+- Tendo City (https://www.tendocity.net)
+-- Forum: Tendo City: Metropolitan District (https://www.tendocity.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=4)
+--- Forum: Tendo City (https://www.tendocity.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=42)
+--- Thread: Nintendo 64 Homebrew Has Gotten Incredibly Impressive (/showthread.php?tid=7614)
Nintendo 64 Homebrew Has Gotten Incredibly Impressive - A Black Falcon - 16th January 2026
It used to be that the N64 barely even had a homebrew scene. Writing games for 3d is hard, and writing good 3d for the N64 is even harder, with its limited hardware and compromises to fit within its $200 budget. For many years homebrew devs wanting to work on retro hardware stuck to 2d games for consoles like the Genesis or NES, or hacking already existing games for those systems, the SNES, or others. The N64 eventually got a small game hacking scene, which has produced some nice results particularly in Mario 64 hacks, but actual original works? It was just too much.
Well, in case you all hadn't noticed, in the last few years it has happened. And some of the techdemos are exceptionally impressive. The games? They aren't on that level yet, but they're improving... they'll get there. But the tech demos? Spectacular stuff.
Two years ago, we had this.
This is pretty impressive! The textures here are so high resolution, it looks like something running on a more powerful hardware, but isn't.
But homebrew developers aren't done... now homebrew devs have done THIS. These demos are running in tiny3d, a homebrew microcode option for the N64. That means that these are not using Nintendo's proprietary microcode, and instead are entirely free of any potential copyright issues.
Yes, that is running on real hardware. If I didn't know better I'd think this is running on Gamecube or Xbox or something. The Nintendo 64 really IS a tiny little $200 SGI supercomputer, as demos like this show -- once people figured out how to get the most out of the hardware they've started to do incredible things.
And how is tiny3d doing at high-res textures?
Yeah, pretty seriously well. It's pretty insane to see the N64 doing this stuff, isn't it? It can even do portals!
The amount of particles on screen in this demo is ridiculous stuff. Exceptional work!
And here is the N64 doing full HDR.
So yeah the tech demos look incredible, but how are homebrew games doing? Well, there still aren't full, complete, homebrew N64 games with 3d graphics and the scale of a full retail title. There are only demos and smaller projects. Making a full game with just one person is a whole lot of work once you are trying to do 3d graphics, so this makes sense. In order to encourage development for the system, for several years now there has been a Nintendo 64 homebrew games jam late in the year. A year ago the theme was 'make a minigame, Mario Party style', then they put the minigames together into a launcher which lets you load any minigame.
The tiny3d guy made this one for that:
Obviously this isn't as impressive as the techdemos, but the particle effects are shown off here, as is the smooth framerate and really nice, detailed graphics. The gameplay is simple, just whack stuff and collect money, but it's good for what it's doing. The high detail graphics certainly could fool someone into thinking this is running o n something more powerful than the N64.
The guy behind the first video in this post, meanwhile, is currently working on a game. He was making a N64 port of Portal, but dropped it halfway because of issues from Valve, sadly. Now he's working on an original title. There aren't really video showing the whole game but bits of it are shown in this video:
The magic system looks interesting, but I don't like the super-pixelated graphics. I assume he turned off the texture smoothing and I don't like that look at all, myself, sorry. Still, I wanted to post a video of this game despite that.
There are plenty more little homebrew N64 demos or minigames I could mention. Here are a few.
This one is basically a very simple take on Rocket League.
This video covers some of the titles from a N64 Jam a few years ago. The same guy did another video on the 2024 minigame-themed jam:
The overall improvement in homebrew visuals shown here should be quite apparent.
The sixth N64brew Game Jam is currently underway, with a January 31 deadline. I'll be very interested to see what people made this year! https://itch.io/jam/n64brew-game-jam-6
And that isn't even getting into the hacking and rompatching scene, with things like Kaze Emanuar's effort to rewrite Super Mario 64 to get it running fully smoothly at 60fps with perfectly optimized code. So yeah, the Nintendo 64 has come a long way. Today the way the hardware runs is much better understood than it ever was before, and optimized code is now possible. The N64 has major strengths -- its fast CPU, its SGI supercomputer roots -- and limitations -- the small texture cache, the slow RAM access speed. Making a great N64 game requires working around those limitations. Managing RAM access is the key, apparently. That is probably the biggest cause of slowdown. Optimizing is apparently pretty challenging but obviously possible, as the results show.