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This is, of course, cool. No doubt. I have an EverDrive 64 and I’ll probably test this out later today or tomorrow. I am skeptical that this would be the prefe

This is, of course, cool. No doubt. I have an EverDrive 64 and I’ll probably test this out later today or tomorrow. I am skeptical that this would be the preferred way to port emulators or graphical games. You’re not getting a budget SGI workstation out of this, because the OS kernel itself is only a small part. The N64 is built around a chip called the Reality Control Processor, or RCP. This contains the RSP, stripped-down MIPS CPU core with a fixed-point SIMD vector unit, and the RDP, a rasterization engine that does simple trilinear texture interpolation and color blending. This is the hard part of programming the N64, and it’s not something that’s addressed by swapping out the OS kernel. There are… a number of major challenges you will still have to face if you want to make homebrew software for the N64, unless you are okay with just having something on the CPU and writing to the framebuffer.

naikrovek 6y ago
I don't think anyone is claiming that the N64 is finally unleashed with this, or anything. It will knock down an entry barrier for some people, though, and there's no harm in that at all.
- dietrichepp 6y ago
  > I don't think anyone is claiming that the N64 is finally unleashed with this, or anything. Just trying to temper people’s expectations. > It will knock down an entry barrier for some people, though, and there's no harm in that at all. To be honest—I don’t think this is lowering the barrier of entry to N64 development much. Those are the expectations I’m trying to temper here. If you want to develop for N64, you’re going to go through a lot of fuss getting an EverDrive 64 or a similar alternative, setting up an accurate emulator like CEN64 (the popular emulators are not suitable for development), getting toolchains running on your development system, etc. I think some people have equated “Linux has been ported to system X” as “development for system X is now solved”, when Linux is only a small part of the solution, and for smaller systems (like the N64, which has only 4 MB RAM base), Linux is probably not your kernel of choice anyway. The Nintendo 64 development scene would definitely benefit from more people pitching in and doing tools development. This is a good time to do it, there are a lot of gaps ready to be filled, and the number of people doing N64 development has increased quite a bit over the past couple years.
yellowapple 6y ago
> This is the hard part of programming the N64, and it’s not something that’s addressed by swapping out the OS kernel. On the other hand , this might massively improve the turnaround time on RSP programming (which is something I've actively been trying to learn), since it'll be that much easier to edit and run microcode without having to bake entirely-new ROMs in the process: I'd just need a serial console (or even a framebuffer console on top of whatever the RSP's rendering) and an assembler (or, at the very least, something to turn hexadecimal input into binary data to DMA over - we're only talking 4K each of code and data here, after all).

naikrovek 6y ago

I don't think anyone is claiming that the N64 is finally unleashed with this, or anything. It will knock down an entry barrier for some people, though, and there's no harm in that at all.

dietrichepp 6y ago
> I don't think anyone is claiming that the N64 is finally unleashed with this, or anything. Just trying to temper people’s expectations. > It will knock down an entry barrier for some people, though, and there's no harm in that at all. To be honest—I don’t think this is lowering the barrier of entry to N64 development much. Those are the expectations I’m trying to temper here. If you want to develop for N64, you’re going to go through a lot of fuss getting an EverDrive 64 or a similar alternative, setting up an accurate emulator like CEN64 (the popular emulators are not suitable for development), getting toolchains running on your development system, etc. I think some people have equated “Linux has been ported to system X” as “development for system X is now solved”, when Linux is only a small part of the solution, and for smaller systems (like the N64, which has only 4 MB RAM base), Linux is probably not your kernel of choice anyway. The Nintendo 64 development scene would definitely benefit from more people pitching in and doing tools development. This is a good time to do it, there are a lot of gaps ready to be filled, and the number of people doing N64 development has increased quite a bit over the past couple years.

yellowapple 6y ago

> This is the hard part of programming the N64, and it’s not something that’s addressed by swapping out the OS kernel. On the other hand , this might massively improve the turnaround time on RSP programming (which is something I've actively been trying to learn), since it'll be that much easier to edit and run microcode without having to bake entirely-new ROMs in the process: I'd just need a serial console (or even a framebuffer console on top of whatever the RSP's rendering) and an assembler (or, at the very least, something to turn hexadecimal input into binary data to DMA over - we're only talking 4K each of code and data here, after all).