Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/nearly-all-nintendo-64-games-can-now-be-recompiled-into-native-pc-ports-to-add-proper-ray-tracing-ultrawide-high-fps-and-more

by Malic • 2 years ago

382 169 2 years ago

tomshardware.com

ranger_danger2• 2 years ago

Jamulator did this for NES way back in 2013 but nobody really seemed to care...

https://andrewkelley.me/post/jamulator.html

There is also Winlator for running Windows programs on Android:

https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator

Also is the youtube video linked in the article using an AI voice?

BearOso• 2 years ago

Jamulator was unsuccessful because so much extra hardware was on the cartridges. Recompilation complicates things and doesn't provide many benefits in that situation.

The N64 is fixed hardware, so it's a little bit easier. Even so, this project still uses emulation for the RDP. I don't know how it handles generated RSP microcode, maybe it doesn't. A lot of games just used the official libraries.

claudex• 2 years ago

Jamulator did this for NES way back in 2013 but nobody really seemed to care...

At least Mr WiseGuy seems to care. From the N64Recom Github repo[0]: "This is not the first project that uses static recompilation on game console binaries. A well known example is jamulator, which targets NES binaries."

[0] https://github.com/Mr-Wiseguy/N64Recomp

zamadatix• 2 years ago

Jamulator didn't take it farther than what NES emulators could do beyond the way it ran. If Jamulator had released with similar enhancements for Zelda it probably would have been a lot more popular. I.e. the interest is more from what is now available with it than about how it does it.

That's just Nerrel, a real person, narrating. It's crazy (in an interesting way, not necessarily a doom and gloom way) how we have AI voices these days so good we start to suspect people who don't speak like we expect are AI.

refracture• 2 years ago

That's just Nerrel; his narration is so flat that he's always sounded like an AI. I enjoy that mix with his humor.

jonhohle• 2 years ago

This is really cool. Many of the foundational tools created for N64 decomp are finding their way into other system decomp packages. I recently came across https://decomp.me/ which allows collaborative decompilarion for a bunch of systems with presets for their relevant SDKs and hardware. I’d imagine this happening several more systems in the coming years.

protoster• 2 years ago

Do typical emulators compile ahead of time? Just-in-time? If not, why? This approach (ahead of time compilation) appears to have huge benefits.

ranger_danger2• 2 years ago

A fair amount of 32-bit and later emulators do have JIT recompilation, but I'm not aware of any ahead-of-time translation unless that's how TeknoParrot works (you can run linux arcade games that use ELF binaries on windows with it for example), but I wouldn't call that emulation either way since the architecture is the same.

entropicdrifter• 2 years ago

Modern Vintage Gamer over on Youtube has worked with Nightdive and Limited Run Games and helped design a C recompiler called Carbon Engine for various older consoles that are functionally the same as ahead of time compiled emulators.

https://youtu.be/eZRzaGFWoz8?si=XQyJol0pe2z2oG6d

jerf• 2 years ago

You name the compilation and/or interpreter technique and there's at least one emulator that uses it.

chlorion• 2 years ago

There are lots of emulation methods but interpretation is probably(?) the most common or at least very common.

Interpretation involves writing a VM that represents the state of various parts of the machine, and executes instructions that change the state of the VM, with varying levels of accuracy.

izzydata2• 2 years ago

I hope this eventually also works for Linux so that N64 games can be reliably played on very low end portable handhelds. N64 is notoriously tricky to emulate, but building them for the platform natively removes all performance problems.

vaughnegut• 2 years ago

I watched the youtube video this article links to the other day and it mentioned that it supports Linux, specifically mentioning that it should be usable on Steam Deck.

izzydata2• 2 years ago

The steam deck has way more than enough resources to power through any and all N64 emulation so that wouldn't change much there. I'm specifically talking about something $50 retro handhelds and the like.

For example Mario64 and Ocarina of Time are completely reverse engineered and have native support for Windows and Linux and they run perfectly on those systems as where they really struggle when trying to emulate.

andrewclunn• 2 years ago

That will likely require full decompilation. This is akin to wrapping the emulator up with the rom, with a few common functions (found via decompilation) being updated to support more modern rendering approaches. This isn't so much "native" as it is a patched container in an executable form.

EDIT - But hey, you can always just add another layer of emulation via Proton to run it in Linux.

GaggiX• 2 years ago

I don't think that's true, it really does recompile the N64 games into native executables, you can compile them using any C compiler like msvc, gcc and clang.

jjice2• 2 years ago

N64 is notoriously tricky to emulate

Huh, I wouldn't have expected that. I don't know much about the specifics of N64 emulation, but I've had N64 emulators running perfectly since the early 2010s. I played mostly the big classics, so I'm unfamiliar with more niche title performance.

LetsGetTechnicl2• 2 years ago

You'd be surprised, even Nintendo doesn't get it perfect themselves. When N64 games were first made available on the Nintendo Switch Online platform, there were several problems with graphical effects and input lag. Here's an MVG video from the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSyBMSOfPxg

0cf8612b2e1e• 2 years ago

I think part of the issue is that some purists believe anything less than pixel perfect fidelity is unacceptable. I recall reading a report on N64(?) Wii(?) about how the flame flicker in one level of one game was off.

grecy• 2 years ago

Many games were very playable with UltraHLE back in 1999, on the hardware of the time (~ Pentium 133 IIRC)

mrguyorama• 2 years ago

The N64 had a fully unified memory architecture, and weird custom silicon that also happened to be a fully programmable GPU kinda device. For decades, all N64 emulation was done by translating calls to that GPU (called the RDP) to openGL or DirectX calls, and that works horribly, but anything else would have had awful performance. Several years ago however, someone decided "Fuck it" and created a fully emulated version of the RDP that you could run, ie feed it real N64 instructions and it spits out pixel values. It was significantly slower than the translation approach, so you had to have like a powerful 8 or more core CPU to run it well.

Some other madlad then took that approach, and ported it to a GPU Shader, because fuck yeah thousands of cores! It actually greatly improved the situation, as you didn't need a super powerful GPU, just a somewhat modern GPU.

That development means devices like the steam deck actually have zero issues running awesome N64 emulation, including allowing for upscaling to much higher rendering resolutions without artifacts because you are literally telling a virtual RDP to do it, and it happily complies.

Before AngryLion and ParaLLEl, we were stuck with basically the same graphics plugins, glitches, and tweaks as the late 90s.

https://www.libretro.com/index.php/category/parallel-n64/ for a more detailed description of how this changed things.

anthk6• 2 years ago

I had to do several magic flags for video plugins in order to avoid glitches in THPS2 for instance, compared to Zelda or SM64.

cpressland• 2 years ago

I’m pretty sure Linux is natively supported via N64Recomp: https://github.com/Mr-Wiseguy/N64Recomp

An example of this can be found here: https://github.com/Mr-Wiseguy/Zelda64Recomp?tab=readme-ov-fi...

Fartmancer• 2 years ago

I tried this out on my Ubuntu PC and it works great. Played it for around an hour without any issues.

privacyking• 2 years ago

It already works on linux. I've tested it.

xnx• 2 years ago

Would this recompilation technique be applicable to other systems (3DS, GameCube, Wii, etc.)?

naikrovek• 2 years ago

In theory it will work for anything, but there is a LOT of work that must be done to annotate the binaries on the source platform so that tooling such as this can pull it apart and reassemble all the pieces into something that works on the target platform.

A straight recompilation is one thing, but what this tool does is recompile with the target system’s apis for input and output in mind. A straight recompilation would offer less than an emulator, really.

This tool knows (or is told) where rendering routines are, for example, so that they can be replaced with destination platform versions. That’s how higher resolutions and different aspect ratios are supported in a recombination.

vouaobrasil2• 2 years ago

One thing this could be cool for is games like Goldeneye, which is hard to play on PC because it expects that weird joystick input. It would be awesome to have a native Goldeneye port with normal mouse behaviour like other FPSes.

wodenokoto• 2 years ago

Wouldn't it still expect a weird joystick?

haiku20774• 2 years ago

The native ports have additional features, which are easy to implement starting from the native compilation. For example, the native port of Zelda has gyro aiming and automatic autosave options.

vouaobrasil2• 2 years ago

Well I was hoping there'd be a way to translate mouse input into the joystick input in a straightforward way that isn't available on emulators.

whateveracct• 2 years ago

WASD with mouse aim control doesn't really work with the game though.

The modal aspect of aiming combined with the travel time/return-to-center of the cursor is a really fun part of the game. If you could just free-aim while running a la PC FPS it would kind of ruin the campaign since everything is designed around this. Picking your spots and keeping cool while aiming are the appeal.

That said, if you keep the modal aspect and have the mouse just 1) rotate Bond like left/right on the stick does and 2) control the cursor only in "aim mode" (hit R)..then I think that could be fun.

Tbh, I wish shooters didn't go straight to Quake-style WASD+mouse free-aim across the board. The modal aspect makes gives Goldeneye a certain physicality I really like.

AlecSchueler• 2 years ago

You can turn off auto aim in the game though. Always the first thing I do.

anthk6• 2 years ago

Deus Ex has quake controls but you need to focus a little before aiming. Then, later you get upgrades and laser reticles allowing you to shoot near instantly.

X0Refraction• 2 years ago

Weirdly Goldeneye did have a control layout where you could move with one joystick and aim with the other using 2 controllers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZaEpugk3hY

terramex• 2 years ago

There is emulator hack for Goldeneye that add WASD + mouse support and I heard that it works great.

https://github.com/Graslu/1964GEPD/releases/tag/latest

hot_gril9• 2 years ago

Something's wrong with it, maybe related to the framerate. I can run and shoot a lot faster than before, but enemies take just as long as the old version to aim. I was able to beat levels on 00 mode with ease, mostly by sprinting past enemies.

fl0ki2• 2 years ago

I played this a couple of years ago and it was already really solid back then. Do you know if they've figured out a way to do gyro aim since then? That'd be perfect for the growing number of devices inspired by the Switch and more recently Steam Deck.

ThrowawayTestr2• 2 years ago

The mouse+wasd hack works really well. Also works with Perfect Dark.

skrrtww2• 2 years ago

To operate this tool, you still need to disassemble the ROM up front and annotate it heavily before it can be recompiled. This tool is very nice, to be sure, but the hyperbole about anything close to one-click generation of standalone executables for an arbitrary ROM is getting out of hand.

speps• 2 years ago

Except this work can be done once, stored somewhere and shared. Take a ROM (it means read-only after all) and get native port out...

Hamuko2• 2 years ago

Shared legally?

doublepg233• 2 years ago

I don't think that's true. The video in the post shows a no-name n64 game being recompiled and running fine. No annotation needed.

amlib• 2 years ago

The video also makes it clear that only games using a certain microcode works for now. I imagine there are many parts of HLE emulation that gets added to the recompiled software as wrappers and compatibility code to make it all work, so in a sense this may be more akin to an embedded emulator into a native binary (recompiled code), which can overtime be worked on to add new features, fix shortcomings of the original software and make it more "ergonomic"/compatible with it's new target platform. But such work can only feasibly be achieved by reverse engineering the software and giving it human readable symbols. In a sense there is almost as much work to do as on the previous decompilation projects, but you can get results (run the game) right away (or at least much faster than traditionally), assuming of course the game uses a compatible microcode and isn't doing anything fancy that depends on the intrinsics of the n64 architecture.

slongfield2• 2 years ago

To be fair, N64 is not the PS2 or Gameboy--there are only 388 games that were released for it. Going through all of the games that were released and shepherding them through this process is feasible.

kwanbix• 2 years ago

And there are probably fewere games that are worth doing. Maybe 100? 200?

kilburn• 2 years ago

In fact, Thabeast is beating every N64 game, and he means ALL of them. [1]

He has already completed all games, but the videos are waaay behind (he's releasing one video/game a week).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@Thabeast721/videos

darby_eight• 2 years ago

you still need to disassemble the ROM up front and annotate it heavily before it can be recompiled.

Why? Surely it's more straightforward to do binary-to-binary translation. No human input needed!

immibis2• 2 years ago

For example, Zelda (both of them) load segments of code from the cartridge at runtime. The recompiler needs to know which areas contain code, and the original relocation-applying code for MIPS instructions obviously won't work on x64 instructions either, so it needs to know how the relocations work.

ambyra• 2 years ago

What is the process, and can any of it be chatgpted?

advael• 2 years ago

I think "but using the tool takes time and effort" is a good but not perfect criticism of a tool that purports to reduce time and effort spent. As many asinine CEOs are making outsized claims about generic "productivity" improvements from various tools in this space and similar ones all the time, I get this instinct. However, it does not make sense when the use of the tool is anything other than "something you could already do, just faster"

kkukshtel3• 2 years ago

I saw this when it came out, and as someone that doesn't follow the ROM hacking scene, I'm wondering - why did this approach take so long to come up with? Translating the assembly instructions to C and then recompiling them seems like an obvious method to try early on, but I'm wondering if there was some other breakthrough that made this possible in a way it wasn't before?

pjc50• 2 years ago

Emulating the hardware usually requires cycle-accurate emulation of things running in parallel, so it's not quite so simple as just the program in the ROM.

whizzter• 2 years ago

Yes and no, with the 8bits and probably 16bits like the C64, NES, etc you really want cycle accuracy and emulating something like the PS2 really well would probably need a fair bit of accuracy.

HOWEVER.. writing an recompiler (not feasible for 8bits due to the amount of self-mod code) you could probably insert pattern checks to detect writes to DMA-starting locations,etc (thinking back to our PS2 games) and transform it to safe sequences without accurate timing for most games that really only would be happy with some extra cycles.

kkukshtel3• 2 years ago

Watching the video, it seems like the explanation is mostly "tag the code and transpile to C" - im assuming the tags are acting as the hardware-aware part?

bluedino• 2 years ago

Are they using self-modifying code or anything else that would make this tricky?

dividuum• 2 years ago

Really surprised this topic didn't come up anywhere. I couldn't find anything in the linked repositories either. I guess there's no self-modifying code due to it being mapped into the address space from a cartridge?

unleaded• 2 years ago

Basically every game is written in C on a modern processor (MIPS) so i highly doubt it. Maybe some weird homebrew stuff like that flappy bird video uses it but emulators tend to deal with problems like that by ignoring them (e.g. IIRC there is no emulator that can properly run that N64 linux port from a few years ago, and there have been plenty of SM64 glitches that work differently on emulators vs real hardware)

slongfield2• 2 years ago

The N64 has a GPU, which is not the same as modern GPUs, and you need that GPU to render graphics.

Skimming the Github repo, looks like this uses rt64 under the hood for the raytracing support ( https://github.com/rt64/rt64 ), and that uses the ubershader technique to emulate the GPU. This excellent article talks about the what, why, and insanity that are ubershaders: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/

kkukshtel3• 2 years ago

Was raytracing support necessary to get the compilation working to circumvent "normal" GPU calls?

DCKing• 2 years ago

Other emulators want to solve the problem generically, and this solution doesn't quite.

Static recompilation from one machine language to one other language is somewhere between extremely difficult to not being generally possible in practice [1]. To make recompiling something like this properly, you need some help from the binaries that make recompilation easier [2] and on top of that you need to patch certain things to make this work [3].

Dynamic recompilation doesn't have this problem. It allows you to create software you can dump the original binaries+assets ("ROMs") in and it will generally emulate it.

There's a lot of confusion about how generic this solution it. It's extremely impressive in how much work it saves making recompilations/"ports" much easier, and it will be very valuable. But it is not able to replace the need for traditional emulators.

[1] https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/155511/why-is-static-...

[2]: N64 game binaries may happen to avoid a bunch of things that make general static recompilation hard that help this approach, but I don't actually know.

[3]: The Majora's Mask recompilation repository contains a lot of handcrafted patches to make it work: https://github.com/Mr-Wiseguy/Zelda64Recomp

anthk6• 2 years ago

I'd love to see this with THPS2 and 3, some games I love but not with the 'modern' graphics (PSP/DC and up).

nottorp• 2 years ago

Isn't Nintendo hunting every one of their fans^H^H^H^H IP abusers with their black helicopters?

Why do people even bother when they know they'll get lawyers at their door in 3... 2... 1... ?

kotaKat• 2 years ago

Because a few of them will turn and go take a job offer from NERD.

https://www.nerd.nintendo.com/files/Secu%20Job%20Offer%20202...

babypuncher• 2 years ago

Nintendo doesn't typically go after emulation projects. Yuzu was the exception, and there are reasons for that related to how the Yuzu team ran their project and distributed it that painted a legal target on their back.

This project isn't distributing any of Nintendo's code, game assets, or other intellectual property.

0xcde4c3db• 2 years ago

Nintendo has also gone after a handful of specific tools for circumventing the Switch encryption, which has led to speculation that this push is really about shoring up "Switch 2" against existing hacks and emulators being updated (in the event that it's substantially the same software platform with updated silicon).

yamazakiwi3• 2 years ago

Nintendo isn't as hard on tracking people emulating older systems, emulating their most modern system is where they start to get particularly whiny.

sillysaurusx2• 2 years ago

This isn’t true. The smash community has suffered for over a decade because Nintendo refuses to let them use emulation for melee in tournaments. Any tournament that tries is immediately C&D’ed. https://youtu.be/fAmidph6QU4?si=wbJvpN6ZhUSxSR17

How anyone has any sympathy or hope for Nintendo not going after their users in 2024 is beyond me. This is GameCube era games, and they’re still litigious.

elorant• 2 years ago

dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40337009

djmips• 2 years ago

What's the advantage over an emulator? This is after all, a form of an emulator - one where you translate ahead. This sort of thing has been done in the past with things like Bleem so it can be more performant but on a modern PC any good emulator is going to perform well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!

wmf• 2 years ago

JIT emulation can cause stutters while AOT should not. The difference may not be noticeable now that computers are so much faster than the N64.

ThrowawayTestr2• 2 years ago

Recompilation is not emulation.

anthk6• 2 years ago

I don´t get the downvotes, this is just... porting.

doublepg233• 2 years ago

The video shows multiple bugs disappearing when using this method vs. emulation.

skrrtww2• 2 years ago

The goals of this project and the goals of N64 emulation are fairly different.

The goal of N64 emulators (generally) is to accurately recreate the behavior of the original console.

Conversely, there is a large crowd of people who just want to play SM64, OOT and MM with a bevy of "graphical enhancements" like 60fps, widescreen, texture packs, randomizers, etc.

For these people, the fact that these games originally ran on the N64 is practically irrelevant. In fact, it's a hindrance; The N64's graphical pipeline is cumbersome to emulate and actively stands in the way of modern 'enhancements.'

This project is more aimed at giving the games themselves modern treatments, removing the N64-centric aspects of the games from the equation entirely.

hot_gril9• 2 years ago

Honestly SM64 with new graphics in those demo videos looks worse than the original game. But Gamecube games running in an emulator look amazing because they use a lot more vector graphics, which the emu can scale up and apply antialiasing to.

What interests me more about recompilation is it can produce very efficient binaries instead of having to emulate everything. And also makes it easier to add new features.

deadbabe• 2 years ago

Would love to play fully ray traced N64 games.

DrNosferatu2• 2 years ago

Any efforts for other platforms?

I would love to play a source-port of arcade “GTI Club”! <3

DrNosferatu2• 2 years ago

Any tutorials/step by step guide on why to use these tools and perform this from start to finish?

pipes• 2 years ago

As an aside, the perfect dark decompile port is really nice to play on the steam deck. Not sure why, but the Linux version tends to freeze on the villa level. Switching to the windows version and using proton works great.

https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/perfect_dark

simple10• 2 years ago

Super impressive walkthrough video in the article. It does a great job of explaining Majora's Mask. Although, it's probably glossing over a lot of the upfront technical challenges of using it to port games.

lcnmrn• 2 years ago

I wish all game executables would be OS agnostic, something similar to WebAssembly: GameAssembly. For example you can no longer play 32-bit games on new macOS version, neither 32-bit Windows games under Wine. It's almost impossible to find 64-bit .exe files so they can run under fine under Wine/Crossover.

lupusreal2• 2 years ago

The JVM does this pretty well for Minecraft. I doubt Minecraft would support Linux, the BSDs, etc without it. Bedrock edition (the not-JVM version which supports Windows and consoles/phones) doesn't even support MacOS even though it obviously could.

hot_gril9• 2 years ago

If Minecraft were a Microsoft product from the start, they probably wouldn't have made the Java version compatible with Mac or Linux (even though it uses JVM, there are some natives included), or wouldn't have made a Java version to begin with.

treyd• 2 years ago

CIL is kinda like this for games implemented heavily in C#.

hot_gril9• 2 years ago

I was able to run 32-bit Windows games in Wine on Mac, even on Apple Silicon. GTA IV on my M1 mini. There's some kind of "32 on 64" emulation built into whatever version of the 32-bit Wine that PlayOnMac installs. Impossible to Google so idk how it really works.

It's funny how the Mac is more compatible with old Windows programs than old Mac programs.

josefx• 2 years ago

Old windows programs had the luck that intel fucked up Itanium, which left us with AMDs idea to just take the existing 16 bit compatible 32 bit processor and turn it into a 32 bit compatible 64 bit processor (that might also be 16 bit compatible, not sure on that one). As result new and old windows programs use a lot of the same basic instructs and emulating the newer programs includes a lot of the work needed to also emulate the older ones.

lambertsimnel• 2 years ago

I agree with your sentiment, but I've had satisfactory results running 32-bit Windows games on x86_64 Linux

On Debian, I found I had to run

  dpkg --add-architecture i386 && apt-get update

and then install the wine32 package

neonsunset3• 2 years ago

.NET would probably be as close as you can get given it allows you to have portable assemblies with pointers, structs and simd code which is very relevant to games.

It models statically-typed compiled languages in a much superior way to WASM, there are projects showcasing how well e.g. Rust maps to it[0], and C++/CLI existed for a long time (although it's not cross-platform, and is considered cursed).

C and C++ could be mapped in a perfect manner to IL and then AOT compiled in ways that GraalVM's Truffle can only dream of (given that .NET exposes a very wide set of intrinsics allowing a lot of code to be ported that way).

[0] https://github.com/FractalFir/rustc_codegen_clr

angra_mainyu• 2 years ago

Funnily enough, I think Windows might just be it.

Wine (+ Steam's Proton) works incredibly well these days, a huge improvement from the old days when barely anything ran, and what did run required heavy tweaking or even custom compilation.

On Linux, my Steam library of about 300 games runs almost in its entirety without issues (except for Last Epoch).

codedokode• 2 years ago

It is not enough to provide portable machine code to make games portable, there are lot of different APIs that games need: graphics API, windows API, input API, sound API, disk API and so on. Sometimes they need kernel modules for anti-cheat and anti-piracy features.

What saddens me is that open-source OSes do not want to provide a common set of APIs so that the developer only has to write and test the code once and it works everywhere. There is flatpak, but as I understand, it doesn't provide a set of APIs, it simply packs a Linux distribution into a virtual machine without any specifications or documentation. So ugly, and no compatibility for smaller non-Linux OSes.

lxgr2• 2 years ago

The code running on the CPU is arguably the smaller problem when it comes to games: At least for consoles, they're often depending on very low-level GPU implementation details, especially for older titles and platform exclusives.

Older consoles had even more dedicated chips doing relevant stuff other than "simple" I/O, like e.g. the SNES's sound chip, which was a completely independent CPU running its own little programs in parallel with the CPU and GPU.

Of course you could "mandate" a high-level VM for all future game development, but given the static nature of console hardware specs, that wouldn't be competitive for titles wanting to make use of cutting-edge graphics.

Cloudef• 2 years ago

libretro kinda is this by providing runtime where the game runs inside. You still need to compile the game/core for the correct architecture.

PeakKS• 2 years ago

You can actually. New versions of Wine support WoW64, allowing you to run 32 bit windows programs on a fully 64 bit Linux system.

tombert• 2 years ago

This is pretty neat; can someone tell me if this could lead to a proper working version of Conker on the MiSTer? E.g. could this be used to assist in a decompilation and then someone could make a fix?

theyinwhy• 2 years ago

Any suggestion for a high quality n64 controller compatible with windows or linux? The official one touts "Switch only".

mikestew2• 2 years ago

I'm wondering if a wireless Xbox controller would work. It's what I use with Apple TV without issue. Button layout is close enough (runs to living room to compare Xbox controller to Switch Pro...), in fact they're basically identical.

OTOH, I haven't tried the Switch Pro controller with anything else but a Switch, so maybe it can be made to work? (EDIT: just tried it: my Mac connects to the Switch Pro via BT, haven't actually tried it, 'cuz damned work is in the way.)

haiku20774• 2 years ago

It would but the N64 controller's layout is unique and it's more intuitive to play games on the original controller.

haiku20774• 2 years ago

8BitDo sells a kit to modify an original N64 controller into a wireless controller with a modern Hall effect joystick.

Rychard• 2 years ago

I use the N64 controller with my PC, it's available for purchase by anyone who subscribes to NSO. It connects via bluetooth (the USB connection is for charging only).

https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/nintendo-64-contr...

rcarmo• 2 years ago

Nintendo is probably having kittens about now. Extremely impressive.

Gala999• 2 years ago

There was speculation Nintendo did this for the Switch port of Super Mario Sunshine released in 2020. Someone is mentioning "NERD's recompilation tool" there : https://gbatemp.net/threads/who-said-switch-gamecube-emulati...

Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports

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