Comment by FlavioMacedo
11 hours ago
Great work! I didn't even know it was still possible to publish new games for old consoles like the N64.
11 hours ago
Great work! I didn't even know it was still possible to publish new games for old consoles like the N64.
It may be counterintuitive at first, but why wouldn't be possible? It's one of the perks of "offline" hardware without subscriptions or DRM. You build a piece of hardware (cartridge) that attaches to another one (console) and it works. As long as the console works, there shouldn't be a problem.
Agree. There is a wall coming for "retro" video game nostalgia once we reach the end of the purpose-specific hardware era. Like, you can build an emulator for WiiWare games, but what does it mean to release a "new" WiiWare game when they're just built using an API like OpenGL which is still being used in new games today? What does following the constraints of an older system like that result in besides just another, lower, quality setting? What does "retro" Fortnite look like in 10 years besides just worse shaders?
Well, one thing is that it would run on a Wii.
The NDS graphics processor takes binary-encoded OpenGL commands through a FIFO, didn't stop anyone writing NDS homebrew.
Nintendo is notoriously litigious.
> It may be counterintuitive at first, but why wouldn't be possible?
For the same reason it wasn't possible at the time for a third-party to make N64 cartridges themselves to avoid Nintendo's fees. But I assume these lockout chips are replicated or circumvented by now.
Related to this, every ROM needs a "boot loader" that has to be signed and is verified by the lockout chip.
Nintendo's boot code is under copyright and thus cannot be used. So the boot code distributed with Libdragon is signed by finding a hash collision with a brute force tool running on the GPU[1]. Fun stuff!
[1] https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon/tree/trunk/boot#bu...
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Fairly recently the chip was studied in detail and replicated. But like most systems of that era, I believe it was circumvented fairly quickly by pirates. The easiest way would be to piggyback a licensed cartridge - unlike the NES, it has to be one with the same region and bootloader as there are several lockout chip variants, but that basic technique still works.
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