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Did Nintendo really forget to Optimize Super Mario 64 ? | MVG

Modern Vintage Gamer

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  • Recommended by 4 people: 3 on Hacker News and 1 in engineering communities.
  • Presented by Modern Vintage Gamer
  • Linked in the descriptionn64decomp/sm64
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 6 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

1.3M views6 years ago4 recommendations

Game developmentSystems programmingGame programmingCompilers and interpretersPerformance and optimization

Modern Vintage Gamer investigates whether Super Mario 64 was released without compiler optimizations by analyzing N64 development history.

A recent discovery from the N64 Super Mario 64 De-Compilation Project appears to show that Super Mario 64 USA release for the Nintendo 64 was not optimized and was released as a debug version. However things are not that cut and dry. In this episode we take a deep dive in to what went on with development of Nintendo 64 games in 1996 and how this theory may not be accurate. N64 Footage was captured with an UltraHDMI and trdrop was used for framerate analysts. Big thanks to SpawnWaveMedia for the N64 captures. ► Consider supporting me - patreon.com/ModernVintageGamer Links: ► MattKC Nintendo's big mistake that made Super Mario 64 Super Slow - youtube.com/watch?v=9_gdOKSTaxM ► Ghidra Reverse Engineering Tool - ghidra-sre.org/ ► N64 Decompiling Guide - retroreversing.com/n64-decompiling ► N64 DevKit Manual - n64devkit.square7.ch/ ► Super Mario 64 Decompilation - github.com/n64decomp/sm64 Social Media Links : ► Facebook : facebook.com/ModernVintageGamer ► Twitter : twitter.com/ModernVintageG ► IG: instagram.com/ModernVintageGamer ► BandCamp : modernvintagegamer.bandcamp.com/ ► The Real MVP Podcast : player.fm/series/the-real-mvp #Nintendo #Mario64 #Optimization

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a well-researched debunking of the myth that Nintendo forgot to enable compiler optimizations for Super Mario 64.

Moments people linked to

gonzuson Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Reconstruction of ZZT”

I just watched a documentary about how Super Mario 64, a game for Nintendo consoles, was reverse engineered in a way that will also generate byte-identical objects when being compiled. I found this nothing short of amazing. This is the link to the part of the video that mentions this: link to this video
View on Hacker News

hbnon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Overhauling Mario 64's code to reach 30 FPS and render 6x faster on N64 [video]”

The whole "Nintendo forgot to set the O2 optimization flag" thing has been somewhat debunked, or at best it's misleading. ModernVintageGamer did a video discussing the topic that's pretty well-researched link to this video To summarize what he says: since the game was a launch title, it was likely being compiled with an early, less-stable compiler/SDKs, with known bugs that wouldn't be fixed until later (he even cited some official developer documentation that mentions this). So setting that flag could have caused known issues/instability at the time so they just left the optimization out. And the other thing is the game is using a lot of libraries that were indeed compiled with the O2 flag, and the pe…
View on Hacker News

semion Hacker News • Recommends

On “Super Mario Bros. 3 in 3 Minutes – World Record Speedrun Explained [video]”

But notably not in SM64, where they disabled compiler optimization for some reson. Vintage Gamer has a good video about this. link to this video
View on Hacker News

u/CultistHeadpiecein r/C_Programming • Recommends

Did Nintendo really forget to Optimize Super Mario 64?
2View on Reddit