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Comment by soulbadguy | Hacker News Reader

Naive question : how did we get access to the source ? Is that from a disassembler or did the source code leaks at some points

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From what I understand he used Mario 64 decomp code.

The game was reverse engineered as 1-1 compilable to the original rom.

[1]:https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64

Fun fact: The people who did this moved on to Zelda 64 Ocarina of time and recently completed that project as well

[2]:https://zelda64.dev/

There are ongoing projects by other people for Mario Kart 64, Goldeneye, Perfect-Dark, Banjo-Kazooie and others although I think the next target for completion may probably be either Majora's Mask or The Minish Cap.

A 30+ FPS Perfect Dark would be amazing. The RAM extension pack wasn't enough for that game. The AI was pretty good IIRC (although definitely went in loops). Had lots of fun playing 1 vs 11 medium difficulty. I miss throwing N-bomb grenades.

PD will definitely be the next game to be fully (or near enough) decompiled. The dev behind that one is great.

If you're bored, his write up on the "Challenge 7 Bug" is great read: https://gitlab.com/ryandwyer/perfect-dark/-/blob/master/docs...

Thank you. I was honestly thinking the Minish cap would be done (why I don't know). It sits at 89% complete while PD is at ~74% but I guess I am not drilling into what is actually left in each project. I CAN'T wait to see what will be done with the PD source code!

What is "SH" region mentioned in [1]?

https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64/blob/master/Makefile#L34

An updated version that was released later

IIRC from an earlier read about this, the code is from a disassembler.

Why wouldn't Nintendo release the source, considering they're is little commercial value in this particular game now?

Nintendo, like many other Japanese companies, are very protective of their IP.

That assumes they even still have it. Not sure about Nintendo in particular, but many other games of the era are known to have lost source code.

Nintendo did (supposedly) use an emulator for the N64 games in Nintendo Online (for the Switch); so it's possible that they don't have the source (or maybe it had enough machine-specific code that doing a source port would be more effort).

Of course, if they can re-sell it as a subscription service they probably would want to avoid releasing the source anyway…

Nintendo is still selling Mario 64 in various ways. You can buy it in "Super Mario 3D All Stars" for $60 on the Switch.

Virtual Console (or whatever Nintendo calls it now) releases mean that the game can be a moneymaker decades past the end of retail sales. You also see this with MS-DOS games, sometimes modders will voluntarily stop making their fan patches if an official rerelease makes it to Steam.

The code is not from a disassembler. The developers of the sm64 disassembly project used a disassembler to look at the machine instruction output of the game’s functions, and then wrote their own implementation in C that results in the same output.

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