GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[radorn]

http://moogle-tech.com/blog/?p=126

For a little background, this guy is, among other things, reverse engineering the N64's RCP and making it into the LLE N64 MESS driver.

This new side project of his could be very interesting for hackers here

---radorn's personal thoughts start---
Looking forward to a possible distant future, it could even be the foundation of a pc port of the game... not without a lot of further work, of course, since that code would still output displaylists for GE's microcode, among other challenges.

Oh well, nevermind my day-dreaming
---radorn's personal thoughts end---

EDIT: For those that didn't bother watching the file linked in the blog post:
Project Goal: 100% complete re-creation, in C or C++, of Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64.
Realistic Goal: Determine based on manual traces what is preventing Goldeneye from booting in MESS.
Additional Goal: Determine any as-yet unknown debugging modes.

Last edited by radorn on Mon Aug 24, 2009 11:22 am; edited 3 times in total

[SubDrag]

There's no way, at least don't think anything useful. It took me days to straight port one piece of its compression.

[Camaro]

Excuse me for asking but, what would be the point of a pc port when it can emulated and played on a pc?
_________________
304 HP

[radorn]

The PC port part is just something I added, not something the author has talked about or anything. Just a remote possibility I thought of. Thought it was clear, but I'll edit the post to make it clearer.

Anyway, a port of the game to a PC could be a very cool thing.
It could provide lots of interesting features, both tartegetted towards players, modders and hackers of the original N64 game and also info on the internal workings of the game.

Firstly, and without modifying the basic foundations of the game, you could, for starters, recode the input system of the game so you could have a more flexible configuration, enabling better support for KB+Mouse or other controllers, or even programming a mode that works well with the Wiimote.
Also, running the game natively instead of under emulation is faster and more precise.
Additionally, for people making levels for the original, it could provide some kind of faster, less restrictive test environment and still be mostly compatible with the N64 version if the modder build it with N64's limits. The modder would then decide whether he will leave it on the PC or make an extra effort to fix it for N64 in case it had some incompatibility.
Going even further, the engine could be enhanced on the PC, like how there are lots of enhanced Doom and Quake engines arround. Imagine an one-station-per-player multiplayer mode in full screen, enhanced graphics, good co-op mode, fixing of some bugs from the original... well, dreaming is nice, isn't it?

Also, it could give some info on the still not reversed stuff of the game, like animations. Hopefully it could aslo provide info on the infamous soundbanks.

Last edited by radorn on Mon Aug 24, 2009 2:54 am; edited 2 times in total

[monkeyface]

I don't quite understand this. Unless he translates EVERYTHING, isn't it just a form of emulation? I figured the Goldeneye Editor is a mix of translation and emulation, am I right?

[Dragonsbrethren]

SubDrag wrote:

There's no way, at least don't think anything useful. It took me days to straight port one piece of its compression.

Agreed. The only console to PC ports I've seen (outside of official ports, which obviously have access to the full source) are either very simple games (in comparison to GE) or games where the engine was already available on the PC in some form. That's not to say those ports aren't very impressive, nor that they didn't take a lot of hard work to do, but they're infinitely easier than porting GE would be, I'd think.

Such a port would interest me, of course, but I just don't see it happening. It would be great to be able to run GE at full speed on an older system, and with native PC controls, but those are about the only benefits I see. Once you start knocking out limitations some of the fun goes away, for me, anyway.

[radorn]

Just bumping the thread since I have updated the initial post.

[GERage]

Of course it would be awesome to play a GE port, but I'm not getting my hopes up. I'll agree with Sub, DB and Camaro and say the amount of work it takes to port GE isn't justified. I'll stick to emulators; that's good enough for the time being.

[TimEh]

it wouldnt be the first 64 game ported.

now im not even sue this is the same engine(quick google search) but i know i downloaded something like this a couple months ago. http://doom64ex.sourceforge.net/index.html

its doom64 ported to PC. and its almost flawless. Now doom is a game that has been taken apart time and time again, then with the source code released, every little detail was known about the engine. all though the 64 version had many new features(different linedefs and such) the core way the game worked remained much the same. thats how something like this is possible. Porting GE to the PC would be amazing. But alot of hard work. It might be worth it, taking a recent game engine, and just modifiying the way it loads a map to read GE bg's/setup/models..ect. All the low level techincal renderin stuff would be taking care of, and time would be spent tweaking to make it feel like the real thing.

What im saying is that its possibl, and the info learned would benifite anyone reading this or has attemptded to learnn something from this game. Buttt..... it would be an intence amount of work and time

[Yurei]

Quote:

the source code released, every little detail was known about the engine.

The sound code is missing in the released source code, but no one cares.
(As a Doom nerd, I know it)

Actually the thoughts of having GoldenEye on PC are sweet, but they're just thoughts. I still prefer to play the good old version on the N64.
_________________

[TimEh]

Ya since they licenced the sound code for the game from someone else. but still. you still have the file formats for sound and the source code to tell when they should be played. if i can remember correctly sounds used wavs, and doom music used .mus which were like midis but kinda limited. Mabey not every little detail on how the music came out the speakers was known, but the file formats were. So was the wad structure. So anything unsure of in doom 64 still had some easy access. Well, all im saying porting doom64 to pc, using an existing doom port, would be a hell of alot easier than porting GE. But shows possibility

[Dragonsbrethren]

Yeah, I was actually referring to that port in my post. Quite a bit of the game was changed for the N64 version (the old lighting system was thrown out and a new one implemented, the lines themselves use a modified format, there was a rudimentary scripting system for triggering multiple lines in sequence, etc.), but the main game engine was already there. I'm sure it still took a ton of work to replicate the game so perfectly, but it was a lot easier than recreating GE from scratch would be.