6 ms·

Fascinating work. I know that people did the same for Super Mario 64 [1]. It is still unbelievable to me that they can generate a bit-by-bit identical copy of t

Fascinating work. I know that people did the same for Super Mario 64 [1]. It is still unbelievable to me that they can generate a bit-by-bit identical copy of the original ROM by simply running some old gcc on actual C source code files. IIRC the main insight was that Nintendo did not use any optimization flags which made it possible to create a 100% matching binary. I've never really looked into it, but I guess the did some try and error to figure out the exact gcc version that Nintendo used to make sure that they get 100% identical binary code? [1] https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64 https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64

monocasa 3y ago
> I guess the did some try and error to figure out the exact gcc version that Nintendo used The official SDKs have been leaked for decades, so they probably just looked there.
- IntelMiner 3y ago
  Did Nintendo's SDK's use GCC back then? Hopefully they shipped the GPL source with it!
  - davikr 3y ago
    They used IDO, but GCC was an option, I think.
CSMastermind 3y ago
There's an amazing video about refactoring Mario 64 to reach 30 FPS and render 6x faster on N64: https://youtu.be/t_rzYnXEQlE?si=ZWpp7-74cMdbsdba https://youtu.be/t_rzYnXEQlE?si=ZWpp7-74cMdbsdba The changes were much more extensive than just removing the debug flags. They were also able to get local coop and a 4 player split screen working which were features originally intended for the game but cut for performance reasons.
nanaian 3y ago
SM64 uses SGI's IRIS Development Option (IDO) compiler. And yes, it's unoptimised. Paper Mario, however, /does/ use GCC, and it's optimised. Figuring out the compiler version was fairly easy as there's a limited number of options - we know when the game began development, so we looked for releases around that time. The harder parts were figuring out compiler flags (consider all the -f flags affecting code generation; papermario used -fforce-addr) and coming to the terrifying conclusion that the compiler was modified! The majority of papermario was built with a modified build of GCC 2.8.1 [1] at -O2. The SDK code (libultra, nusystem) was built with GCC 2.7.2 at -O3. The iQue Player version, i.e. the Chinese release, was built with EGCS. [1] https://github.com/pmret/gcc-papermario https://github.com/pmret/gcc-papermario
- xurukefi 3y ago
  Thanks for the insight. The fact that Paper Mario uses optimizaion flags makes this project even more fascinating. Great work.

monocasa 3y ago

> I guess the did some try and error to figure out the exact gcc version that Nintendo used The official SDKs have been leaked for decades, so they probably just looked there.

IntelMiner 3y ago
Did Nintendo's SDK's use GCC back then? Hopefully they shipped the GPL source with it!
- davikr 3y ago
  They used IDO, but GCC was an option, I think.

CSMastermind 3y ago

There's an amazing video about refactoring Mario 64 to reach 30 FPS and render 6x faster on N64: https://youtu.be/t_rzYnXEQlE?si=ZWpp7-74cMdbsdba https://youtu.be/t_rzYnXEQlE?si=ZWpp7-74cMdbsdba The changes were much more extensive than just removing the debug flags. They were also able to get local coop and a 4 player split screen working which were features originally intended for the game but cut for performance reasons.

nanaian 3y ago

SM64 uses SGI's IRIS Development Option (IDO) compiler. And yes, it's unoptimised. Paper Mario, however, /does/ use GCC, and it's optimised. Figuring out the compiler version was fairly easy as there's a limited number of options - we know when the game began development, so we looked for releases around that time. The harder parts were figuring out compiler flags (consider all the -f flags affecting code generation; papermario used -fforce-addr) and coming to the terrifying conclusion that the compiler was modified! The majority of papermario was built with a modified build of GCC 2.8.1 [1] at -O2. The SDK code (libultra, nusystem) was built with GCC 2.7.2 at -O3. The iQue Player version, i.e. the Chinese release, was built with EGCS. [1] https://github.com/pmret/gcc-papermario https://github.com/pmret/gcc-papermario

xurukefi 3y ago
Thanks for the insight. The fact that Paper Mario uses optimizaion flags makes this project even more fascinating. Great work.