Hey, author of the project here! Thanks for posting! It's been a really fun project to work on, and a great way to learn about how to use Claude more efficiently. I'm just a few hours away from posting a big update with:
64dd on original 3DS
Local & Online Multiplayer
QR Code sharing for Custom Courses
I hope ya'll check out the authors notes, post-morterm, and give it a try on your 3DS.
cynicalkane
Look, I'm gonna say what's been said a lot of times, but bears repeating: when the very first two or three sentences I read are mind-blanketing AI prose breathlessly em-dashing together fragments of stuff I don't care about, it makes me skeptical that there's value perusing the rest of the project. Like, you can't even be bothered to make your lede some form of human-to-human communication.
ryan_n
In the "Read On" section at the bottom it says "Author's notes: The one page written by a human." Seems they're pretty open about everything being written with Claude.
coffeesoda
Appreciate it, but the info is there for anyone (or their LLM) to learn about the project in a technical sense. Like others have kindly stated, my notes (written by a human, for humans) are in a separate section.
The technical notes are dense and interesting in their own right, but I don't expect anyone not already familiar with the N64 to 3DS port scene to care.
testernews
this is why i don’t post anything here anymore...
autoexec
If what you'd post are pages of obnoxious AI generated text that you yourself couldn't even be bothered to think/write about in the first place, then thank you for your restraint. A topic you think is worth your time to post about with your own words, sharing your thoughts, in your own voice could be interesting and worth our time too, but that's also not something you can just copy out of a chat bot.
echelon
This is not cool.
Do you not see what you're doing? How do you know they don't think about things? You're attacking with unfounded accusations, and it's incredibly uncivil.
Why are you in this AI thread spewing hate?
Think about it a second.
This is an AI thread.
You do not have to be here.
jonhohle
This was a thread supposedly about a port of an N64 game to 3DS. It turned out that it’s just something LLM was told to do. Not interesting.
desterothx
Ok, for future reference, the next couple months you see any port, you can be 99% sure it was done by ai given the recent REA news. So if you don't want to see ai posts, avoid the port posts
opan
All your stuff is vibecoded these days? Or is this a general complaint about negativity in the comments?
regularfry
Not the GP but the experience of being on the wrong end of a vociferous false positive is not great, and there are enough readers to make that not an unlikely outcome.
TuxSH
Yeah and some of the article wasn't proofread (by himself or a clanker) and the project is missing some of the due dilligence.
One striking example is "No debugger, no stdout" which is baffling considering I implemented a GDB stub in the very first version of Rosalina which I released like... 10 years ago?
Stdout redirection is supported by both 3dslink and GDB stuff on 3ds, too.
I don't mean to be a party pooper - and the projects fullfills its role as a showcase of how far pure vibecoding can take someone - but it's this can of thing that gives the "absolutely no AI" crowd grounds to stand on.
[deleted]
Comment removed.
CursedSilicon
I wonder how long it'll take people like you breathlessly chanting "this is the future!" before the slop bots hoover that up into their training data like narcissistic poison
Tell the slop bot it's wrong about something and it just starts berating you "get used to it!" "I'm the future!"
dormento
> I wonder how long it'll take people like you breathlessly chanting "this is the future!" before the slop bots hoover that up into their training data like narcissistic poison
This is a real risk. The copyright washing machine is an average of our collective "spoken consciousness", and in turn it influences the way we express ourselves, then it ends up inside the next training slopdate. Real organic human reasoning will eventually be as valuable as low-alpha steel was for a long time, at least till the background levels drop. AI businesses are raiding libraries for "sunken knowledge", the similarity is uncanny.
echelon
The only slop is this anti-progess mindset that memetically propagates everywhere saying the same thing over and over.
People using AI are constantly showing off net new things to the world.
Antis are using the same arguments from 2022 and aren't showing us anything good or cool that they've done. They just complain.
Y'all need to do something worth talking about. This mindset you have is exhausting. Antis somehow find a way of entering every pro-AI conversation and breathing down our necks with hate and misery.
I don't like these bleak views and I don't want to interact with this kind of fist shaking and ground gazing while I'm trying to have a good time using all the new toys. This post was a celebration, and yet here we are again. Why even show up? What is so worth it to you to come in here and complain?
Let us reinvent the web. Let us cure cancer. And instead of chanting "slop" in every corner this is discussed, you can go to Matrix or Mastodon or live on a farm or cut the cords or something. Just don't dump on every single thing we do. You can sit this out on the sidelines.
This thread is about cool AI results - why are you even here? This is our celebration, not an open invitation to complain.
jonhohle
I’ve been working on decomp project for the past two years that was started three years before I joined. I stream and try to teach the skills four days a week on twitch and YouTube.
You know what people learn when they vibe code a decomp? How LLMs work.
If I come across a hacker news front page story, I want it to be something interesting about a topic. Seeing a topic I’m deeply familiar with actually be another vibe coding project is exhausting and click bait. I can’t learn anything more about what I was trying to learn about in the first place.
Publishing this on GitHub is actively harmful to the RE and decomp communities. Vibe coders don’t care and probably don’t even know. They haven’t talked to the EFF, read USPCO opinions on fair use, followed VGHF’s attempts to expand rights, or anything that will legally move the needle forward. They’re just dumping mountains of copyright infringement under terms previously associated with completely legal activity.
coffeesoda
This is totally fair, and I did learn a lot about agentic development which was my main goal (aside from playing F-Zero X on 3DS). I mean no harm to the community and my attempt is earnest. I learned a few things about the 3DS and N64 architectures and while it's cursory, it was still interesting.
As far as I could tell, this project was legitimately offering rendering techniques not yet used in N64 to 3DS ports, and I felt this documentation might be helpful.
I actually do care very much and would like to actively avoid harming the community. Any sort of resources out there to educate myself further would be appreciated.
jonhohle
Talk to the EFF or read what they’ve written, read USPCO opinions on fair use related to LLMs, read the petitions VGHF has made for supporting modern ways to play retro games; exactly what said in my original comment.
I do apologize however. I inferred from the repo that the decomp was done by LLM, but I’m glad to see it seems like an older, pre-LLM decomp.
I have mixed feelings about modern LLM implementations of older game SDKs, but generally support it. Though copyright and licensing there can be tricky as well. Caveat emptor.
echelon
You're not harming the community. Don't let these negative voices stop you.
CursedSilicon
You sure did provide a convincing counter-argument
msephton
Having read some of what this project had to do to fit 3DS, if you think “the only thing learned was how to use LLMs” then I don’t know what to say to you other than...are you sure about that?
echelon
You can still enjoy doing things the way you always did. Nothing is stopping you from continuing to enjoy your hobby.
I've wanted to do this but had no time to learn this arcane science. Life is simply too short.
This is opening the world up to more people. You shouldn't be mad at them for coming into your hobby.
People want this. They shouldn't have to do it the way you bless or anoint.
jonhohle
Decomp.dev shut down, Activision and others going after vibe coded mods chilling legitimate projects, destruction of clean room practices, lost time due to slop contributions of dubious legality.
Your perspective is like saying LLMs have had no impact on mathematicians. Or dirt bikes don’t have impact on hiking trails.
echelon
I don't think we're going to agree on this.
Electricity shut down hunting whales for oil, cars shut down horse whip makers, etc. That's just progress. Like shopping malls, Blockbuster, buffet restaurants -- everything has its time.
There are more games being decompiled now than ever before, and the leap in accessibility is tremendous. While this may dilute your community and its practices, and while it may look like an Eternal September, it is bringing orders of magnitude more people into the fold. And that's worth a lot more than you're giving it credit.
Math, science, bio, and certainly CS and software engineering are going to change. That's progress. Nothing should stay the same forever.
I'm happier to see the world morph into something exciting during my lifetime rather than have slow and modest progress up until I die. I feel a bit like the people who were born early enough to witness the Wright brothers and who ultimately lived to see people walk on the moon. I'm glad tech is doing something like that rather than just having decades of uninspiring incrementalism.
I'm sorry you don't share the same outlook, but I promise there's a silver lining in this if you look more closely.
People are going to get closer and closer to owning their technology. The value of code is plummeting, and that means that in time these claims over our software will erode to nothing.
I would focus your energy on making sure we have open weights parity with the foundation models. We need to have a seat at that table. That is the real threat to our freedom and future, not petty IP squabbles or software rights.
CursedSilicon
I don't know why pro AI people are so upset all the time
It's not like we're insulting your work
jonhohle
“Author” seems to be doing a lot of work. Probably not the right word to use for LLM wrangler.
orangedog
You're coming across as rather unkind in this thread and it does the project that you mentioned that you are working on a disservice.
jonhohle
Did the poster “write” this? What does the word author mean to you?
orangedog
The poster referred to themselves as the author. They created it, which is good enough for me.
aculver
Haven't had a chance to check the project out yet, but wanted to say I love the idea of having a section dedicated to your human-written thoughts. It's the best of both worlds, with as much detail as possible throughout, but also still getting to hear from you personally. Congrats!
coffeesoda
Thanks! As fun as the project is, the scope of it is not lost on me. I wanted it to serve as evidence of the frightening power these recent models have, and make it clear.
dpedu
How much did you know about N64 and 3DS development/internals before starting this project?
Amekedl
Multi player would be so dope, have multiple 3DS and friends willing to play
Tepix
For those who aren’t aware: The game was originally released on Nintendo 64 in 1998.
xeyownt
Yup.
Something that the bot overlord didn't even think to say in its superdense page intro.
That's the problem with AI-generated text. They have no idea of what proper context is.
ChrisRR
I guess for those who are interested in an F Zero X port you assume they already know what platform it was on.
If I ever talk about Ocarina of Time, I don't feel the need to specify what platform it was on, or now that I realise, that it was even a Zelda game
latexr
> I guess for those who are interested in an F Zero X port you assume they already know what platform it was on.
You assume wrong. I would be interested and I didn’t know by name what the platform was. I never played F-Zero but I’m familiar with it thanks to Super Smash Bros.
> If I ever talk about Ocarina of Time, I don't feel the need to specify what platform it was on
Considering there’s a remake with the same name on the Switch 2, you do need to specify.
rustyhancock
Really grateful the costs were included - just shy of 5K USD. Really out of morbid curiosity. And they estimate it was the equivalent of 250-400k for human work.
Just in case anybody get's scared by those numbers: A $20 Claude Pro subscription is worth around $1000 API tokens.
refactor_master
So it’s like paying $20 for a gym subscription but if you had just stayed there 24/7 paying hourly rates the whole month it would’ve cost $1000.
Except, nobody does that. So that’s not a real number.
jrmg
?
People regularly blow through all their Claude Pro tokens every week. It’s relatively easy to do.
coffeesoda
I spent $600. $200 a month for the last 3 months. Used for other projects too but this blew my token usage quite often.
daniel_rh
This is so cool! I've been working on trying to minimize the F-zero render loop to fit on gameboy and multiplayer over the link cable...it's been a journey. (I rushed the writeup cus of this article--still polishing the text), but give the game a try on the in-browser emulator: https://fireflyk64.github.io/makingfsub/
coffeesoda
This is really great, thank you for sharing. I may borrow this technique for a Playdate project in the future.
daniel_rh
I love that idea! Please let me know if it's of any help :-)
Since the Playdate doesn't have any of the sprite rendering hardware that made the gameboy both underpowered in compute and overpowered in graphics at the time, some of the tricks may be unnecessary.
I suppose you could do some kind of shift of a whole row of the framebuffer easily with a memmove sort of operation. The gameboy's shift registers and the per sprite drawing are what really made this both difficult and possible at such a slow CPU clock speed. The playdate CPU is about 40x faster than that on the gameboy, so probably all these kinds of tricks and more would work just fine.
I’m curious why people have started using the 3DS as the gateway device for ports of games, like Melee and F-Zero X.
Don’t get me wrong, the 3DS is a gem of a console, and it harks back to when Nintendo put more thought into what they released instead of just another Mario sports game; but since the Switch is so much more powerful, I’d expect ports to that be more of a priority.
Gigachad
Not sure why others are doing it, but the switch is kind of a boring console imo. You may as well just use one of the million PC handhelds with the same form factor, and persistent hacks require a hardware mod.
The 3DS is a fun pocketable form factor which a lot of people already own and easy to permanently mod on any firmware version or hardware revision.
BoorishBears
I'm surprised no one has mentioned online: most people don't want to risk console bans, and that immediately makes jailbreaking their Switch a non-starter
At this point most people getting a 3DS are probably doing so specifically to jailbreak it
circuit10
From what I understand if you take certain precautions like not doing piracy, installing anything to the homescreen or cheating in multiplayer games you can use homebrew online without being banned, I've been used it occasionally and not been banned at least
sunaookami
Most people use an EmuMMC to avoid bans. I think the bigger issue is that most Switch consoles need a hardmod.
coffeesoda
The 3DS has the novelty of 3D. I always wanted to play F-Zero in this form factor and it seemed like a reasonable port to accomplish.
cubefox
It seems to me that stereoscopic 3D is as much as "novelty" as is color. It's an objective improvement, because we perceive the real world in stereoscopic 3D. Of course the hardware implementation (not so much on the New 3DS) has various downsides, unlike color.
jamesrcole
I don't think color is that different. E.g. older computers had limited color palettes, like 16 color EGA.
cubefox
I'm saying that more colors are strictly better than fewer colors, not just a "gimmick", and that the same holds for stereoscopic 3D, modulo issues with implementing it in hardware via (auto)stereoscopic screens.
For example, if you play games on a virtual screen using a VR helmet, you pretty much always want the game to use stereoscopic 3D, because playing it without it would be strictly worse. (Okay, it would consume less GPU resources, which is good, but that would be the only difference, and this would also hold for things like lower resolution or frame rate.)
tempest_
I would guess the 3DS is far more "jailbroken" than the switch.
tourmalinetaco
It is. Any 3DS can be jailbroken with CFW with a simple Internet guide and no physical modifications. As far as I know, the Switch CFW is locked to only V1 motherboards or modchips, making it far less accessible even if it is more powerful.
prophesi
Jailbroken 3DS scene is usually for modding the console OS itself given how easy it is to run custom firmware. And for ports, and emulation. While the GBA has a pretty dedicated community for custom games and romhacks, people often create games for the platform at gamejams because of how great the dev tooling is. It's a bit lackluster on the 3DS, but I did find the Love Brew[0] framework to be really nice. Even has simulator support[1] for testing your builds locally, though fonts will look much different on real hardware, with likely a bunch of other gotchas. Running out of RAM being a big one.
edit: compared it to the GBA homebrew scene since it's a large dedicated community to derive pros and cons between the two from. Switch is still receiving updates from Nintendo to brick your system.
ivraatiems
The Switch is powerful enough it could just straight emulate an N64 game if it needed to. It has a huge back catalog of games where it does this. It's basically a computer on the level of a mobile phone or tablet, or a laptop from 15 years ago.
The 3DS is still a _console_, purpose built and limited in what it can do. It is also approachably easy to find a good one in working order, and still has the vibe of a retro console.
Also, for fun, I suspect.
shoobiedoo
The N64 dev scene seems to be taking off too. If I had to guess, working around limitations in hardware are the fun part for a lot of people.
ChrisRR
I think there's currently a lot of nostalgia of the 3DS as the console people have grown up with. And the device has a good homebrew community around it, and is more interesting than something like the switch can definitely run it with enough horsepower
p1necone
One non-obvious reason might be that it's the only handheld console with a natively 240p height screen. This means all the 2d ui elements will remain crisp at the same size as they would be on original hardware.
Tepix
The PS Vita has a sweet 960x544 OLED
ChrisRR
They mean because the game originally ran at 320x240 of N64, so no scaling of 2d assets is required
Revisional_Sin
The 3DS has software jailbreaks, but the Switch requires a modchip to be soldered in.
I imagine that's a big part of it.
ndesaulniers
This is cool!
I had been working on getting claude to port Super Metroid to the Gameboy Advance. Was mostly curious if the GBA could run it at full speed. Looks like, yes!
Cool. I wanted to let Claude port Zelda Link's Awakening DX from the GBC to the NES. That's a bit of the opposite problem to yours: for Zelda the target resolution is higher than the source, so the backgrounds have to be expanded or (not ideal) a border added.
neuroelectron
Amazing. I hope I can get around to testing it out and making a video.
Gigachad
The costings here are based on API pricing, but my understanding is that no one is paying the API pricing and everyone uses the subscription pricing, or even multiple accounts with a subscription each. I'd be interested to know the actual cost incurred here.
Yahivin
I’ve found that subscription is ~98% cheaper than API pricing.
grumbel
On the stuff I have done (mostly Opus5.5) it came out at around 1/20 the cost, 95%. So a $20 subscription is around $1000 API. Somewhere in that ballpark.
ivraatiems
I think the API pricing is a good proxy for "what was the actual physical cost of doing this," but even if you increase it from 5k to 30k or even 100k, it's a huge savings over getting a human to do it, AND it was faster.
I don't think the productivity gains from AI can be ignored for contexts like this. It's what they're best at.
I just hope it goes to good uses (more ports of fun games, more interoperability and opennesS) instead of bad ones (firing humans instead of retasking them), and that hope feels faint.
coffeesoda
Yep, I agree. Further in the notes it's mentioned this probably would've taken a handful of Senior Engineers anywhere from 6 months to 2 years. The range of budget on the project is like $200 to $500k. This was done for peanuts in my spare time. I share both your optimism and pessimism, depending on the day, lol.
starkparker
> This was done for peanuts
If you don't have a real dollar cost then can you tell us how much it actually cost in peanuts?
The_Blade
$20 can buy many peanuts
theYipster
explanation: money can be exchanged for goods and services.
Gigachad
In no way am I suggesting that doing this without AI would be more practical. What I want to know is roughly how much is Anthropic subsidizing this stuff through the subscriptions currently and how much we can expect the real price paid to go up in the future.
ivraatiems
Right, that's why the API pricing is a better metric than subscription pricing. It's probably still subsidized but not as much.
bakugo
> it's a huge savings over getting a human to do it
This of course assumes it's something anyone would consider worth paying a human to do (it's not).
ivraatiems
That's not true, companies pay humanies to develop ports and remasters of software all the time. Maybe not from one dead platform to another, but the same technology can be used to take a game like this from a dead platform to a living one.
coffeesoda
It was, 15+ years ago, when porting N64 games to 3DS was a lucrative market for hired guns. We have the magic 'port' button and this tech just showed how easy it is with severely different architectures & constraints.
matthewfcarlson
I’m almost done with a port of two games from the original Xbox to modern platforms. While having a good background in assembly and understand of why x87 is problematic and SSE makes life a little easier to understand what it’s doing. And I’ve offered a few suggestions that I thought were useful but it’s been shockingly hands off
kingofspain
Well this is interesting to see. I was thinking of porting my game to 3DS which is based on my memories of playing F-Zero X (mainly trying to make it as fast as possible!)
Now I’ll have to do it and see how they compare. I purposefully avoided playing it again during development so it’ll be most curious.
sara_kumodeck
how are u planning to handle netcode for online muktiplayer on the 3ds?
coffeesoda
It's already done. The race sim is fully deterministic so the consoles exchange controller inputs and run off the same seed. It uses the underlying VS. mode for the scaffolding but changes the screen render to full for each player.
VCFundedGenYer
AI slop port. The gaming world doesn't need any more of these.
peggigulgow
The 3DS fillrate budget is the interesting constraint here. F-Zero X was already doing a lot with the N64 T&L pipeline; mapping that onto a tiled GPU without dropping the 60fps target is the part I'd want more numbers on.
coffeesoda
Good instinct, the bottleneck is on the CPU side though. The PICA200 is an immediate-mode GPU not a tiler.
Other F-Zero X ports feed the N64 display lists to an interpreter, command by command, with the T&L on CPU. Pre-v1.0 of this port took that approach but did some double buffering on another CPU core.
When porting to Old 3DS, that other core wasn't an option, so we had to make better batch calls to the GPU. It ended up being that now we walk that list the first time and group triangles that share the same material, and moved the position & rotation transformations to the GPU too.
Rather than creating the mesh for tracks out of the spline on the fly, it also precomputes at the start of the race.
I'm fairly certain this is a pretty novel implementation for a N64 to 3DS port.
Most of these optimizations are just for race elements, which is why some of the menus are still pretty laggy.
TuxSH
> Good instinct, the bottleneck is on the CPU side though.
Have you, or rather your agents, tried to identify which CPU functions were the bottlenecks (e.g. in citro3d, perhaps)?
I find it surprising that your stuff is CPU bound. Are you doing one command-list submission for _both_ eyes (with one drawcall for each)? This should be relatively simple, only require viewproj matrix changes and avoid CPU<>GPU roundtrips.
If not, you are going to hit IRQ dispatching costs as well as shardmem dispatching costs as well as other costs.
coffeesoda
Bypassing Citro3D for raw PICA200 commands cut our per-draw CPU cost by 15x (11 µs to 0.7 µs). After that, there's no single hot function left.
The remaining bottleneck is the o3DS instruction cache. Our code is bigger than the 16KB L1, so the CPU spends a big chunk each frame waiting on instruction fetches.
We build the list for left eye, submit, and then re-submit the list offset for the right. Hadn't tried chaining both into one submission, it improved performance. Thanks so much for the suggestion!
Thanks for taking a look and the great questions. I really appreciate your contributions to the scene.
[deleted]
Comment removed.
pizzathyme
we are going to find out very soon
[deleted]
Comment removed.
qwerpy
Not sure why online forums attract this kind of permanently grumpy person whose only contributions are complaints and nitpicks and snark, but I’m happy to shame, downvote, and flag them every time.
woozlewuzzle
I've noticed social media in general tends to be filled with posts by people like this.
I'm guessing well-adjusted level headed people are off doing more productive things.
yoz-y
I am doing a lot of LLM writing and porting; and am still calling it slop. Even though it saves me a bunch of time at work and in hobby coding.
opan
Is there a reason you've decided the current Web belongs to the pro-AI crowd? Why can't they start their own community of only AI lovers and leave the Web as it was? I hear lobste.rs has changed course on their AI stance, removing the relevant tags and deleting anti-AI comments recently. Compared to HN then I would think lobste.rs is like a safe haven for AI projects.
64dd on original 3DS
Local & Online Multiplayer
QR Code sharing for Custom Courses
I hope ya'll check out the authors notes, post-morterm, and give it a try on your 3DS.
The technical notes are dense and interesting in their own right, but I don't expect anyone not already familiar with the N64 to 3DS port scene to care.
Do you not see what you're doing? How do you know they don't think about things? You're attacking with unfounded accusations, and it's incredibly uncivil.
Why are you in this AI thread spewing hate?
Think about it a second.
This is an AI thread.
You do not have to be here.
One striking example is "No debugger, no stdout" which is baffling considering I implemented a GDB stub in the very first version of Rosalina which I released like... 10 years ago?
Stdout redirection is supported by both 3dslink and GDB stuff on 3ds, too.
I don't mean to be a party pooper - and the projects fullfills its role as a showcase of how far pure vibecoding can take someone - but it's this can of thing that gives the "absolutely no AI" crowd grounds to stand on.
Tell the slop bot it's wrong about something and it just starts berating you "get used to it!" "I'm the future!"
This is a real risk. The copyright washing machine is an average of our collective "spoken consciousness", and in turn it influences the way we express ourselves, then it ends up inside the next training slopdate. Real organic human reasoning will eventually be as valuable as low-alpha steel was for a long time, at least till the background levels drop. AI businesses are raiding libraries for "sunken knowledge", the similarity is uncanny.
People using AI are constantly showing off net new things to the world.
Antis are using the same arguments from 2022 and aren't showing us anything good or cool that they've done. They just complain.
Y'all need to do something worth talking about. This mindset you have is exhausting. Antis somehow find a way of entering every pro-AI conversation and breathing down our necks with hate and misery.
I don't like these bleak views and I don't want to interact with this kind of fist shaking and ground gazing while I'm trying to have a good time using all the new toys. This post was a celebration, and yet here we are again. Why even show up? What is so worth it to you to come in here and complain?
Let us reinvent the web. Let us cure cancer. And instead of chanting "slop" in every corner this is discussed, you can go to Matrix or Mastodon or live on a farm or cut the cords or something. Just don't dump on every single thing we do. You can sit this out on the sidelines.
This thread is about cool AI results - why are you even here? This is our celebration, not an open invitation to complain.
You know what people learn when they vibe code a decomp? How LLMs work.
If I come across a hacker news front page story, I want it to be something interesting about a topic. Seeing a topic I’m deeply familiar with actually be another vibe coding project is exhausting and click bait. I can’t learn anything more about what I was trying to learn about in the first place.
Publishing this on GitHub is actively harmful to the RE and decomp communities. Vibe coders don’t care and probably don’t even know. They haven’t talked to the EFF, read USPCO opinions on fair use, followed VGHF’s attempts to expand rights, or anything that will legally move the needle forward. They’re just dumping mountains of copyright infringement under terms previously associated with completely legal activity.
As far as I could tell, this project was legitimately offering rendering techniques not yet used in N64 to 3DS ports, and I felt this documentation might be helpful.
I actually do care very much and would like to actively avoid harming the community. Any sort of resources out there to educate myself further would be appreciated.
I do apologize however. I inferred from the repo that the decomp was done by LLM, but I’m glad to see it seems like an older, pre-LLM decomp.
I have mixed feelings about modern LLM implementations of older game SDKs, but generally support it. Though copyright and licensing there can be tricky as well. Caveat emptor.
I've wanted to do this but had no time to learn this arcane science. Life is simply too short.
This is opening the world up to more people. You shouldn't be mad at them for coming into your hobby.
People want this. They shouldn't have to do it the way you bless or anoint.
Your perspective is like saying LLMs have had no impact on mathematicians. Or dirt bikes don’t have impact on hiking trails.
Electricity shut down hunting whales for oil, cars shut down horse whip makers, etc. That's just progress. Like shopping malls, Blockbuster, buffet restaurants -- everything has its time.
There are more games being decompiled now than ever before, and the leap in accessibility is tremendous. While this may dilute your community and its practices, and while it may look like an Eternal September, it is bringing orders of magnitude more people into the fold. And that's worth a lot more than you're giving it credit.
Math, science, bio, and certainly CS and software engineering are going to change. That's progress. Nothing should stay the same forever.
I'm happier to see the world morph into something exciting during my lifetime rather than have slow and modest progress up until I die. I feel a bit like the people who were born early enough to witness the Wright brothers and who ultimately lived to see people walk on the moon. I'm glad tech is doing something like that rather than just having decades of uninspiring incrementalism.
I'm sorry you don't share the same outlook, but I promise there's a silver lining in this if you look more closely.
People are going to get closer and closer to owning their technology. The value of code is plummeting, and that means that in time these claims over our software will erode to nothing.
I would focus your energy on making sure we have open weights parity with the foundation models. We need to have a seat at that table. That is the real threat to our freedom and future, not petty IP squabbles or software rights.
It's not like we're insulting your work
Something that the bot overlord didn't even think to say in its superdense page intro.
That's the problem with AI-generated text. They have no idea of what proper context is.
If I ever talk about Ocarina of Time, I don't feel the need to specify what platform it was on, or now that I realise, that it was even a Zelda game
You assume wrong. I would be interested and I didn’t know by name what the platform was. I never played F-Zero but I’m familiar with it thanks to Super Smash Bros.
> If I ever talk about Ocarina of Time, I don't feel the need to specify what platform it was on
Considering there’s a remake with the same name on the Switch 2, you do need to specify.
https://hypnotize.works/gdx-3ds/postmortem/cost.html
Except, nobody does that. So that’s not a real number.
People regularly blow through all their Claude Pro tokens every week. It’s relatively easy to do.
Since the Playdate doesn't have any of the sprite rendering hardware that made the gameboy both underpowered in compute and overpowered in graphics at the time, some of the tricks may be unnecessary.
I suppose you could do some kind of shift of a whole row of the framebuffer easily with a memmove sort of operation. The gameboy's shift registers and the per sprite drawing are what really made this both difficult and possible at such a slow CPU clock speed. The playdate CPU is about 40x faster than that on the gameboy, so probably all these kinds of tricks and more would work just fine.
Don’t get me wrong, the 3DS is a gem of a console, and it harks back to when Nintendo put more thought into what they released instead of just another Mario sports game; but since the Switch is so much more powerful, I’d expect ports to that be more of a priority.
The 3DS is a fun pocketable form factor which a lot of people already own and easy to permanently mod on any firmware version or hardware revision.
At this point most people getting a 3DS are probably doing so specifically to jailbreak it
For example, if you play games on a virtual screen using a VR helmet, you pretty much always want the game to use stereoscopic 3D, because playing it without it would be strictly worse. (Okay, it would consume less GPU resources, which is good, but that would be the only difference, and this would also hold for things like lower resolution or frame rate.)
[0] https://lovebrew.org/
[1] https://github.com/lovebrew/nest
edit: compared it to the GBA homebrew scene since it's a large dedicated community to derive pros and cons between the two from. Switch is still receiving updates from Nintendo to brick your system.
The 3DS is still a _console_, purpose built and limited in what it can do. It is also approachably easy to find a good one in working order, and still has the vibe of a retro console.
Also, for fun, I suspect.
I imagine that's a big part of it.
I had been working on getting claude to port Super Metroid to the Gameboy Advance. Was mostly curious if the GBA could run it at full speed. Looks like, yes!
https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/sm/tree/gba-port
I don't think the productivity gains from AI can be ignored for contexts like this. It's what they're best at.
I just hope it goes to good uses (more ports of fun games, more interoperability and opennesS) instead of bad ones (firing humans instead of retasking them), and that hope feels faint.
If you don't have a real dollar cost then can you tell us how much it actually cost in peanuts?
This of course assumes it's something anyone would consider worth paying a human to do (it's not).
Now I’ll have to do it and see how they compare. I purposefully avoided playing it again during development so it’ll be most curious.
Other F-Zero X ports feed the N64 display lists to an interpreter, command by command, with the T&L on CPU. Pre-v1.0 of this port took that approach but did some double buffering on another CPU core.
When porting to Old 3DS, that other core wasn't an option, so we had to make better batch calls to the GPU. It ended up being that now we walk that list the first time and group triangles that share the same material, and moved the position & rotation transformations to the GPU too.
Rather than creating the mesh for tracks out of the spline on the fly, it also precomputes at the start of the race.
I'm fairly certain this is a pretty novel implementation for a N64 to 3DS port.
Most of these optimizations are just for race elements, which is why some of the menus are still pretty laggy.
Have you, or rather your agents, tried to identify which CPU functions were the bottlenecks (e.g. in citro3d, perhaps)?
I find it surprising that your stuff is CPU bound. Are you doing one command-list submission for _both_ eyes (with one drawcall for each)? This should be relatively simple, only require viewproj matrix changes and avoid CPU<>GPU roundtrips.
If not, you are going to hit IRQ dispatching costs as well as shardmem dispatching costs as well as other costs.
The remaining bottleneck is the o3DS instruction cache. Our code is bigger than the 16KB L1, so the CPU spends a big chunk each frame waiting on instruction fetches.
We build the list for left eye, submit, and then re-submit the list offset for the right. Hadn't tried chaining both into one submission, it improved performance. Thanks so much for the suggestion!
Thanks for taking a look and the great questions. I really appreciate your contributions to the scene.
I'm guessing well-adjusted level headed people are off doing more productive things.