7 ms·

GoldenEye (N64) has a fully-functional ZX Spectrum 48x emulator built into it.

241 points by emillon 15y ago

leoh 15y ago
Looks like the server is busy with requests. Here's a cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.therwp.com/forums/showthread.php%3Ft=48139&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
kranner 15y ago
Very nice, but do they mean ZX Spectrum 48K? I've never heard of a 48x.
- ertdfgcb 15y ago
  Yeah, it looks like a typo. A Google search for "ZX Spectrum 48x" shows this article as the top result, and the Wikipedia page only lists the 48k and 16k.
gazrogers 15y ago
Excellent! Now all I need is an N64 emulator...
- rbanffy 15y ago
  For the ZX Spectrum! ;-)
- bandy 15y ago
  The N64 is inexpensive enough and readily available at secondhand shops. I got mine so I could play Road Rash 64 - in my experience, the best version ever, having played all of the RR titles.
  - joelhaus 15y ago
    Or you can try this app, which Google appears to have removed today (cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fplay.google.com%2Fstore%2Fapps%2Fdetails%3Fid%3Dcom.emudev.n64 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3...) -- installed it, but haven't tried it yet... here's a backup of the .apk from my phone: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32510284/N64%20Player%28Free%20N64%20Emulator%29-15.apk http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32510284/N64%20Player%28Free%20N64%2... It's also hosted on Github: https://github.com/emudeveloper/N64-Player--Mupen64plus- https://github.com/emudeveloper/N64-Player--Mupen64plus-
polshaw 15y ago
Neat. Jetpac actually shipped as a playable sub-game in Donkey Kong 64, so I guess this emulator was ultimately used there.
- coroxout 15y ago
  I remember a friend being excited before Donkey Kong 64's release because he'd heard about the Jetpac sub-game - I wonder if he already had Goldeneye... I just felt old on realising that the N64, which I remember reading previews of in Edge magazine, is as old now as the 48k Spectrum (treasured artefact of my childhood) was when the N64 came out. It helps a little that I didn't see an N64 in action until 3 years after its Japanese release.
  - vidarh 15y ago
    The N64 is actually the only console I've ever played... I had a Commodore 64 and then Amiga all they way through the "early console years", and only played some N64 stuff because a house mate bought one. Then I sort of fell out of gaming apart from a bit of simulation and strategy games... Getting tempted again these days when I see how far they've gotten. With a young son taking up my time I suspect it'll be him that'll be the excuse...
- ayuvar 15y ago
  Later on in the linked thread, the original poster seems to indicate that it doesn't appear to be the same emulator - or at least that the big chunk of code for the controller mapping isn't retained in Donkey Kong 64. Perhaps they did a quick port or trimmed the emulator to fit the requirements of that specific game.
earbitscom 15y ago
This was the greatest video game ever made.
- Torn 15y ago
  Was? Until what?
  - Graham24 15y ago
    elite?
  - freehunter 15y ago
    Perfect Dark, which was basically the same game but with updated graphics and an alien plotline.
    - oinksoft 15y ago
      That game always seemed like a choppy, blurry GoldenEye to me.
      - davidwtbuxton 15y ago
        Perfect Dark benefited greatly from the N64 expansion pack, and was a lot less fun without it. I'm not certain it was better than Golden Eye (mostly because I found the second level very frustrating) but it had better graphics and a much more ambitious style of play.
- molsongolden 15y ago
  Watching your arms float around disjointedly as you run is the best part, or taking 25 sniper shots to kill a guard. I went from playing MW3 one morning to Goldeneye in the afternoon and it was mindblowing.
  - TillE 15y ago
    I spent plenty of time playing GoldenEye; it was a good game. But the hyperbole surrounding it on the internet is unbelievable. It was released in August 1997. Even if you only care about the first-person shooter genre, Duke Nukem 3D had already been out for over a year, and it was a much more sophisticated game.
Permit 15y ago
Looks like a video of this in use can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONJtqf2lIIM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONJtqf2lIIM
sycren 15y ago
I remember the legality of emulators being rather spotty until this ruling was made: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nintendo_of_America,_Inc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nint.... Since Nintendo are against emulators: http://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp#emulator http://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp#emulator I wonder what they think about the ZX Spectrum emulator and the roms that it contains that the player did not specifically buy..
- jamesu 15y ago
  With the exception of the "Monitor Program" (which "was not supposed to be included"), the games included were all developed by Tim and Chris Stamper, co-founders of Rare. Provided they own their own IP, i don't see how this could be a problem.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- strags 15y ago
  Even the "monitor program" - ie. the Spectrum 16KB ROM image is probably ok: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/permits/amstrad-roms.txt http://www.worldofspectrum.org/permits/amstrad-roms.txt 1) What exactly do you have to do to use Sinclair ROMs in an emulator, such as acknowledgements etc?" "Amstrad are happy for emulator writers to include images of our copyrighted code as long as the (c)opyright messages are not altered and we appreciate it if the program/manual includes a note to the effect that "Amstrad have kindly given their permission for the redistribution of their copyrighted material but retain that copyright"."
intsunny 15y ago
Hrrm, being that cartridge space is absolutely premium, and the size of the games affected their profitability, I wonder if this code was left in there with the space trade off of other features. (Golden Eye was a 96 megabit/12 megabyte cartridge.)
- smackfu 15y ago
  My guess is that it was just a screw-up, and cost them $x0,000 over all the cartridges.
  - vshade 15y ago
    The cartridges have a fixed size, so if the game was made to fit in a bit less than 12MB but more than 8MB(or 10MB I didn't lookup the size of rom chips) then the cartridge would cost the same
- ayuvar 15y ago
  GoldenEye has a surprising amount of stuff "left over" on the cartridge (levels, meshes, weapons, scripts) which people have been digging out for years: http://tcrf.net/Goldeneye_007 http://tcrf.net/Goldeneye_007 It would be really interesting to know about the environment that generated something like that. Time was probably at a much bigger premium than cartridge space while it was under development, as I don't remember hearing that later Rare games had quite so much left over in them.
strags 15y ago
I wrote a NES emulator for ExciteBike 64, so that the original 8-bit ExciteBike could be played as an unlockable level. The hardest part was getting the audio to sound approximately right! Fun fact: NES Excitebike supported saving and loading your custom tracks to the Famicom Data Recorder. The USA version of the FDR was never released, but the USA version of NES Excitebike still had all the save/load code+functionality built in. When you tried to save a track it would just hang for a while before returning to the menu. After figuring out where the save/load routines were, and where the track was stored in RAM, we were able to put hooks in the emulator to save the tracks to the N64 cart.
- jcurbo 15y ago
  Audio seems to be a problem in a lot of emulators... SNES emulators had issues with sound for years. (wind blowing in FF3 (6j) being the one I always remember) I guess it's because of trying to support the capabilities of the actual sound chip? Also the bit about the track saving is fantastic. Thanks for sharing!
  - strags 15y ago
    No worries! Audio emulation can be hard for a couple of other reasons too: Firstly, it's sometimes easy to tell that something "isn't quite right", but unless you have awesome ears (I don't), it's hard to hear exactly what the problem is. Secondly, audio isn't the sexiest part of emulator development - it often gets overlooked, and consequently there's far less information available about it. As it happens, audio emulation on the ZX-Spectrum 48k is easier: There's a one-bit on/off output wired to a speaker. Even generating tones has to be done by timing Z80 cycles! Some people still managed to do amazing things using pulse-width modulation.
  - nickloewen 15y ago
    > I guess it's because of trying to support the capabilities of the actual sound chip? This may be the case for some emulators -- such as the NES emulator in excitebike. However, (if I understand everything I've read correctly) the SNES didn't have a 'sound chip' in the same sense that the NES (or GameBoy, C64, etc.) did. The NES and all of Nintendo's other hardware used to synthesize its sound in real-time, but that changed with the SNES, which introduced sample-based audio instead. (Fun fact: some people suggest that the N64's sampled audio can meet -- or exceed -- CD quality!) These pages know more about SNES audio than I do: http://chipmusic.org/forums/topic/217/so-super-nintendo/ http://chipmusic.org/forums/topic/217/so-super-nintendo/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Nintendo_Entertainment_System#Audio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Nintendo_Entertainment_Sy... I suspect issues with SNES emulation are simply that all of the SNES emulators we have are fairly poor in _all regards_, it's just that it's easier to notice in the sound than in things like timing. Here are some examples of the other failings of many SNES emulators: http://byuu.org/bsnes/accuracy http://byuu.org/bsnes/accuracy
Porter_423 15y ago
Biggest thing since the discovery of Stop 'n Swop in Rare land! Thanks for sharing. It works like a charm and now I can re-play Sabrewulf without crappy keyboard controls I just have one (small) problem: no sound in the emulation. Just me? No biggie though, the sound was just beeps and peeps anyway. I wonder if they later made use of this for Jetpak in DK64?
JonnieCache 15y ago
The amount of stuff that lies hidden in video game codebases for decades never ceases to amaze me. See http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DummiedOut http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DummiedOut If this kind of thing interests you, then you will very probably enjoy the story of the legendary Ocarina of Time Debug Cart http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?23285-Origins-of-Zelda-Master-Quest-Debug-Rom http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?23285-Or... http://tcrf.net/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Ocarina_of_Time_(Debug_version) http://tcrf.net/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Ocarina_of_Time_(Debug_... Also, I'd just like to take a moment to show some appreciation for Rareware, one of the greatest game dev houses ever. They're responsible for so many great childhood memories, as well as breaking many technical and artistic boundaries.
- shinratdr 15y ago
  > See http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DummiedOut http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DummiedOut You bastard. > The Cutting Room Floor is a site dedicated to unearthing and researching unused and cut content from video games. Seriously, stop it. I have things I have to do like eat and sleep. If I'm found starved to death at my computer, you'll know who to blame. > http://tcrf.net/Final_Fantasy_VII/Debug_Room http://tcrf.net/Final_Fantasy_VII/Debug_Room "In the latest case of video game related violence, shinratdr was found dead at his house today, after spending two straight weeks reading about content cut from various video games. He was about to quit when he stumbled upon the page for the FFVII debug room and all hope was instantly lost. He will be missed, I guess."
  - JonnieCache 15y ago
    Yeah sorry about that. Should've given some warning.

241 points by emillon 15y ago

leoh 15y ago

Looks like the server is busy with requests. Here's a cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.therwp.com/forums/showthread.php%3Ft=48139&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

kranner 15y ago

Very nice, but do they mean ZX Spectrum 48K? I've never heard of a 48x.

ertdfgcb 15y ago
Yeah, it looks like a typo. A Google search for "ZX Spectrum 48x" shows this article as the top result, and the Wikipedia page only lists the 48k and 16k.

gazrogers 15y ago

Excellent! Now all I need is an N64 emulator...

rbanffy 15y ago
For the ZX Spectrum! ;-)
bandy 15y ago
The N64 is inexpensive enough and readily available at secondhand shops. I got mine so I could play Road Rash 64 - in my experience, the best version ever, having played all of the RR titles.
- joelhaus 15y ago
  Or you can try this app, which Google appears to have removed today (cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fplay.google.com%2Fstore%2Fapps%2Fdetails%3Fid%3Dcom.emudev.n64 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3...) -- installed it, but haven't tried it yet... here's a backup of the .apk from my phone: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32510284/N64%20Player%28Free%20N64%20Emulator%29-15.apk http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32510284/N64%20Player%28Free%20N64%2... It's also hosted on Github: https://github.com/emudeveloper/N64-Player--Mupen64plus- https://github.com/emudeveloper/N64-Player--Mupen64plus-

polshaw 15y ago

Neat. Jetpac actually shipped as a playable sub-game in Donkey Kong 64, so I guess this emulator was ultimately used there.

coroxout 15y ago
I remember a friend being excited before Donkey Kong 64's release because he'd heard about the Jetpac sub-game - I wonder if he already had Goldeneye... I just felt old on realising that the N64, which I remember reading previews of in Edge magazine, is as old now as the 48k Spectrum (treasured artefact of my childhood) was when the N64 came out. It helps a little that I didn't see an N64 in action until 3 years after its Japanese release.
- vidarh 15y ago
  The N64 is actually the only console I've ever played... I had a Commodore 64 and then Amiga all they way through the "early console years", and only played some N64 stuff because a house mate bought one. Then I sort of fell out of gaming apart from a bit of simulation and strategy games... Getting tempted again these days when I see how far they've gotten. With a young son taking up my time I suspect it'll be him that'll be the excuse...
ayuvar 15y ago
Later on in the linked thread, the original poster seems to indicate that it doesn't appear to be the same emulator - or at least that the big chunk of code for the controller mapping isn't retained in Donkey Kong 64. Perhaps they did a quick port or trimmed the emulator to fit the requirements of that specific game.

earbitscom 15y ago

This was the greatest video game ever made.

Torn 15y ago
Was? Until what?
- Graham24 15y ago
  elite?
- freehunter 15y ago
  Perfect Dark, which was basically the same game but with updated graphics and an alien plotline.
  - oinksoft 15y ago
    That game always seemed like a choppy, blurry GoldenEye to me.
    - davidwtbuxton 15y ago
      Perfect Dark benefited greatly from the N64 expansion pack, and was a lot less fun without it. I'm not certain it was better than Golden Eye (mostly because I found the second level very frustrating) but it had better graphics and a much more ambitious style of play.
molsongolden 15y ago
Watching your arms float around disjointedly as you run is the best part, or taking 25 sniper shots to kill a guard. I went from playing MW3 one morning to Goldeneye in the afternoon and it was mindblowing.
- TillE 15y ago
  I spent plenty of time playing GoldenEye; it was a good game. But the hyperbole surrounding it on the internet is unbelievable. It was released in August 1997. Even if you only care about the first-person shooter genre, Duke Nukem 3D had already been out for over a year, and it was a much more sophisticated game.

Permit 15y ago

Looks like a video of this in use can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONJtqf2lIIM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONJtqf2lIIM

sycren 15y ago

I remember the legality of emulators being rather spotty until this ruling was made: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nintendo_of_America,_Inc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nint.... Since Nintendo are against emulators: http://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp#emulator http://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp#emulator I wonder what they think about the ZX Spectrum emulator and the roms that it contains that the player did not specifically buy..

jamesu 15y ago
With the exception of the "Monitor Program" (which "was not supposed to be included"), the games included were all developed by Tim and Chris Stamper, co-founders of Rare. Provided they own their own IP, i don't see how this could be a problem.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
strags 15y ago
Even the "monitor program" - ie. the Spectrum 16KB ROM image is probably ok: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/permits/amstrad-roms.txt http://www.worldofspectrum.org/permits/amstrad-roms.txt 1) What exactly do you have to do to use Sinclair ROMs in an emulator, such as acknowledgements etc?" "Amstrad are happy for emulator writers to include images of our copyrighted code as long as the (c)opyright messages are not altered and we appreciate it if the program/manual includes a note to the effect that "Amstrad have kindly given their permission for the redistribution of their copyrighted material but retain that copyright"."

intsunny 15y ago

Hrrm, being that cartridge space is absolutely premium, and the size of the games affected their profitability, I wonder if this code was left in there with the space trade off of other features. (Golden Eye was a 96 megabit/12 megabyte cartridge.)

smackfu 15y ago
My guess is that it was just a screw-up, and cost them $x0,000 over all the cartridges.
- vshade 15y ago
  The cartridges have a fixed size, so if the game was made to fit in a bit less than 12MB but more than 8MB(or 10MB I didn't lookup the size of rom chips) then the cartridge would cost the same
ayuvar 15y ago
GoldenEye has a surprising amount of stuff "left over" on the cartridge (levels, meshes, weapons, scripts) which people have been digging out for years: http://tcrf.net/Goldeneye_007 http://tcrf.net/Goldeneye_007 It would be really interesting to know about the environment that generated something like that. Time was probably at a much bigger premium than cartridge space while it was under development, as I don't remember hearing that later Rare games had quite so much left over in them.

strags 15y ago

I wrote a NES emulator for ExciteBike 64, so that the original 8-bit ExciteBike could be played as an unlockable level. The hardest part was getting the audio to sound approximately right! Fun fact: NES Excitebike supported saving and loading your custom tracks to the Famicom Data Recorder. The USA version of the FDR was never released, but the USA version of NES Excitebike still had all the save/load code+functionality built in. When you tried to save a track it would just hang for a while before returning to the menu. After figuring out where the save/load routines were, and where the track was stored in RAM, we were able to put hooks in the emulator to save the tracks to the N64 cart.

jcurbo 15y ago
Audio seems to be a problem in a lot of emulators... SNES emulators had issues with sound for years. (wind blowing in FF3 (6j) being the one I always remember) I guess it's because of trying to support the capabilities of the actual sound chip? Also the bit about the track saving is fantastic. Thanks for sharing!
- strags 15y ago
  No worries! Audio emulation can be hard for a couple of other reasons too: Firstly, it's sometimes easy to tell that something "isn't quite right", but unless you have awesome ears (I don't), it's hard to hear exactly what the problem is. Secondly, audio isn't the sexiest part of emulator development - it often gets overlooked, and consequently there's far less information available about it. As it happens, audio emulation on the ZX-Spectrum 48k is easier: There's a one-bit on/off output wired to a speaker. Even generating tones has to be done by timing Z80 cycles! Some people still managed to do amazing things using pulse-width modulation.
- nickloewen 15y ago
  > I guess it's because of trying to support the capabilities of the actual sound chip? This may be the case for some emulators -- such as the NES emulator in excitebike. However, (if I understand everything I've read correctly) the SNES didn't have a 'sound chip' in the same sense that the NES (or GameBoy, C64, etc.) did. The NES and all of Nintendo's other hardware used to synthesize its sound in real-time, but that changed with the SNES, which introduced sample-based audio instead. (Fun fact: some people suggest that the N64's sampled audio can meet -- or exceed -- CD quality!) These pages know more about SNES audio than I do: http://chipmusic.org/forums/topic/217/so-super-nintendo/ http://chipmusic.org/forums/topic/217/so-super-nintendo/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Nintendo_Entertainment_System#Audio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Nintendo_Entertainment_Sy... I suspect issues with SNES emulation are simply that all of the SNES emulators we have are fairly poor in _all regards_, it's just that it's easier to notice in the sound than in things like timing. Here are some examples of the other failings of many SNES emulators: http://byuu.org/bsnes/accuracy http://byuu.org/bsnes/accuracy

Porter_423 15y ago

Biggest thing since the discovery of Stop 'n Swop in Rare land! Thanks for sharing. It works like a charm and now I can re-play Sabrewulf without crappy keyboard controls I just have one (small) problem: no sound in the emulation. Just me? No biggie though, the sound was just beeps and peeps anyway. I wonder if they later made use of this for Jetpak in DK64?

JonnieCache 15y ago

The amount of stuff that lies hidden in video game codebases for decades never ceases to amaze me. See http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DummiedOut http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DummiedOut If this kind of thing interests you, then you will very probably enjoy the story of the legendary Ocarina of Time Debug Cart http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?23285-Origins-of-Zelda-Master-Quest-Debug-Rom http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?23285-Or... http://tcrf.net/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Ocarina_of_Time_(Debug_version) http://tcrf.net/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Ocarina_of_Time_(Debug_... Also, I'd just like to take a moment to show some appreciation for Rareware, one of the greatest game dev houses ever. They're responsible for so many great childhood memories, as well as breaking many technical and artistic boundaries.

shinratdr 15y ago
> See http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DummiedOut http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DummiedOut You bastard. > The Cutting Room Floor is a site dedicated to unearthing and researching unused and cut content from video games. Seriously, stop it. I have things I have to do like eat and sleep. If I'm found starved to death at my computer, you'll know who to blame. > http://tcrf.net/Final_Fantasy_VII/Debug_Room http://tcrf.net/Final_Fantasy_VII/Debug_Room "In the latest case of video game related violence, shinratdr was found dead at his house today, after spending two straight weeks reading about content cut from various video games. He was about to quit when he stumbled upon the page for the FFVII debug room and all hope was instantly lost. He will be missed, I guess."
- JonnieCache 15y ago
  Yeah sorry about that. Should've given some warning.