Picture the scene, somewhere deep off the coast of Japan. The year 2024, something is rising from the depths. Something no humans have the power to stop, no matter how strong their military is. It can’t be, it can’t be Godzilla, can it? Nope, it’s just Nintendo’s legal department frantically photocopying cease and desist letters in preparation for a new onslaught of homebrew PC ports of its Nintendo 64 games from the 90s.
How come you ask? A new tool has been released that has been worked on in secret for over a year that can basically takes the vast majority of classic N64 games and spits them back out in a playable PC format, complete with high frame rates, ultrawide support, and even raytracing.
Oh Goldeneye come to daddy. N64: Recompiled is a tool that recompiles N64 binaries into C code that can then be compiled into any platform and used for ports.
Now the process of doing this may not be for everything because there is a little bit of tech know-how needed. However, that won’t be a problem because guess what plenty of Nintendo fans have – just that know-how so we can export amazing ports just like the one we got of Super Mario 64 last year for a lot of our favorite Nintendo 64 titles courtesy of other people without me even having to get my hands dirty.
My friend Wiseguy’s been working in secret for a year on a tool to make PC ports of N64 games without complete decompilations. The result doesn’t include assets and only requires a ROM to play.
He’s managed to run games like Banjo-Kazooie, Rocket Robot and even Superman 64. pic.twitter.com/sKGuViEsJZ
— Darío (@dariosamo) May 10, 2024
Now, guessing what is going to happen here is easy as Nintendo still likes to push the occasional N64 game on Nintendo Online, but now the cat is out of the bag, the rolling stobe us gathering no moss, and nerds everywhere are recompiling Perfect Dar, and somewhere, probably Gex into a glorious raytraced PC version.
Everything is on GitHub at the moment so if you want to check out the project you can do so. It will be interesting to see what happens with this one and Nintendo who is not exactly known for letting things go..
Featured Image: AI-Generated in Ideogram
The post Now you can play nearly all N64 games on your PC with raytracing, speedy FPS, and much more – we can sense Nintendo’s lawyers stirring appeared first on ReadWrite.
