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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

This seems like an incredibly specific demo. Even they say that it doesn't work with games that aren't mario kart.

Unlike the NES which has only a few ways to layout the display, which the 3D NES emulator relies on to get good results, the DS can do arbitrary 3D stuff. It also has no API layer to reliably extract the camera information to generalize this kind of re-projection.

Neat looking trick but its sort of a dead end. It requires hand written code for any game you would want to do. I'm also curious about the rendering artifacts visible in the demo.

The DS is very much the wrong choice for this. They should try something similar with Dolphin and gamecube games, because the community there already does some stuff with camera manipulation.

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There is a fork of Dolphin for VR. I played a few minutes of Zelda with my Oculus on several years ago. Pretty trippy to be transported to a game I enjoyed on a CRT 22 years ago, with a life-scale Link staring me in the face, 3 feet away.

This reminds me that there seem to be few "VR ports" or "cross platform VR releases" of normal games. I guess the gameplay of standard games doesn't necessarily work very well with the inherent limitations of VR. (E.g. nausea from moving around too much)

The nausea thing is quite a dealbreaker.

If someone had told me ~15years ago that one day I'd have the ability to play a VR version of Super Mario Galaxy, but that, when that time came, I wouldn't even bother to try and play it, I'd have (1) had a hard time believing it, and (2) assumed that future gaming must be godlike, in order to make me not bother with SMG VR.

But the reality of it, is so much more human and boring.

That is, I know from playing far-more-tame 3d motion games in VR, that it actively sucks as much as it rules. The eyes are saying Wow, and the rest of the body is saying No thanks, in a way not experienced before++. As such, when I heard of Dolphin VR last year, I didn't even dream of using it. Even the mere thought of trying to do SMG levels in VR is intimidating.

++I grew up loving roller coasters, and was the only local kid that never got sick on rough boats, but this, this is something else.

I still think the Metroid Prime games would work well in VR, giving you more depth perception, situational awareness, and ability to look around than the original 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios did.

I own a Quest 2 and I very rarely use it. I don't experience any nausea, it just hurts my face. :(

The NES also had many games with specific chips inside the cartridge, so I guess it is not too unusual for emulators to have game specific code.

There's way fewer NES mappers than there are DS games. It's 30ish vs hundreds. On an NES emulator, coding up just a few mapper chips gets you most of the library and probably 95% of the games worth playing, whereas with this, you need to write a "camera and 3D asset exporter" for each and every title you want to emulate. The work to give this effect to any game is nontrivial. Honestly interacting with the AR library and headset is probably the EASIEST part of this demo.

> It also has no API layer to reliably extract the camera information to generalize this kind of re-projection.

What do you mean?

Why do you have to be so negative about it? The README itself says it's a "prototype/concept". It's a neat hack, certainly the best thing I've seen on this website today. You make entirely valid technical points, but you don't have to present them as if you were scrutinizing someone's startup pitch. It's not that.

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