Comment on Soon, You May Be Able To Play Diddy Kong Racing Natively On Your PC | Time Extension

Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• towerful@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Pretty much, yes.
  Developers for the older consoles employed all sorts of hacks and used all sorts of undocumented features.
  Emulators of N64 would develop the emulator for something like 80% of the features of 80% of the games, then put in specific workarounds for the oddities of each game.
  Which is why some games are better on specific emulators.

  Also, decompilation lead to a greater understanding of the various glitches. DK64 and Mario 64 speedruns benefitted massively from this.
  And also fun hack/mods like randomisers and hardcore modes, massively extending the games playability.

  But yeh, the things devs did back in the day is bonkers

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  • SailorMoss@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I’m surprised no one ever tried to compile all the hacks into a single open source plugin or emulator. There are only around 400 retail games for the N64 which seems pretty manageable to have some sort of game detection ruleset for various hacks.

    It seems like in recent years N64 emulation is finally improving somewhat with lower level emulation like the parallel64 core in retroarch.

    Long term decompilation is the better solution regardless but it’s going to take a good amount of time to decompile all the games of significance for the N64.

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    • Nikls94@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      no one ever tried to compile all the hacks into a single open source plugin or emulator

      Because the hacks of one game might destroy another one.

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    • SynopsisTantilize@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Starcraft64 decomp when?

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