Zelda: Majora's Mask is now a native PC game, and every N64 title could follow | Hacker News Reader

Zelda: Majora's Mask is now a native PC game, and every N64 title could follow

theverge.com

27 pointslatexr29 comments

> I just double-clicked an EXE file on my Windows laptop, told the app where to find a Majora’s Mask ROM file, and was immediately playing a copy of the game

I'm not sure I see the practical distinction compared to using an emulator?

It's the difference between running the game in a virtual machine and running the game natively

Right.

But, to the average person playing the game, what is the practical difference?

None, right?

Theoretically better performance when running native (higher fps, etc).

Really the main draw is that the native version is more amenable to modding.

So, no, no real practical difference.

> Really the main draw is that the native version is more amenable to modding.

Why on earth should that be true?

Because... it's easier to hack on C source code than on the assembly language of an old esoteric CPU that no one uses (64-bit NEC VR4300)?

LOL. I dare you to pull up that decompiled C code and tell me to my face it's nicer than 64-bit NEC VR4300 assembly.

Even if the C is ugly, just the fact I can use gcc + ide of choice for editing is already loads better than using a hex editor on a rom file or having to build up or hunt down custom n64 tooling.

I think you and I are just going to have to agree to disagree about the meaning of the phrase "loads better".

Are you well established in the N64 modding/emulation community? If so, I apologize. Otherwise I'm just assuming you are an armchair expert with a particularly strong opinion about this for some reason.

I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree here, friend.

You take care now.

higher fps is enough for me. i slogged through the 20 fps originals painfully just to see the story

actually enjoying the gameplay now

Nearly every N64 emulator will let you run at an unlimited frame rate.

There is almost no performance difference between an emulated and the recompiled version.

You are thinking from gaming PC centric perspective. The article says "their tool works by statically recompiling N64 binaries into C code that can then be compiled into native apps for any platform".

N64 emulators have poor performance on things like raspberry pi or anbernic handhelds which have ARM64 chips in them. This would allow you to natively compile an N64 game to ARM64 to get better performance on less powerful but more portable devices.

No, it won't. These games are bottle-necked by their GPU, not their CPU.

Afaik this is a decompilation and recompilation, which means there should be non-trivial performance increases over running it in an emulator, which will be important for people with non-high-end machines (the majority of the population)

No, not really. It's less a decompilation and more a specialization of a dynamic recompiling (JIT) emulator w/ this specific ROM - the performance increase is dramatically less than a true emulation would be. For example, an "add" instruction gets compiled down to something like 4 x64 instructions - fetch the input registers from the CPU context (in memory), do the actual add, store the result. A real recompilation would be one x64 instruction and no memory accesses.

In this specific implementation, from what I can see looking at the generated assembly, the C compiler's optimization options are further limited because they don't pass the CPU context around as a restrict *, so aliasing concerns often require the compiler to emit real memory reads/writes for every memory access, and prevent many other optimizations too. (Even something like QEMU TCG isn't much worse than this - TCG can and will, IIRC, quite happily yoink target (MIPS) registers into CPU registers for an entire TB (slightly broader than a basic block), it only needs to spill them back to the CPU context at the end of a TB.)

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40366204

Tool to statically recompile N64 games into native executables

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40325531

There is a nice Digital Foundry video about the Zelda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1wlTOvn2y0

> To be clear, these recompiled N64 apps do not include the game itself, which is part of their charm — while protective Nintendo lawyers might argue they encourage piracy, they do not redistribute the ROM files you’d need to actually play the copyrighted Nintendo works.

But you don't need the ROM files to actually play the (c) works. You are now playing a translation of those files that remains (c) Nintendo.

This will not end well.

> They make a distribution that lets you play the copyright works without the ROMs.

I understood the opposite: They make a distribution that will not let you play the copyrighted works unless you have the ROMs.

I saw only that it asks for the ROMs. Perhaps I'm being overly sceptical, but I don't see anything saying it actually requires the ROMs. And that ask will be easily circumvented.

It explicitly says that you do need the ROMs, though. The software is all original and it extracts resources from the ROMs. It's useless otherwise, you can't use these to play SM64, OOT, or MM on PC without also obtaining the ROMs.

> The software is all original and it extracts resources from the ROMs.

I missed that. Where does this article say that?

Second paragraph:

> told the app where to find a Majora’s Mask ROM file

That's not "software is all original" or "extracts resources from the ROMs".

to be fair that would also cover verifying the ROM file with a checksum. It might not read any assets.

I too suspect that's all it does. But we'll see.

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