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by amlib 760 days 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.
2 comments

There’s also inevitably going to be timing/performance-related bugs - the N64’s devkit docs say it runs games under a thin OS for multi-threading[1] so that’s another opportunity for things to go wrong.

Also, after conversion these games are still designed and hardcoded for an N64 controller and 4:3 aspect-ratio - that’s hardly “native” as far as PC gamers are concerned.

[1] https://ultra64.ca/files/documentation/online-manuals/man/pr...

That operating system is statically linked into the game binary.
Does that mean I could have rolled an OS for my n64 together with game? l
I’m guessing it works for the standard Nintendo provided microcodes.