64dd on original 3DS
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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.
Tell the slop bot it's wrong about something and it just starts berating you "get used to it!" "I'm the future!"
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.
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
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.
[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.
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).
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 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!
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.
Screw that word.
This took effort.
I don't want to share the internet with this bombastic negativity.
I wish anti-AI folks would find usenet or something and leave us to reinventing the web back into a magical place.
This is the Web 1.0 Wild West again. And it's beautiful.
I'm guessing well-adjusted level headed people are off doing more productive things.