He's not a war profiteer, he's a peace profiteer. His philosophy is peace through strength, not profit through death. He even strongly emphasizes saving lives through weapons with better precision, which has been the trajectory of US weapons design for many decades. Russia is over there killing everything in sight and leveling entire cities including thousands of schools.
Your claim is similar to saying nobody should own a gun, because it should be illegal to defend yourself or others. So everyone who owns any kind of weapon is evil and bad? Only bad people are allowed to own weapons and we should just roll over?
Nobody should defend Ukraine from Russia? Anduril has been helping Ukraine since very early on.
AWS (and many others) is also then war profiteering company with JWCC, C2E, WildandStormy, not to mention all the other defense contractors that rely on their computer power to design and operate mass surveillance and killing of people. Is your agenda selectively blind?
not OP but yes, i consider the tech sphere's dive into mass surveillance to be war profiteering and have eliminated or minimized several in my life including amazon and spotify.
A friend of mine did posit the quandary that an "unpalatable" individual such as Luckey appears to be one of the few making consumer-friendly products: Removable, swappable battery packs, AA battery support, standard USB-C charging, easy interoperability, open sourced designs, exposed screws, teardown instructions, etc. Apparently ModRetro is even looking into making dumb TVs for gaming.
It's ironic, in another world HN commenters would be lauding Luckey and ModRetro for all these virtues.
Comparing a run-of-the-mill defense contractor to a serial rapist and murderer is certainly up there in the most unhinged justifications that I've seen on HN.
I don’t think the parent comment was trying to equate the two, but rather pushing the argument to its logical extreme to test show that the reasoning doesn’t hold consistently across cases. Whether they made a convincing argument is separate.
Taking it to a logical extreme is good practice for thinking from first principles, but always pair it up with going to the logical extreme in the other direction. That might look something like: "would you really eat at a restaurant owned by a habitual jaywalker?".
Run-of-the-mill. Ya know, a normal perpetuator of war profiteering. I mean he's your standard enabler of civilian bombing. Simply an average propagandist. Just a regular guy!
Yeah I don't really like Luckey, or what I've heard from him anyways. But in the run up to launch the Chromatic, it became pretty clear that this guy, for whatever reason, is really passionate about gameboy. I have been less impressed with the other emulator/fpga machines. the chromatic is solid though.
> It's ironic, in another world HN commenters would be lauding Luckey and ModRetro for all these virtues.
Lot's of HN (and "social" media) commenters in this world evidently are; nothing ironic about it.
It's just many people have a radically different set of ethics which, once they become principles, can't be easily, or at all, compromised on. And just to be fair, it's not just the what, but the how (which extends not just to Luckey & Friends, but to Anduril & Friends).
> Lot's of HN (and "social" media) commenters in this world evidently are; nothing ironic about it.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that it's ironic that the one guy providing these consumer-friendly features is considered anathema by many of the people clamoring for those features. You, yourself even mention downthread that you'd otherwise be interested in the M64 Pro controller, but won't consider it.
I was just trying to make a genuine comment remarking on the dichotomy, but I guess people are more interested in making quippy one-liners.
> I suppose what I'm trying to say is that it's ironic that the one guy providing these consumer-friendly features is considered anathema by many of the people clamoring for those features.
Yeah, I got that. I just don't think the fact that a to me detestable individual can have, or work for, an outfit that produces (some) good, interesting, or even highly impactful merchandise is at all remarkable. History is littered with such people, especially in the tech sector (e. g. Ford, von Braun, etc.).
I am nuanced enough to appreciate that these qualities are present in the products being produced and still not buy from this producer because of their industry ties. Hopefully someone without such ridiculously unpalatable PR is able to copycat their design and sell a competitor - and hopefully the lead they've laid sets the standard for easily replaceable parts for the market (though, I'd mention that retro gaming hardware is intentionally made to be as modular as possible in most circumstances anyways).
> I am nuanced enough to appreciate that these qualities are present in the products being produced and still not buy from this producer because of their industry ties.
ModRetro produces one thing I do have an interest in. A partly aluminium-cast version of the, to me, most ergonomic gamepad made so far: the classic trimaran-style N64 controller. But that marriage ain't gonna happen. And that goes for every other (future) product of theirs as well.
Certainly one of the most devisive controller designs, but the lack of two thumbsticks is precisely what I like about it. The pad centers one thumbstick and the trigger on opposite sides of the "main hull", with the rest of the inputs divided along two (remappable) zones, i. e. the outriggers. I have never held a controller in my hand with better ergonomics and holding adaptability. Even the size is just right for my hands.
It's the only pad that ever made FPS games on a console a joy to play for me; put in two analog sticks and you fuck with that formula. Its only serious weaknesses are the cheap plastic, especially for the thumbstick, and the weight (too light). Make a full metal version out of it, with some thumbstick material mods known from the PvP fighting game community, and it's the best. Well, at least for me.
I have mixed feelings about it. I don't agree with how my country often ends up using these technologies, but defense tech and weaponry still seems pretty necessary. The US is not the only one doing this. Should they wait for their adversaries to have the upper hand? I don't think it's such a bad thing, as long as they can put the right people in charge. That's a whole other problem.
I mean, that's just defense companies in general now. Would you rather have your own soldiers dying in a war, rather than robots? Ukraine is using AI in their targeting, is that something you condemn?
This is no different from the invention of machine guns or artillery. Yes, it's sad that these things will be used in war to kill (more) people. But intentionally avoiding that technology means you're just handicapping your own military and sacrificing others' lives for your principles.
I saw a video from the ModRetro YouTube channel a few days ago and thought it was AI because it only had 10,000 subscribers. They’ve been at it since March of 2024 and have less than 400,000 views spread across 54 videos. Strong attention economy recession indicator that even a memeified billionaire can’t get organic attention on a platform like that.
This is the same concept as "separating art from the artist". i.e. can you appreciate the creation without associating it with the personal foibles of the creator?
If you went around scrutinizing the personal failings of every single creator and deciding not to support their art, you would cut yourself off from a huge chunk of human creation. Creators and builders are disproportionately imperfect people.
Harvey Weinstein, for example, is a serial abuser and genuinely evil person. He also was involved in an enormous number of Hollywood productions. Do you go out of your way to make sure to never watch or consume media associated with him? My guess is probably not. It's impractical and also I think the net benefit of this mindset, where we only allow people with certain moral characteristics to succeed, is a loss for society.
Xbox is literally imploding right now, they laid off half the company and significantly raised the console price. If sales were good they never would've had to do game pass.
Besides, it's a dumb argument to compare military purchasing non-weapons commodities like controllers or toilet paper to a literal weapons company. It is almost literally impossible to live anywhere in the world without using a platform hosted on AWS or Azure. It is very easy to not buy things from the drone and now retro-console king. They are entirely different asks.
but the comforts you enjoy directly came from those very items you listed as unethical.
you could live off the grid in the cabins without internet if you truly believed in being free from the grips of the military industrial complex and the petrodollar you deeply feel guilty about
anything less and you risk sounding like a hypocrite
Genuinely what am I supposed to do if you can't read? Participating in the global economy is not the same thing as enthusiastically giving money to a company that only makes weapons of war because you love war. If you try to not use AWS in a modernized economy like the US you will probably die on the street and still have unwittingly used AWS anyways.
No one should be surprised that this comment doesn't go over well on HN. But the multiple people replying to you like "Oh? Cool I'm gonna buy more now that I know it signals that I love war" is really disgusting. And they're all identical, like you've activated something in their programming.
They're posting flamebait in an attempt to trigger HN's cool-down autokill and bury the root post. Usual red vs blue tribal conflict, influence campaign, or people reacting to something that makes them feel bad by pretending it doesn't exist, who knows.
I wish I could just leave earth until this whole "tech industry" thing blows over.
Yeah, I’m seeing this a lot too recently. I guess polarization comes for us all eventually. Nuance and cognitive dissonance are so painful for some they simply flatten their position to something that feels safely straightforward, even if ghoulish?
It common to reply to silly comments with more silliness. It's a obvious virtue signal, which rightfully draws ridicule. Some people use mocking as ridicule, and it says nothing about the person doing the mocking, since they're likely saying it as a joke.
It's not a good or acceptable thing for the level of discourse on this website to be a bunch of 8th-grade boys on Xbox Live. You can disagree with OP or be conservative or whatever, but saying you want to support a drone manufacturer for no self-interested reason but because you like drone warfare is not a proportionate response to someone saying something "silly".
but your position that people just making nuanced non-emotional purchase decisions is somehow flawed itself is the main point of contention, its similar to how vegetarians keep pushing their views and preferences as a yardstick to measure others who don't share the same values.
so the question here is why can you not tolerate people simply separating a product from the manufacturer of another niche that is completely legal and is demanded by sovereign nations?
Libdragon has been improved massively in the past year or so, there are now simple demo games that show capabilities far beyond the original N64 games (bump mapping textures, HDR, seamless loading of massive overworld maps, etc.) Really talented core team, fun to give them a follow.
That[1] was James Lambert, who was also responsible for Portal 64[2] and is now developing a completely new N64 game. His Youtube channel is worth a follow.
I’ve been building quite an ambitious flash cart menu system for the N64 recently, and it’s been an absolute joy! Would really recommend anyone with a curious, hacker mindset that grew up with these consoles to explore this platform - it’s fascinating!
Here’s what I’m working on - it contains a comprehensive retail game metadata library & cheats database, can screenshot running games and execute frame-perfect tool-assisted speedruns: https://youtu.be/UyqtU0hgGRA?si=_YisdNOrQrSpdpNT
I'm tinkering with a PlayStation homebrew (voxel space renderer) and development for fifth generation consoles has never been easier.
Modern toolchains, programming languages, dev cartridges and libraries from the community makes all the difference. Outside of some niceties like ICE (gotta write that GDB stub for target hardware at some point), it's not that different from what you'd experience with modern embedded work.
I am still amazed my own minimalist PS1 tutorial series [1] became as popular as it did, given that prior to it basically all learning material on the internet was written around the decent-for-the-time-but-horrible-now Sony SDK and often based on 30-year-old example code full of 30-year-old C practices (in particular the complete disregard for aliasing and concurrency, which resulted in plenty of headaches once people started using those ancient libraries and example code with modern GCC). We even have bleeding-edge C++ SDK options [2] complete with an STL and coroutine support, so if anybody here wants to try their hand at PS1 homebrew development I would highly encourage checking out the modern tooling we have now.
To put this into perspective for youngsters, that horrible Sony SDK was considered a wonder for its time, and what kickstarted the movement away from Assembly into C for home console development, as main language.
Until then, only arcades had already made the switch.
On PS2, PS2Linux, Dreamcast there was already C++ support, by the way.
I’ve started to adapt my historic accounting of gaming away from hardware centric (console generations) and toward languages and compilers, and the force-multiplication they provided to developers which is tangibly evident in the products. Though these do correlate strongly with orders of magnitude of RAM being made available.
- Physical logic gate era of gaming.
- Assembly era
- C era
- OOP era
- Interpreted languages and game logic living in scripts on top of c++ engines
FWIW, interpreted languages living on top of a native code engine has been a pretty common theme throughout. It goes back to early PC days (when PC meant IBM, Apple II, etc), where it was common that engine would be written in ASM, but it would implement a VM with all of the game business logic would exist to ease porting to very differnt systems. Almost all the early LucasArts games were written this way (hence ScummVM), Another World, the Sierra Games, etc.
There is something so charming about the N64/PS1 era. They were so unique in their own right and you could tell at a passing glance which system was displaying on the screen even if you didn't know what game it was. Two radically different systems at the dawning of 3D console games.
I bought a MiSTer for me and my son and we played the heck out of Mario Kart 64 and Mario Golf. I think he picked up my "gaming is dead now" outlook since he doesn't really have any interest in new systems or games anymore
One gets the impression that gaming is dead when one's only contact with modern gaming consists of reading headlines about a handful of AAA games.
In reality, the gaming landscape has never been better, as game production has expanded in several directions:
- The barrier to entry into game development has been lowered; People who are talented in design but not programming now have the opportunity to create games
- AAA budgets have increased; those who enjoy large-scale productions will find increasingly large games
- There is still a market for old-school games, so plenty of (especially smaller) companies produce retromodern games
Heck, they even still produce commercial Commodore 64 games o_O
Of course, there is less room for radical innovation, but people do not play only radically innovative games. And regardless, innovation still exists today, especially in smaller-scale productions.
All we see out of mainstream AAA gaming is abused devs, private equity scalping, and mindless remaster regurgitation. Basically going through the same problems as Hollywood is with major films. You get a massive banger of a production every few years, and the rest is just endless money burning and developer harm.
Meanwhile the good indie devs are a dice roll on if they are gonna get recognized by the world at large and find success, just like small budget films.
My game library gets older by the day and I prefer it that way, but love it when an indie game bubbles to the surface and gets beloved by enough fans to break into the news cycle. Itch.io is the only place I look for games anymore unless something I need for the collection hits GoG finally.
This is a very rose tinted take.
AAA game development was far more brutal in the 90s.
Go look up the development of Sonic Xtreme in the 90s. A brutal development process in the 90s that led to more thsn half the development team camping out in Redwood City Sega office building for months until they all got so sick half the team went on medical leave. Or Quake, where the game development process literally broke the team.
>Or Quake, where the game development process literally broke the team.
Going by interviews with the team over the decades, they had clashing personalities and poor leadership.
> AAA game development was far more brutal in the 90s.
Honestly it's probably always been brutal going back even to the early days of Atari. Companies like EA have spent three decades destroying beloved studios for profit, only to now be chewed up and spit out by PE/VC bastards themselves. A fitting end really.
Main issue with AAA gaming was studios consulting people who wanted to tell gamers what they should want, using their capital on paying influencers and media to demonize said gamers for rejecting their games and so on.
That's what pisses off the mostly straight hetrosexual male crowd that make up most of the gaming market.
A big reason why many east asian game studios are doing so well by rejecting that tried and failed formula from the West.
You don't have to go full GamerGate non-sense to find plenty of issues that are hurting the AAA market. Private equity, shareholders, and greed have been far more damaging to gaming.
why can't you see that their greed has enabled the dynamics that brought AAA market to its where it is ? you dont think PE has influence on media with their vast resources ?
> That's what pisses off the mostly straight hetrosexual male crowd that make up most of the gaming market.
Honestly, the hell kinda remark is that?
It’s nothing to do with sexuality or “companies telling you what you want” but everything to do with companies putting out complete and utter slop and people ACTUALLY buying it all. They wouldn’t waste all that time and investment money if they knew there wasn’t a market for it, but guess what? There is.
Gamers seem to have the memory span of a goldfish. Horse armour? Bad. GTA VI at 80 bucks and no physical release on consoles? OMG YAAAAAASSSS GIVE ME MORE OF THE SAME HOOKER-SEX SIMULATOR WITH CRIMINAL ACTS SPRINKLED ON TOP!!!
Don’t complain about gaming companies’ behaviour if you keep giving your money to them.
Hell with emulation the sky is the limit now too. I’d be bummed if my steam account exploded today but I’ve got countless other options available to me. Whenever I hear people act all snobby and claim there’s nothing to play today i tell them stop playing modern games and go play all the old games that are allegedly so much better and perfect. How they can’t find anything among modern Indies in particular is beyond me, but hey, emulation’s right there waiting for them. Hell I have RetroArch on my iPhone. I was playing a PSP game all last week on mine.
I love that. My wife and I are hopefully having kids soon and that's one thing I really want to encourage. Not to say that modern games aren't any good, but there's an increasing lack of respect for the player's time and wallet. The goal is shifting to maximizing value because they're getting more expensive to produce, but increasing the game price itself is a cardinal sin. Not to mention that live service games just out-earn non-service ones.
I hope it works out. I can see it working in the reverse: I play n64/ps1/ps2/gamecube games with my kid, they go to school and their friends are playing fortnight or valorant, and then you become the bad guy for trying to be an obstacle in that.
Let your kid go over to their friend's house to play Fortnite or Valorant. And let your kid's friend come over to yours to play Mario Kart.
I think as adults we get locked into a few things. I remember as a kid I would play anything I had access to and liked. Now it's more of one or two games at a time.
One thing that's absolutely shocking is how "hard" it is to actually play games these days. Sit down with anything modern and between software updates, EULAs, load times, network congestion, etc. it can easily be 15-20 minutes before you actually do something; especially if you're an infrequent player.
Pop in a game on N64/Gamecube and you're controlling the character within 10 seconds every time.
The modern upgrades for those generations really make them great - the 8BitDo kit to make an N64 controller wireless, N64 Summercarts, replacing the optical drive in Gamecubes with a memory card reader...
That's true for the big-advertising-budget AAA slop games. Go do a search for "best indie games 2025" and you'll find more amazing games made just last year than you could spend several whole years playing.
As a lifer of gaming (with a wife with similar tastes), prior to having kids my friends and I would have the discussions about "raising our kids right on the old games". I can't claim to be some classic purist, my last 25 years of gaming has been 90%+ Halo, with other competitive shooters and hardcore racing sims, but we still own almost all of our old systems.
My oldest is 7, and my youngest almost 5, and they came into gaming in a round-about way. My sister was visiting when the oldest was 3 or 4, and asked to play "an old Sonic 3D game". So, I pulled the Dreamcast out of storage, hooked everything up, and she played for all of 15 minutes before getting bored. However, my daughter was enamored. Immediately asked to play and even knowing how janky old Sonic was, I obliged.
Honestly, the rest is history. I'm not exaggerating when I say that our living room TV currently has a Dreamcast, a Gamecube, an Xbox One, PS3, PS4, and Switch hooked up to it. Both girls are huge Sonic fans, and play everything from rereleases of the Genesis games, to every brand new Sonic game that comes out, along with a whole mix of other age appropriate games (3D Marios, Animal Crossing, Smash Bros, and Mario Kart all being staples in our household).
My point in all of this is that if you expose them to the older stuff at a young age and it clicks, they'll explore the gaming landscape in their own way. I've also got an 11 year old brother that plays Fortnite with his friends every day, but also is trying to collect every single Lego game that's come out since they started the Lego Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc. series of games. Kids will like what they're going to like, but having parents that are enthusiastic about the breadth of what the medium has to offer will encourage them to dig being the modern offerings.
>I think he picked up my "gaming is dead now" outlook since he doesn't really have any interest in new systems or games anymore
This is interesting, as I was about to say that gaming has never been more alive than it is now - but it's true that at least the developments in hardware are not nearly as exciting as they used to be in the past. Maybe that's what he's feeling?
The hardware thing is a yes and no type of deal. Yes next gen hardware is largely boring but retro gaming hardware is amazing right now. I recently acquired a r36s which is an amazing system and apparently can also run things like Undertale or Stardew valley (yet to try out this part). I'm having a blast playing the Pokemon games.
I'm a bit of an old-timer now (almost 45), but I enjoy a lot of the classics on GOG. And at a price that can't be beat. Totally no interest in playing modern games.
I grew up playing diablo II and super smash bros (super nintendo before that!). While I don't have as much time for it these days, gaming couldn't be farther from dead, IMO. There are incredible games and worlds being created both from AAA and indie studios alike.
It's interesting people have this perspective, there are some Numbers that support it. But there endless layoffs, studios closing and it's impossible to get a game dev related job at the moment.
I've been on-and-off writing a Zig library for writing N64 games and it's indeed pretty wild how getting working code was as simple as telling the compiler to use LLVM's MIPS III target.
Of course, getting working code that actually does anything useful is a much different story (it's taking multiple days just to write the wrappers for RDP commands, for example; lots of cross-referencing between N64Brew wiki pages v. official SGI docs v. libdragon source code v. Peter Lemon's assembly code to figure out what all the different bitpacked fields really mean and how to best represent them), but it still feels magical that I can just use an ordinary toolchain and not some ancient proprietary monstrosity.
The same way it's done now with current generation consoles: the manufacturer would provide you with SDKs and development hardware once you paid them a decent chunk of money and signed an NDA. Prior to the fifth generation it was common for the SDK to be just an assembler, debugger and register-level hardware documentation, leaving the implementation of a kernel and game engine up to the game developer.
Sony however decided to provide a full C toolchain based on GCC as well as a set of very high level libraries that abstracted away basically all aspects of the PS1 [1], all the way up to implementing a ready-to-go 3D engine and MIDI sequencer. This was an unpopular move as the libraries were slow, inefficient and most game developers were used to having full control over the hardware, but it also allowed inexperienced devs to get started quickly (as proven by the thousands of low budget PS1 titles that used the high level APIs) and eventually contributed to the popularity of the console over its peers with worse tooling.
Sony would eventually go on to release some slightly lower level documentation for certain aspects of the console as well as APIs that better mapped to how the hardware actually worked under the hood. It wasn't however until years later that the hardware would be fully reverse engineered at the register level [2], and it took even longer for most homebrew to move away from the official SDK (which only really started happening a few years ago as accurate emulators and homebrew SDKs started popping up).
They had stuff, but it was all proprietary. The N64 was a stripped-down implementation of the technology used on (high-end) SGI graphics workstations of the time. SGI certainly had all the required tools.
> Does Modretro's target market buy this type of stuff? Or are they the type to just download and emulator and ROM.
Speaking as someone who spent all weekend playing his new M64: Yes, the target market often does buy the cartridge. I've got a brand new copy of Xeno Crisis sitting on my shelf, although Xibalba was a close 2nd. (Tied with Buck Bumble ;) )
That said, there's definitely a crowd that would rather buy a summercart and pirate all their roms. Personally, I'm interested in more thoughtful and intentional electronics, so I'm attracted to the idea of old school "buy the game on a cartridge" mentality.
Companies have been building and selling clones of Nintendo consoles for many years now. I suspect if Nintendo had a legal angle against this they would've exercised it a long time ago.
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?
> 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!
The “development” version of that is even crazier: it's a very tiny signed bootloader that does nothing but copies the “real” bootloader into memory, then trampolines into it, such that even developing your own IPL3 doesn't require having to re-brute-force the signature for every build.
And on top of that, libdragon's IPL3 doesn't just blindly copy the first megabyte of ROM code into RDRAM like the official Nintendo one does, but actually expects the ROM data after it to be a full-blown ELF executable, which it parses out and copies pieces of to the specified places.
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.
I never saw a piggyback cartridge at the time though, or one that was obviously unlicensed. Of course, this could have more to do with Nintendo's legal pressure than with technological possibility.
The main pirating route at the time (a device (oh which there were several) that sat under the N64 and had either an Iomega Zip drive or a CD drive for holding ROMs), had a port for inserting a real cartridge to use its lockout chip.
As far as Nintendo's concerned, it is. Their method of piracy prevention at this point was putting a lockout chip on every cartridge, and attaching their license fee to the lockout chip. Your homebrew cartridge needs one too.
I consider all homebrew stuff very cool but the number of games emulating PS1 / N64 aesthetics is so massively oversaturated at this point that I'm kind of burned out on it.
But in general, the thing that really impresses me is what people come up with working within these various constraints. Less is more.
Megadrive / genesis homebrew is where it's at for me. But tbh I am honestly kind of clueless when it comes to this stuff. Still trying to get parallax scrolling and foreground occlusion figured out for my "game."
> the number of games emulating PS1 / N64 aesthetics is so massively oversaturated at this point that I'm kind of burned out on it.
The point isn't just to be a novelty throwback aesthetic. It's the most accessible way for indie devs to make a 3D game without needing to worry about particularly high quality 3D models and animation.
Super interesting article - thanks for sharing your journey. As AI slop takes over the internet, well written and original technical content like these will be important.
Also,
2026 web dev: 4MB of JavaScript to render a button.
2026 N64 dev: entire FPS in 1MB
if I am not wrong, the game described in this article, is presented in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gOJUEcKYRk, from Palmer Luckey[1]. Wild this guy find time and energy for this side quest. That's passion.
Anyone know a vendor that might sell SummerCart in amateur quantities? Doesn't need to do that specifically, but maybe there's custom low volume board makers, like with 3D printer economics.
Are you looking to make homemade homebrew carts? If the M64 carts are anything like ModRetro's chromatic carts, the boards will be flashable. ModRetro has also stated they're planning on open-sourcing the design, so if we're lucky there could be a large variety of people making flashable blank carts in the near future.
I'm really looking forward to the Epilogue 64 Operator. I have the GB Operator, and it's been amazing to be able to flash romhacks onto carts and play on bona-fide hardware.
I am in the process of using Claude Opus 5 to build an N64 game, and it really works. I've written no code and it is able to build a fully functional game.
I got it to write a skill for driving the Ares emulator via GDB Remote Serial Protocol and it uses that for its feedback loop.
What do you get out of that? The utility of having the end product (a generated game for an obsolete console) seems pretty small, and personally I would think the fun is in learning about the inner workings of the time capsule that is 90s hardware. Would you mind explaining?
It's just not the same. I made games for the PSP and Vita and it's "different" than making games for Windows or Playstation/Xbox. There's something about seeing your creation on a tiny handheld. I guess maybe nowadays we got desensitized to it because our phones are actual supercomputers which can run Fortnite without breaking a sweat, but making a device with 2MB of ram play your game as you imagined it is just hyper cool and (for me personally) is incredibly satisfying.
I'm not trying to be dismissive here - I am the type to be into the nitty gritty nerdy stuff that using Claude skips, BUT I have exactly zero experience developing anything for a legacy hardware platform in any capacity (with or without Claude) so genuinely curious to learn varying perspectives here.
Is it about the idea of the platform having limited capabilities (e.g. akin to Game Bub or MiSTer) or about tactile aesthetics (e.g. possibly vaguely comparable - though not really - to r36t or play.date) or something different entirely.
Honestly I think part of it is just that it's cool to see software running on this platform. I remember coding some trash apps on the 3DS back in the day simply because I could. It was great seeing code running somewhere it isn't strictly "supposed to"
If you enjoy this sort of thing I’d highly recommend pico-8 and tic-80. Both have pretty full featured dev environments and have a set of restrictions that make developing for them fun.
While I agree with you, I think it's interesting that LLMs have progressed enough to be able to write working code even for niche and heavily-constrained platforms like the N64. I'm sure it helps that modern toolchains make that easier (I don't expect very many LLMs to be able to put up with the old Windows 9x or IRIX toolchains, to say the least!).
If your game fits in the bounds of N64 hardware it makes perfect sense IMO. You basically get virtually all modern platforms for free. Much easier than wrestling with all the modern API that are "platform independent" but not really.
I mean, there is plenty of people out there who enjoy the process of making a game(they have a really clear idea of gameplay mechanics they think would be fun when put together) but they really don't enjoy programming at all. I guess it's kinda the same - I Want to see my game happen, I don't want to code it. Which isn't that different from where all the other tools are leading us anyway. Nowadays you can make a video game by just downloading an engine and building everything using the included scripting language most of the time - no need to understand rendering, IO, input or anything else.
> Nowadays you can make a video game by just downloading an engine and building everything using the included scripting language most of the time - no need to understand rendering, IO, input or anything else.
I don't disagree, but I don't see it as a positive, looking at the current game releases and their performance being shockingly unoptimised, there is a lot of lost real world value in knowing the lower level details, it's like anything really, sometimes you have to do the hard/unappealing work to create your best work.
Hmmm look, I can offer you my perspective on this.
I've been a low level engine programmer in video games all my working life. I worked on a few AAA games that sold 20M+ copies, I'm not saying this to boast, I'm saying this to say I know how the sausage is made. My literal day to day job is fixing issues like "The RHI thread on the Switch takes 0.5ms longer than it should" and optimizing things as much as possible.
I think if you asked me few years ago, I would have also taken the same stance you did - that these tools make it "too easy" and we get unoptimized crap out there.
But you know what, nowadays I feel like I mellowed out a lot. A lot of these so called "friendslop" games are horrible in terms of technical work. And you know what? They still bring joy to people. They still make people laugh and have a great time with the people they like. One of my favourite memories from a game I worked on was reading comments from people who said they were looking forward to just playing the game after work in the evening with their friends. Was optimizing the IO performance on PS4 essential to make the game happen? Sure. But what mattered more was that the game was actually fun to play.
Nowadays I see the improvement in tooling as nothing but a positive. There will always be hardcore engine programmers who know how to do this stuff, I have zero doubt about it. But allowing people to just download an engine and make the thing is absolutely fantastic. To say that it's bad - to me personally - that's gatekeeping. Saying you can't make a game unless you know how to write a renderer or a physics system is so offputting to people who want to make a game but just don't know how - we should be encouraging them, not chastising them for it. Little Big Planet did it well as one of the first games of that kind, if you recall that - just saying, here's a sandbox, make a thing that brings joy to other people. Isn't that what gaming is about?
And on a more serious, business side - it's kinda crazy that Epic lets you use UE for FREE until you start making serious money on the game that you made. You can start a company, hire people, and just start making the game you want to make without paying anything for the tooling. Very few other companies in the world let you do this.
You know thats completely fair. I'm not in the game industry but I see some friends and what they do and I do have to admit, I wouldn't be able for it so it's not really fair for me to critisise.
> it's kinda crazy that Epic lets you use UE for FREE until you start making serious money on the game that you made.
Thinking about how powerfull UE is, it is kind of insane.
ModRetro is owned by the same war profiteer who runs Anduril Industries which makes human-killing robots.
Their previous console had an edition made of the same metal as Anduril's lethal drones.
[1]: https://www.timeextension.com/news/2025/12/site-news-why-we-... [2]: https://kotaku.com/modretro-anduril-chromatic-attack-drone-m...
He's not a war profiteer, he's a peace profiteer. His philosophy is peace through strength, not profit through death. He even strongly emphasizes saving lives through weapons with better precision, which has been the trajectory of US weapons design for many decades. Russia is over there killing everything in sight and leveling entire cities including thousands of schools.
Your claim is similar to saying nobody should own a gun, because it should be illegal to defend yourself or others. So everyone who owns any kind of weapon is evil and bad? Only bad people are allowed to own weapons and we should just roll over?
Nobody should defend Ukraine from Russia? Anduril has been helping Ukraine since very early on.
Well, are those humans Iranian schoolchildren or Russian troops invading Ukraine? Hard to make a judgment without knowing.
AWS (and many others) is also then war profiteering company with JWCC, C2E, WildandStormy, not to mention all the other defense contractors that rely on their computer power to design and operate mass surveillance and killing of people. Is your agenda selectively blind?
not OP but yes, i consider the tech sphere's dive into mass surveillance to be war profiteering and have eliminated or minimized several in my life including amazon and spotify.
Why are you presenting your unfounded assumption as a gotcha? Do you have any basis whatsoever to believe GP supports AWS?
This is why I exited the tech industry.
They've all become war profiteers and fascist enablers.
The only way to live with my conscience was to choose not to be complicit.
Oh wow that’s cool, I had no idea Palmer Lucky owned this. He pumps out quality tech. Im gonna check it out.
A friend of mine did posit the quandary that an "unpalatable" individual such as Luckey appears to be one of the few making consumer-friendly products: Removable, swappable battery packs, AA battery support, standard USB-C charging, easy interoperability, open sourced designs, exposed screws, teardown instructions, etc. Apparently ModRetro is even looking into making dumb TVs for gaming.
It's ironic, in another world HN commenters would be lauding Luckey and ModRetro for all these virtues.
Ted Bundy could bake beautiful Soufflé. Perfect every time. Deliciously balanced flavours. Incredible texture.
Isn't it strange that commentors focus on the other, less palatable, aspect of his life?
As the meme goes, "you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it to them.'"
Comparing a run-of-the-mill defense contractor to a serial rapist and murderer is certainly up there in the most unhinged justifications that I've seen on HN.
I'm getting very tired of the redditification of HN. This place used to not be like this.
I don’t think the parent comment was trying to equate the two, but rather pushing the argument to its logical extreme to test show that the reasoning doesn’t hold consistently across cases. Whether they made a convincing argument is separate.
Taking it to a logical extreme is good practice for thinking from first principles, but always pair it up with going to the logical extreme in the other direction. That might look something like: "would you really eat at a restaurant owned by a habitual jaywalker?".
I literally was trying to equate the two.
Except pushing it to the logical extreme is what makes it wrong.
Nevermind that he literally was equating the two and explicitly says so.
Run-of-the-mill. Ya know, a normal perpetuator of war profiteering. I mean he's your standard enabler of civilian bombing. Simply an average propagandist. Just a regular guy!
Yeah, one of them kills school kids for money. The other does it for the love of the game.
Do not assume Hacker News is safe from foreign influence campaigns.
Sadly, this is just an average online take.
Yeah I don't really like Luckey, or what I've heard from him anyways. But in the run up to launch the Chromatic, it became pretty clear that this guy, for whatever reason, is really passionate about gameboy. I have been less impressed with the other emulator/fpga machines. the chromatic is solid though.
> It's ironic, in another world HN commenters would be lauding Luckey and ModRetro for all these virtues.
Lot's of HN (and "social" media) commenters in this world evidently are; nothing ironic about it.
It's just many people have a radically different set of ethics which, once they become principles, can't be easily, or at all, compromised on. And just to be fair, it's not just the what, but the how (which extends not just to Luckey & Friends, but to Anduril & Friends).
> Lot's of HN (and "social" media) commenters in this world evidently are; nothing ironic about it.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that it's ironic that the one guy providing these consumer-friendly features is considered anathema by many of the people clamoring for those features. You, yourself even mention downthread that you'd otherwise be interested in the M64 Pro controller, but won't consider it.
I was just trying to make a genuine comment remarking on the dichotomy, but I guess people are more interested in making quippy one-liners.
> I suppose what I'm trying to say is that it's ironic that the one guy providing these consumer-friendly features is considered anathema by many of the people clamoring for those features.
Yeah, I got that. I just don't think the fact that a to me detestable individual can have, or work for, an outfit that produces (some) good, interesting, or even highly impactful merchandise is at all remarkable. History is littered with such people, especially in the tech sector (e. g. Ford, von Braun, etc.).
I am nuanced enough to appreciate that these qualities are present in the products being produced and still not buy from this producer because of their industry ties. Hopefully someone without such ridiculously unpalatable PR is able to copycat their design and sell a competitor - and hopefully the lead they've laid sets the standard for easily replaceable parts for the market (though, I'd mention that retro gaming hardware is intentionally made to be as modular as possible in most circumstances anyways).
> I am nuanced enough to appreciate that these qualities are present in the products being produced and still not buy from this producer because of their industry ties.
ModRetro produces one thing I do have an interest in. A partly aluminium-cast version of the, to me, most ergonomic gamepad made so far: the classic trimaran-style N64 controller. But that marriage ain't gonna happen. And that goes for every other (future) product of theirs as well.
Controller was terrible, if only for lack of two thumb sticks. Going back to GoldenEye, my second favorite game of all time... It's miserable.
> [...] if only for lack of two thumb sticks.
Certainly one of the most devisive controller designs, but the lack of two thumbsticks is precisely what I like about it. The pad centers one thumbstick and the trigger on opposite sides of the "main hull", with the rest of the inputs divided along two (remappable) zones, i. e. the outriggers. I have never held a controller in my hand with better ergonomics and holding adaptability. Even the size is just right for my hands.
It's the only pad that ever made FPS games on a console a joy to play for me; put in two analog sticks and you fuck with that formula. Its only serious weaknesses are the cheap plastic, especially for the thumbstick, and the weight (too light). Make a full metal version out of it, with some thumbstick material mods known from the PvP fighting game community, and it's the best. Well, at least for me.
Thanks for virtue signaling. Unfortunately, you used internet today which also powers the very industry you are trying to boycott.
I have mixed feelings about it. I don't agree with how my country often ends up using these technologies, but defense tech and weaponry still seems pretty necessary. The US is not the only one doing this. Should they wait for their adversaries to have the upper hand? I don't think it's such a bad thing, as long as they can put the right people in charge. That's a whole other problem.
The article isn't "about" ModRetro, please engage with the actual material instead of off-topic political tirades.
> Modretro agreed to publish the game as a physical launch title for their M64 (a modern N64 clone), complete with cartridge, packaging and manual!
The article says the game is published by ModRetro.
And the contents of the article are almost entirely about the process of making an n64 game. This is HN not reddit.
Good to see Kotaku's admirable journalistic practice of posting a list of histrionic tweets is alive and well
> which makes human-killing robots
I mean, that's just defense companies in general now. Would you rather have your own soldiers dying in a war, rather than robots? Ukraine is using AI in their targeting, is that something you condemn?
This is no different from the invention of machine guns or artillery. Yes, it's sad that these things will be used in war to kill (more) people. But intentionally avoiding that technology means you're just handicapping your own military and sacrificing others' lives for your principles.
Anduril is not "just" anything.
You're right, your family members should be the ones out there pulling the trigger.
I saw a video from the ModRetro YouTube channel a few days ago and thought it was AI because it only had 10,000 subscribers. They’ve been at it since March of 2024 and have less than 400,000 views spread across 54 videos. Strong attention economy recession indicator that even a memeified billionaire can’t get organic attention on a platform like that.
that's wild, it's not like the videos are hosted on an irrelevant platform like bluesky or something. Who knows
This is the same concept as "separating art from the artist". i.e. can you appreciate the creation without associating it with the personal foibles of the creator?
If you went around scrutinizing the personal failings of every single creator and deciding not to support their art, you would cut yourself off from a huge chunk of human creation. Creators and builders are disproportionately imperfect people.
Harvey Weinstein, for example, is a serial abuser and genuinely evil person. He also was involved in an enormous number of Hollywood productions. Do you go out of your way to make sure to never watch or consume media associated with him? My guess is probably not. It's impractical and also I think the net benefit of this mindset, where we only allow people with certain moral characteristics to succeed, is a loss for society.
Yes. It's not impractical, it's baseline human decency.
And ? Are you upset that Google/Microsoft/Oracle sells their tech to the military? Xbox controller is used on nuclear subs too.
also not a good look using kotaku as a source, were you aware of their poor journalistic standards?
I'd take a step back and assess whether the media you are consuming is dictating what to think and feel rather than from free will.
> And ? Are you upset that Google/Microsoft/Oracle sells their tech to the military?
Yes
> Xbox controller is used on nuclear subs too.
I have never played an Xbox, nor do I have any interest in doing so. There is nothing interesting about the Xbox.
You're saying things about yourself, not the Xbox or MS.
There is something interesting about the Xbox, as evidenced by its sales record.
Xbox is literally imploding right now, they laid off half the company and significantly raised the console price. If sales were good they never would've had to do game pass.
Besides, it's a dumb argument to compare military purchasing non-weapons commodities like controllers or toilet paper to a literal weapons company. It is almost literally impossible to live anywhere in the world without using a platform hosted on AWS or Azure. It is very easy to not buy things from the drone and now retro-console king. They are entirely different asks.
but the comforts you enjoy directly came from those very items you listed as unethical.
you could live off the grid in the cabins without internet if you truly believed in being free from the grips of the military industrial complex and the petrodollar you deeply feel guilty about
anything less and you risk sounding like a hypocrite
Genuinely what am I supposed to do if you can't read? Participating in the global economy is not the same thing as enthusiastically giving money to a company that only makes weapons of war because you love war. If you try to not use AWS in a modernized economy like the US you will probably die on the street and still have unwittingly used AWS anyways.
Nobody cares bro
No one should be surprised that this comment doesn't go over well on HN. But the multiple people replying to you like "Oh? Cool I'm gonna buy more now that I know it signals that I love war" is really disgusting. And they're all identical, like you've activated something in their programming.
They're posting flamebait in an attempt to trigger HN's cool-down autokill and bury the root post. Usual red vs blue tribal conflict, influence campaign, or people reacting to something that makes them feel bad by pretending it doesn't exist, who knows. I wish I could just leave earth until this whole "tech industry" thing blows over.
Yeah, I’m seeing this a lot too recently. I guess polarization comes for us all eventually. Nuance and cognitive dissonance are so painful for some they simply flatten their position to something that feels safely straightforward, even if ghoulish?
Social media’s a helluva drug.
It common to reply to silly comments with more silliness. It's a obvious virtue signal, which rightfully draws ridicule. Some people use mocking as ridicule, and it says nothing about the person doing the mocking, since they're likely saying it as a joke.
It's not a good or acceptable thing for the level of discourse on this website to be a bunch of 8th-grade boys on Xbox Live. You can disagree with OP or be conservative or whatever, but saying you want to support a drone manufacturer for no self-interested reason but because you like drone warfare is not a proportionate response to someone saying something "silly".
but your position that people just making nuanced non-emotional purchase decisions is somehow flawed itself is the main point of contention, its similar to how vegetarians keep pushing their views and preferences as a yardstick to measure others who don't share the same values.
so the question here is why can you not tolerate people simply separating a product from the manufacturer of another niche that is completely legal and is demanded by sovereign nations?
Thanks for the heads up. I wouldn't have checked it out otherwise. Palmer Luckey has done some cool shit. And Anduril is super impressive.
Libdragon has been improved massively in the past year or so, there are now simple demo games that show capabilities far beyond the original N64 games (bump mapping textures, HDR, seamless loading of massive overworld maps, etc.) Really talented core team, fun to give them a follow.
Demos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP8g2ngHftY
I recall seeing a demo of an N64 driving an Oculus Rift.
That[1] was James Lambert, who was also responsible for Portal 64[2] and is now developing a completely new N64 game. His Youtube channel is worth a follow.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha3fDU-1wHk
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAkSHzR-P7M
I’ve been building quite an ambitious flash cart menu system for the N64 recently, and it’s been an absolute joy! Would really recommend anyone with a curious, hacker mindset that grew up with these consoles to explore this platform - it’s fascinating!
Here’s what I’m working on - it contains a comprehensive retail game metadata library & cheats database, can screenshot running games and execute frame-perfect tool-assisted speedruns: https://youtu.be/UyqtU0hgGRA?si=_YisdNOrQrSpdpNT
I'm tinkering with a PlayStation homebrew (voxel space renderer) and development for fifth generation consoles has never been easier.
Modern toolchains, programming languages, dev cartridges and libraries from the community makes all the difference. Outside of some niceties like ICE (gotta write that GDB stub for target hardware at some point), it's not that different from what you'd experience with modern embedded work.
I am still amazed my own minimalist PS1 tutorial series [1] became as popular as it did, given that prior to it basically all learning material on the internet was written around the decent-for-the-time-but-horrible-now Sony SDK and often based on 30-year-old example code full of 30-year-old C practices (in particular the complete disregard for aliasing and concurrency, which resulted in plenty of headaches once people started using those ancient libraries and example code with modern GCC). We even have bleeding-edge C++ SDK options [2] complete with an STL and coroutine support, so if anybody here wants to try their hand at PS1 homebrew development I would highly encourage checking out the modern tooling we have now.
[1] https://github.com/spicyjpeg/ps1-bare-metal
[2] https://github.com/grumpycoders/pcsx-redux/tree/main/src/mip...
To put this into perspective for youngsters, that horrible Sony SDK was considered a wonder for its time, and what kickstarted the movement away from Assembly into C for home console development, as main language.
Until then, only arcades had already made the switch.
On PS2, PS2Linux, Dreamcast there was already C++ support, by the way.
I’ve started to adapt my historic accounting of gaming away from hardware centric (console generations) and toward languages and compilers, and the force-multiplication they provided to developers which is tangibly evident in the products. Though these do correlate strongly with orders of magnitude of RAM being made available.
- Physical logic gate era of gaming.
- Assembly era
- C era
- OOP era
- Interpreted languages and game logic living in scripts on top of c++ engines
- Fully Gen-AI era?
FWIW, interpreted languages living on top of a native code engine has been a pretty common theme throughout. It goes back to early PC days (when PC meant IBM, Apple II, etc), where it was common that engine would be written in ASM, but it would implement a VM with all of the game business logic would exist to ease porting to very differnt systems. Almost all the early LucasArts games were written this way (hence ScummVM), Another World, the Sierra Games, etc.
> Fully Gen-AI era?
Yeah, no.
Your historic accounting is not to be trusted by any means if “gen-AI era” is something that you really believe is happening.
There is something so charming about the N64/PS1 era. They were so unique in their own right and you could tell at a passing glance which system was displaying on the screen even if you didn't know what game it was. Two radically different systems at the dawning of 3D console games.
I bought a MiSTer for me and my son and we played the heck out of Mario Kart 64 and Mario Golf. I think he picked up my "gaming is dead now" outlook since he doesn't really have any interest in new systems or games anymore
> "gaming is dead now"
One gets the impression that gaming is dead when one's only contact with modern gaming consists of reading headlines about a handful of AAA games.
In reality, the gaming landscape has never been better, as game production has expanded in several directions:
- The barrier to entry into game development has been lowered; People who are talented in design but not programming now have the opportunity to create games
- AAA budgets have increased; those who enjoy large-scale productions will find increasingly large games
- There is still a market for old-school games, so plenty of (especially smaller) companies produce retromodern games
Heck, they even still produce commercial Commodore 64 games o_O
Of course, there is less room for radical innovation, but people do not play only radically innovative games. And regardless, innovation still exists today, especially in smaller-scale productions.
it should instead say "AAA gaming is dead now"
All we see out of mainstream AAA gaming is abused devs, private equity scalping, and mindless remaster regurgitation. Basically going through the same problems as Hollywood is with major films. You get a massive banger of a production every few years, and the rest is just endless money burning and developer harm.
Meanwhile the good indie devs are a dice roll on if they are gonna get recognized by the world at large and find success, just like small budget films.
My game library gets older by the day and I prefer it that way, but love it when an indie game bubbles to the surface and gets beloved by enough fans to break into the news cycle. Itch.io is the only place I look for games anymore unless something I need for the collection hits GoG finally.
This is a very rose tinted take. AAA game development was far more brutal in the 90s.
Go look up the development of Sonic Xtreme in the 90s. A brutal development process in the 90s that led to more thsn half the development team camping out in Redwood City Sega office building for months until they all got so sick half the team went on medical leave. Or Quake, where the game development process literally broke the team.
>Or Quake, where the game development process literally broke the team.
Going by interviews with the team over the decades, they had clashing personalities and poor leadership.
> AAA game development was far more brutal in the 90s.
Honestly it's probably always been brutal going back even to the early days of Atari. Companies like EA have spent three decades destroying beloved studios for profit, only to now be chewed up and spit out by PE/VC bastards themselves. A fitting end really.
Main issue with AAA gaming was studios consulting people who wanted to tell gamers what they should want, using their capital on paying influencers and media to demonize said gamers for rejecting their games and so on.
That's what pisses off the mostly straight hetrosexual male crowd that make up most of the gaming market.
A big reason why many east asian game studios are doing so well by rejecting that tried and failed formula from the West.
You don't have to go full GamerGate non-sense to find plenty of issues that are hurting the AAA market. Private equity, shareholders, and greed have been far more damaging to gaming.
why can't you see that their greed has enabled the dynamics that brought AAA market to its where it is ? you dont think PE has influence on media with their vast resources ?
> That's what pisses off the mostly straight hetrosexual male crowd that make up most of the gaming market.
Honestly, the hell kinda remark is that?
It’s nothing to do with sexuality or “companies telling you what you want” but everything to do with companies putting out complete and utter slop and people ACTUALLY buying it all. They wouldn’t waste all that time and investment money if they knew there wasn’t a market for it, but guess what? There is.
Gamers seem to have the memory span of a goldfish. Horse armour? Bad. GTA VI at 80 bucks and no physical release on consoles? OMG YAAAAAASSSS GIVE ME MORE OF THE SAME HOOKER-SEX SIMULATOR WITH CRIMINAL ACTS SPRINKLED ON TOP!!!
Don’t complain about gaming companies’ behaviour if you keep giving your money to them.
Hell with emulation the sky is the limit now too. I’d be bummed if my steam account exploded today but I’ve got countless other options available to me. Whenever I hear people act all snobby and claim there’s nothing to play today i tell them stop playing modern games and go play all the old games that are allegedly so much better and perfect. How they can’t find anything among modern Indies in particular is beyond me, but hey, emulation’s right there waiting for them. Hell I have RetroArch on my iPhone. I was playing a PSP game all last week on mine.
I love that. My wife and I are hopefully having kids soon and that's one thing I really want to encourage. Not to say that modern games aren't any good, but there's an increasing lack of respect for the player's time and wallet. The goal is shifting to maximizing value because they're getting more expensive to produce, but increasing the game price itself is a cardinal sin. Not to mention that live service games just out-earn non-service ones.
I hope it works out. I can see it working in the reverse: I play n64/ps1/ps2/gamecube games with my kid, they go to school and their friends are playing fortnight or valorant, and then you become the bad guy for trying to be an obstacle in that.
Let your kid go over to their friend's house to play Fortnite or Valorant. And let your kid's friend come over to yours to play Mario Kart.
I think as adults we get locked into a few things. I remember as a kid I would play anything I had access to and liked. Now it's more of one or two games at a time.
One thing that's absolutely shocking is how "hard" it is to actually play games these days. Sit down with anything modern and between software updates, EULAs, load times, network congestion, etc. it can easily be 15-20 minutes before you actually do something; especially if you're an infrequent player.
Pop in a game on N64/Gamecube and you're controlling the character within 10 seconds every time.
The modern upgrades for those generations really make them great - the 8BitDo kit to make an N64 controller wireless, N64 Summercarts, replacing the optical drive in Gamecubes with a memory card reader...
That's true for the big-advertising-budget AAA slop games. Go do a search for "best indie games 2025" and you'll find more amazing games made just last year than you could spend several whole years playing.
I dug out the Wii I bought for my daughter for my 6yo grandson. He thinks it's great...it's about the only thing that he'll put down Roblox for.
As a lifer of gaming (with a wife with similar tastes), prior to having kids my friends and I would have the discussions about "raising our kids right on the old games". I can't claim to be some classic purist, my last 25 years of gaming has been 90%+ Halo, with other competitive shooters and hardcore racing sims, but we still own almost all of our old systems.
My oldest is 7, and my youngest almost 5, and they came into gaming in a round-about way. My sister was visiting when the oldest was 3 or 4, and asked to play "an old Sonic 3D game". So, I pulled the Dreamcast out of storage, hooked everything up, and she played for all of 15 minutes before getting bored. However, my daughter was enamored. Immediately asked to play and even knowing how janky old Sonic was, I obliged.
Honestly, the rest is history. I'm not exaggerating when I say that our living room TV currently has a Dreamcast, a Gamecube, an Xbox One, PS3, PS4, and Switch hooked up to it. Both girls are huge Sonic fans, and play everything from rereleases of the Genesis games, to every brand new Sonic game that comes out, along with a whole mix of other age appropriate games (3D Marios, Animal Crossing, Smash Bros, and Mario Kart all being staples in our household).
My point in all of this is that if you expose them to the older stuff at a young age and it clicks, they'll explore the gaming landscape in their own way. I've also got an 11 year old brother that plays Fortnite with his friends every day, but also is trying to collect every single Lego game that's come out since they started the Lego Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc. series of games. Kids will like what they're going to like, but having parents that are enthusiastic about the breadth of what the medium has to offer will encourage them to dig being the modern offerings.
>I think he picked up my "gaming is dead now" outlook since he doesn't really have any interest in new systems or games anymore
This is interesting, as I was about to say that gaming has never been more alive than it is now - but it's true that at least the developments in hardware are not nearly as exciting as they used to be in the past. Maybe that's what he's feeling?
The hardware thing is a yes and no type of deal. Yes next gen hardware is largely boring but retro gaming hardware is amazing right now. I recently acquired a r36s which is an amazing system and apparently can also run things like Undertale or Stardew valley (yet to try out this part). I'm having a blast playing the Pokemon games.
I'm a bit of an old-timer now (almost 45), but I enjoy a lot of the classics on GOG. And at a price that can't be beat. Totally no interest in playing modern games.
“Old timer” “44 years old”
Now come on. The greybeard act was never believable nor interesting.
> you could tell at a passing glance which system was displaying on the screen even if you didn't know what game it was
I always felt the same about the look of PS2 games
I demand Sega Saturn representation in this list!
I grew up playing diablo II and super smash bros (super nintendo before that!). While I don't have as much time for it these days, gaming couldn't be farther from dead, IMO. There are incredible games and worlds being created both from AAA and indie studios alike.
It's interesting people have this perspective, there are some Numbers that support it. But there endless layoffs, studios closing and it's impossible to get a game dev related job at the moment.
I've been on-and-off writing a Zig library for writing N64 games and it's indeed pretty wild how getting working code was as simple as telling the compiler to use LLVM's MIPS III target.
Of course, getting working code that actually does anything useful is a much different story (it's taking multiple days just to write the wrappers for RDP commands, for example; lots of cross-referencing between N64Brew wiki pages v. official SGI docs v. libdragon source code v. Peter Lemon's assembly code to figure out what all the different bitpacked fields really mean and how to best represent them), but it still feels magical that I can just use an ordinary toolchain and not some ancient proprietary monstrosity.
How did they do it back in the day? Was basically everything from the tooling etc. just created inhouse from scratch?
The same way it's done now with current generation consoles: the manufacturer would provide you with SDKs and development hardware once you paid them a decent chunk of money and signed an NDA. Prior to the fifth generation it was common for the SDK to be just an assembler, debugger and register-level hardware documentation, leaving the implementation of a kernel and game engine up to the game developer.
Sony however decided to provide a full C toolchain based on GCC as well as a set of very high level libraries that abstracted away basically all aspects of the PS1 [1], all the way up to implementing a ready-to-go 3D engine and MIDI sequencer. This was an unpopular move as the libraries were slow, inefficient and most game developers were used to having full control over the hardware, but it also allowed inexperienced devs to get started quickly (as proven by the thousands of low budget PS1 titles that used the high level APIs) and eventually contributed to the popularity of the console over its peers with worse tooling.
Sony would eventually go on to release some slightly lower level documentation for certain aspects of the console as well as APIs that better mapped to how the hardware actually worked under the hood. It wasn't however until years later that the hardware would be fully reverse engineered at the register level [2], and it took even longer for most homebrew to move away from the official SDK (which only really started happening a few years ago as accurate emulators and homebrew SDKs started popping up).
[1] https://psx.schnappy.xyz/sdk/Psy-Q/DOCS/LibOver47.pdf
[2] https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/
Crazy then that the Bleem and Bleemcast emulator were so early!
https://www.retroreversing.com/playstation-2-development-har...
The Dreamcast dev kits came with CodeWarrior as an IDE iirc.
They had stuff, but it was all proprietary. The N64 was a stripped-down implementation of the technology used on (high-end) SGI graphics workstations of the time. SGI certainly had all the required tools.
The N64 SDK docs, if not the SDK itself, leaked at one point. I would expect that by now the whole thing has leaked long ago.
Come to think of it, it must have, because the bit-perfect recompilation projects are using the exact compilers from the SDK.
Yeah, the full SDK leaked decades ago when the system was still economically relevant to Nintendo.
Yeah, pretty much.
They provide the devkit hardware, the specification technical documentation and the tool chain to compile the binary.
"Modretro customer service address and, to my surprise, heard back from the head of publishing within a day."
This makes me want to jump in. But also, I wonder how many people will ever buy and play your game.
Does Modretro's target market buy this type of stuff? Or are they the type to just download and emulator and ROM.
> Does Modretro's target market buy this type of stuff? Or are they the type to just download and emulator and ROM.
Speaking as someone who spent all weekend playing his new M64: Yes, the target market often does buy the cartridge. I've got a brand new copy of Xeno Crisis sitting on my shelf, although Xibalba was a close 2nd. (Tied with Buck Bumble ;) )
That said, there's definitely a crowd that would rather buy a summercart and pirate all their roms. Personally, I'm interested in more thoughtful and intentional electronics, so I'm attracted to the idea of old school "buy the game on a cartridge" mentality.
I wonder the dropoff for launch titles versus on-going new releases.
Wow the ModRetro units are really polished... Look great with more than a nod to the original system designs.
Anyone know what Nintendo's stance is on the companies making these kind of "brand inspired" retro products?
> Anyone know what Nintendo's stance is on the companies making these kind of "brand inspired" retro products?
Undoubtedly their legal team is at work 24/7 finding every angle at which to unleash legal hell upon it.
Companies have been building and selling clones of Nintendo consoles for many years now. I suspect if Nintendo had a legal angle against this they would've exercised it a long time ago.
Really? I think the ModRetro M64 is hideous compared to Analogue's 3D (their version of the N64)
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?
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...
The “development” version of that is even crazier: it's a very tiny signed bootloader that does nothing but copies the “real” bootloader into memory, then trampolines into it, such that even developing your own IPL3 doesn't require having to re-brute-force the signature for every build.
And on top of that, libdragon's IPL3 doesn't just blindly copy the first megabyte of ROM code into RDRAM like the official Nintendo one does, but actually expects the ROM data after it to be a full-blown ELF executable, which it parses out and copies pieces of to the specified places.
Pretty slick stuff.
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.
I never saw a piggyback cartridge at the time though, or one that was obviously unlicensed. Of course, this could have more to do with Nintendo's legal pressure than with technological possibility.
The main pirating route at the time (a device (oh which there were several) that sat under the N64 and had either an Iomega Zip drive or a CD drive for holding ROMs), had a port for inserting a real cartridge to use its lockout chip.
Yeah, though piracy is not the same as publishing unlicensed original games (bootlegs) like Xibalba 64.
As far as Nintendo's concerned, it is. Their method of piracy prevention at this point was putting a lockout chip on every cartridge, and attaching their license fee to the lockout chip. Your homebrew cartridge needs one too.
I think a lot of the early flashcarts were piggybacks. I was never into that scene though.
I consider all homebrew stuff very cool but the number of games emulating PS1 / N64 aesthetics is so massively oversaturated at this point that I'm kind of burned out on it.
But in general, the thing that really impresses me is what people come up with working within these various constraints. Less is more.
Megadrive / genesis homebrew is where it's at for me. But tbh I am honestly kind of clueless when it comes to this stuff. Still trying to get parallax scrolling and foreground occlusion figured out for my "game."
> the number of games emulating PS1 / N64 aesthetics is so massively oversaturated at this point that I'm kind of burned out on it.
The point isn't just to be a novelty throwback aesthetic. It's the most accessible way for indie devs to make a 3D game without needing to worry about particularly high quality 3D models and animation.
Obligatory link to an interview with three of the Goldeneye developers about the development of the game. I found it very fascinating.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bNN9XhGZ3Yw
(Also The Centre for Computing History YouTube channel is seriously underrated)
Super interesting article - thanks for sharing your journey. As AI slop takes over the internet, well written and original technical content like these will be important.
Also,
2026 web dev: 4MB of JavaScript to render a button. 2026 N64 dev: entire FPS in 1MB
Tried to see if it was possible to buy the Rom itself. But it seems like you would need to buy a physical copy at this point:
https://modretro.com/products/xibalba-64
Does compatibility with M64 imply N64 compat?
Yes. The game was mostly developed with an original N64.
The cartridges from Modretro only work on NTSC N64s, though. I'm told the next production run should work on PAL, too.
If you go into the "Specs" tab on the right, it explicitly lists the original N64 as compatible.
At some point I reallly gotta sit down and play around with Pyrite64, it looks super cool
if I am not wrong, the game described in this article, is presented in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gOJUEcKYRk, from Palmer Luckey[1]. Wild this guy find time and energy for this side quest. That's passion.
References: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Luckey
Each person that dies by his weapons of war makes him stronger.
Great writeup. Thanks author!
wowowowowow
Anyone know a vendor that might sell SummerCart in amateur quantities? Doesn't need to do that specifically, but maybe there's custom low volume board makers, like with 3D printer economics.
Are you looking to make homemade homebrew carts? If the M64 carts are anything like ModRetro's chromatic carts, the boards will be flashable. ModRetro has also stated they're planning on open-sourcing the design, so if we're lucky there could be a large variety of people making flashable blank carts in the near future.
I'm really looking forward to the Epilogue 64 Operator. I have the GB Operator, and it's been amazing to be able to flash romhacks onto carts and play on bona-fide hardware.
As open-source hardware they are on AliExpress no problem
Strange choice to go for a raycaster with sprites on the N64. The hardware is basically begging to be fed textured polygons.
All geometry is rendered as textured polygons. The raycasting step only determines visibility.
But yes, the N64 isn't particularly well suited for this type of game (or anything 2D, really). I didn't know that when I started the project.
Raycasters in the modern age are generally an artistic decision, not a technical one.
what about a playstation/sega saturn game in 2026 ?
So is Nintendo Online a popular service? I'm curious if I should get it.
I am in the process of using Claude Opus 5 to build an N64 game, and it really works. I've written no code and it is able to build a fully functional game.
I got it to write a skill for driving the Ares emulator via GDB Remote Serial Protocol and it uses that for its feedback loop.
What do you get out of that? The utility of having the end product (a generated game for an obsolete console) seems pretty small, and personally I would think the fun is in learning about the inner workings of the time capsule that is 90s hardware. Would you mind explaining?
Not the OP, but when I was kid I used to draw game level for 8-bit systems back when I wasn’t allowed on a computer (screen time).
My point is, people get enjoyment out of game design too. It’s not just about nerding out on technical specs.
> My point is, people get enjoyment out of game design too.
The plot-twist here is: The game design is made by Claude too :)
I guess the curiosity here is in why game design for a modern target platform wouldn't garner the same enjoyment.
It's just not the same. I made games for the PSP and Vita and it's "different" than making games for Windows or Playstation/Xbox. There's something about seeing your creation on a tiny handheld. I guess maybe nowadays we got desensitized to it because our phones are actual supercomputers which can run Fortnite without breaking a sweat, but making a device with 2MB of ram play your game as you imagined it is just hyper cool and (for me personally) is incredibly satisfying.
I'm not trying to be dismissive here - I am the type to be into the nitty gritty nerdy stuff that using Claude skips, BUT I have exactly zero experience developing anything for a legacy hardware platform in any capacity (with or without Claude) so genuinely curious to learn varying perspectives here.
Is it about the idea of the platform having limited capabilities (e.g. akin to Game Bub or MiSTer) or about tactile aesthetics (e.g. possibly vaguely comparable - though not really - to r36t or play.date) or something different entirely.
Honestly I think part of it is just that it's cool to see software running on this platform. I remember coding some trash apps on the 3DS back in the day simply because I could. It was great seeing code running somewhere it isn't strictly "supposed to"
If you enjoy this sort of thing I’d highly recommend pico-8 and tic-80. Both have pretty full featured dev environments and have a set of restrictions that make developing for them fun.
But they aren't real hardware platforms.
Yep, I made several games for the Pico-8, it's really really fun.
While I agree with you, I think it's interesting that LLMs have progressed enough to be able to write working code even for niche and heavily-constrained platforms like the N64. I'm sure it helps that modern toolchains make that easier (I don't expect very many LLMs to be able to put up with the old Windows 9x or IRIX toolchains, to say the least!).
If your game fits in the bounds of N64 hardware it makes perfect sense IMO. You basically get virtually all modern platforms for free. Much easier than wrestling with all the modern API that are "platform independent" but not really.
I mean, there is plenty of people out there who enjoy the process of making a game(they have a really clear idea of gameplay mechanics they think would be fun when put together) but they really don't enjoy programming at all. I guess it's kinda the same - I Want to see my game happen, I don't want to code it. Which isn't that different from where all the other tools are leading us anyway. Nowadays you can make a video game by just downloading an engine and building everything using the included scripting language most of the time - no need to understand rendering, IO, input or anything else.
There's a time and place for everything.
> Nowadays you can make a video game by just downloading an engine and building everything using the included scripting language most of the time - no need to understand rendering, IO, input or anything else.
I don't disagree, but I don't see it as a positive, looking at the current game releases and their performance being shockingly unoptimised, there is a lot of lost real world value in knowing the lower level details, it's like anything really, sometimes you have to do the hard/unappealing work to create your best work.
Hmmm look, I can offer you my perspective on this.
I've been a low level engine programmer in video games all my working life. I worked on a few AAA games that sold 20M+ copies, I'm not saying this to boast, I'm saying this to say I know how the sausage is made. My literal day to day job is fixing issues like "The RHI thread on the Switch takes 0.5ms longer than it should" and optimizing things as much as possible.
I think if you asked me few years ago, I would have also taken the same stance you did - that these tools make it "too easy" and we get unoptimized crap out there.
But you know what, nowadays I feel like I mellowed out a lot. A lot of these so called "friendslop" games are horrible in terms of technical work. And you know what? They still bring joy to people. They still make people laugh and have a great time with the people they like. One of my favourite memories from a game I worked on was reading comments from people who said they were looking forward to just playing the game after work in the evening with their friends. Was optimizing the IO performance on PS4 essential to make the game happen? Sure. But what mattered more was that the game was actually fun to play.
Nowadays I see the improvement in tooling as nothing but a positive. There will always be hardcore engine programmers who know how to do this stuff, I have zero doubt about it. But allowing people to just download an engine and make the thing is absolutely fantastic. To say that it's bad - to me personally - that's gatekeeping. Saying you can't make a game unless you know how to write a renderer or a physics system is so offputting to people who want to make a game but just don't know how - we should be encouraging them, not chastising them for it. Little Big Planet did it well as one of the first games of that kind, if you recall that - just saying, here's a sandbox, make a thing that brings joy to other people. Isn't that what gaming is about?
And on a more serious, business side - it's kinda crazy that Epic lets you use UE for FREE until you start making serious money on the game that you made. You can start a company, hire people, and just start making the game you want to make without paying anything for the tooling. Very few other companies in the world let you do this.
You know thats completely fair. I'm not in the game industry but I see some friends and what they do and I do have to admit, I wouldn't be able for it so it's not really fair for me to critisise.
> it's kinda crazy that Epic lets you use UE for FREE until you start making serious money on the game that you made.
Thinking about how powerfull UE is, it is kind of insane.
Urgh. Cool story...