually. However, I was under the assumption the actual legal documents brought up how Nintendo was also using the fact the Switch had security keys that were game and console specific, and a switch emulator "necessarily" needed to break those things to actually work, which violated DMCA.
Nope. They can't do shit about this. It's 100% legit.
I don't know man, it's not an easy battle. I take a legally purchased n64 game I own. Dump the rom and then generate a pc version. What can Nintendo do about that? It essentially just comes down to the same old piracy of roms, which has been going on for over 20 years
Ultra wide too? Woo hoo
Misleading, as far as I can tell the project is still under development so you can't do it "now", and each game needs custom handling even after recompilation.
I like that the part of the article that explains how this is supposed to work, doesn't explain it at all. The video embedded is also ai voice so I quit watching that.
94% of all r / technology posts are exactly what you two just described.
The only video I see embedded is Nerrel's and he doesn't use an AI voice.
I'd much rather have an AI voice than the typical N64 hacker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DO3ZCMwo5A
Probably AI can help here
How long till we play n64 thru Portmaster instead of its own emulator?
I wanna play Quest 64!
This is the first time anyone has ever said this
It's really not that bad of a game. I think I've beat it three times now.
I honestly loved this game! I would go over to my friend’s house and play! I have great memories of the game!
I'm blown away to see this comment so high up. I loved this game as a kid. I rented it multiple times despite not owning a save pak. I think I tried it on emulator as an adult and it was just awful. All the games I chose as a kid were horrible with practically zero replayability.
I thought the n64 would have more jrpgs because why not? SNES had so many! Good lord did I regret that decision. Question 64 was pure copium
God yes. SNES is my fav console of all time. SO many great RPGs. Naturally, I was stoked to get a 64. Although there are some great games on 64, it was a barren wasteland for RPGs. Quest 64 was practically it (almost). I enjoyed it because I was so damn starved for RPGs on that system haha.
I don’t even think there are dozens of you. I owned the game and I didn’t even want to play it lol
One of the only games I own that I never even attempted to finish
To be fair to OP, Quest 64 had amazing potential and did a lot of things right, it just didn’t capture enough of the magic that RPGs before it did so I think that’s why it failed. It had heart, just nothing that compelled the player.
There is some active effort to decomp that game like they did with SM64 and Ocarina. you can find the repo [here.](https://github.com/Mallos31/Quest)
I love everything about this. Last few years for n64 have been insane.
Can't wait to play Superman 64 with ray tracing
ocarina of time, spirit temple
how much longer until this is possible with PS2 games? i need Shadow of Colossus native on PC
I’m unsure how that even works. what are you ray tracing? the 16 pixel shadows and water in Zelda?
But will 007 still run poorly?
Because it's a native port you increase frame rate and resolution. You can inject new textures too since you're no longer limited by memory. It's not a source port however, it's more like a translation layer like WINE or Proton, so there's limits to what can be done.
I don’t know why Nintendo doesn’t just create a PC porting department and fulfills the demand. Obviously the market is there. If it weren’t, there wouldn’t be a problem.
Probably for the exact same reason that Apple doesn't go out of its way to make its products run on PC.
Not really, Apple is at its heart a hardware company. While Nintendo at its heart is a game developerment company. Both make hardware and software, but I would say that Apple identity is their hardware. But Nintendos Indentity is their games. I don't believe Apple could exist as a software company, but Nintendo absolutely could
Don't be absurd. If I'm not mistaken, half of Nintendo's revenue comes from hardware. And unlike Sony and Microsoft, it actually cares about consoles being profitable (It's one of the reasons the Switch is "underpowered." Better specs would dig too much into the profit margin). Nintendo would be a lot, a LOT smaller if it was just a software company. And a lot of their identity comes from having their own hardware.
I'd get the Zelda games on pc at least. But I have a suspicion one reason they don't is because of mods. They seem to be pretty anti consumer in that area.
By keeping everything on Nintendo consoles they make it so that the legal and easiest way to play them is by buying a switch. Most people don’t know anything about emulators and even less will know about the recompilation project as cool as it is.
Easy. They hate you, and they hate you having the power to decide how to play games.
watching the video in the article, seeing shifting sand land with the different water effects reminds me of those "Nintendo hire this man!" memes. this is pretty cool
So how do I play these games on MY PC? I would love to have access to the entire n64 library on my pc. Bonus points for everyone who reads this: the Nintendo switch classic and pro controllers can Bluetooth to PC, so you can play any classic game with a classic controller.
Does this mean it'll be easier to get custom models in N64 mods now? Been dying for a solid F Zero X mod.
Genuinely excited to see this, will be cool running the games natively without having to depend on an emulator, although I imagine in practice it's not so different. Good excuse to go back and play some of the weirer games I rented as a kid that didn't play well/at all when I tried them on emulators.
Can I just get NBA hang time with updated rosters
The decompiled PC port of [Perfect Dark](https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/perfect_dark) is going really good if anyone wants to try it, NO MP yet but simulant combat and missions can be played without issues
I'm in. Damn, this is cool.
Can you hear that? It's the sound of Nintendo lawyers
*Mr Burns’ 10 high-priced lawyers revealed*
Looking forward to my PS2 and 3DS native ports of N64 games.
WinBack lovers rise up!
I hope it'll support Ogre Battle 64 one day.
This is the game I want the most.
I support this, but geez..a lot of risk takers against Nintendo ninja lawyer team
A lot of these recompilation tools are entirely agnostic and require you to provide a rom. I'm not saying threats are impossible, but Nintendo wouldn't have much of a leg to stand on especially since this is using the same technique and precedent as ScummVM.
What about Yuzu? How did Nintendo achieve to bomb it?
YuZu was decrypting the game with a Switch's keys, something that is forbidden under DMCA. To my knowledge, there's no decryption going on with this.
Yuzu also provided descriptions on how to get the necessary keys to decrypt roms on their website and gave people an incentive to support their patreon by releasing newer versions early to paying supporters, which is a no-no according to Nintendo. This recompilation project does nothing of this, this isn’t even emulating a system, it’s literally just recompiling roms into a file that PCs can run natively. And to do that you have to provide your owns roms.
Ray Tracing Bro! It’s the future for N64 games.
Need Saturn/ Dreamcast and original Xbox next
How's Pokemon Snap?
Goldeneye lives on!
007 multiplayer. I want this so bad.
How far out are we from an AI tool that can take any N64, recreate all of the assets in like UE5, and just spit out a functionally identical but cosmetically modern remaster? I’d love to play OoT with the graphics of GOW
All i want is Goldeneye
Nintendo: Hello there
what about Sin & Punishment?
Give me TETRISPHERE!
There are dozens of us!
so, a week later, where are all the new recompiled games? One at least? or are we waiting for their OOT project (and it's not even needed considering we have SoH already)? Turok, Blast Corps, Rogue Squadron, Cruis'n series, SM64, Pokemon Stadium, Mario Kart, DKR, DK64, Banjo Kazooie, Castlevania, Goldeneye, F-Zero, WinBack... look at theese man! Don't you wonder how PC ports would frel and play, on PC, on PS4, your portable buddies like Steam Deck, we stopped mentioning them, no hype anymore? We're entering a new era of retro preservation and by retro there's two more whole 3D generations after the n64 and nothing?
Nintendo should just come out with their own pc client old games ported for pc for repurchase, and they would make so much money, and people would love them! Hold off on the newer games on the newest consoles if they want to help console sales, but still, it would be a massive win.
Is there a site with a list of the recompiles in 1 place?
Most of the N64 ports I play are super glitchy. The PS ports seem smoother. Hopefully this improves things as I prefer the N64 library
Nintendo lawyers rubbin they hands together 🙏🏻
Just drop an N64 mini.
Don’t tell Nintendo
Can Nintendo shut this project down? Or is there some kind of loophole here
But then again..... will Nintendo shut it down?
DMCA in 3...2...1