I recently ran into an interesting article on Tom’s Hardware about a project called N64 Recompiled. Its purpose is to enable recompiling of old Nintendo 64 games into native PC ports that support ray tracing, ultrawide resolutions, high FPS, and other staples of modern games.
Despite its 1996 release, the Nintendo 64‘s original hardware and games have both remained relatively hot-button in enthusiast circles here into 2024. Now, the next frontier of high-end N64 gameplay may be through recompiled PC ports instead of emulation, courtesy of Mr-Wiseguy on GitHub. Wiseguy is responsible for the release of both N64Recomp and Zelda64Recomp, a project that ports The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask to PC with N64Recomp’s graphical and QoL improvements, as screenshotted above and highlighted by YouTuber Nerrel below.
So, what makes crazy graphical improvements like real ray-tracing, uncapped FPS, and proper ultrawide support possible for N64 games? If you’ve been in the Nintendo 64 enthusiast scene for a long time, you may recall the waves made when a completely decompiled Super Mario 64 PC Port dropped in 2020 and allowed for features like real ray-tracing, full model replacements, and so on. It still gets mods to this day.
Recompiled ports aren’t quite the same as decompiled ports like the SM64 PC port in this context, but both will run natively on PC and thus be able to truly maximize performance and effect accuracy to the original hardware while still providing the PC-expected enhancements that come with emulation. N64Recomp is basically the best of both worlds, and since manually decompiling N64 games takes years of labor from one or more people, a tool to more efficiently recompile them into a quickly playable-on-PC state is a godsend for preservationists everywhere.
This is the video mentioned in the quote above:
I was a big fan of the N64 when it was new and so I am excited about the potential of such a project. I am also happy about the potential projects like this have for the preservation of classic games that risk being lost to time and technological advancements.
I appreciate the efforts that Nintendo has gone through for the NES and SNES systems by re-releasing smaller versions with a selection of games, but I think it should be taken a lot further and for more systems and games.
Links
- The original article on Tom’s Hardware: 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
- The N64 Recompiled project: https://github.com/N64Recomp/N64Recomp
