Hey, author of the project here! Thanks for posting! It's been a really fun project to work on, and a great way to learn about how to use Claude more efficiently. I'm just a few hours away from posting a big update with:
64dd on original 3DS
Local & Online Multiplayer
QR Code sharing for Custom Courses
I hope ya'll check out the authors notes, post-morterm, and give it a try on your 3DS.
Haven't had a chance to check the project out yet, but wanted to say I love the idea of having a section dedicated to your human-written thoughts. It's the best of both worlds, with as much detail as possible throughout, but also still getting to hear from you personally. Congrats!
Thanks! As fun as the project is, the scope of it is not lost on me. I wanted it to serve as evidence of the frightening power these recent models have, and make it clear.
Look, I'm gonna say what's been said a lot of times, but bears repeating: when the very first two or three sentences I read are mind-blanketing AI prose breathlessly em-dashing together fragments of stuff I don't care about, it makes me skeptical that there's value perusing the rest of the project. Like, you can't even be bothered to make your lede some form of human-to-human communication.
In the "Read On" section at the bottom it says "Author's notes: The one page written by a human." Seems they're pretty open about everything being written with Claude.
Appreciate it, but the info is there for anyone (or their LLM) to learn about the project in a technical sense. Like others have kindly stated, my notes (written by a human, for humans) are in a separate section.
The technical notes are dense and interesting in their own right, but I don't expect anyone not already familiar with the N64 to 3DS port scene to care.
I wonder how long it'll take people like you breathlessly chanting "this is the future!" before the slop bots hoover that up into their training data like narcissistic poison
Tell the slop bot it's wrong about something and it just starts berating you "get used to it!" "I'm the future!"
I’ve been working on decomp project for the past two years that was started three years before I joined. I stream and try to teach the skills four days a week on twitch and YouTube.
You know what people learn when they vibe code a decomp? How LLMs work.
If I come across a hacker news front page story, I want it to be something interesting about a topic. Seeing a topic I’m deeply familiar with actually be another vibe coding project is exhausting and click bait. I can’t learn anything more about what I was trying to learn about in the first place.
Publishing this on GitHub is actively harmful to the RE and decomp communities. Vibe coders don’t care and probably don’t even know. They haven’t talked to the EFF, read USPCO opinions on fair use, followed VGHF’s attempts to expand rights, or anything that will legally move the needle forward. They’re just dumping mountains of copyright infringement under terms previously associated with completely legal activity.
Decomp.dev shut down, Activision and others going after vibe coded mods chilling legitimate projects, destruction of clean room practices, lost time due to slop contributions of dubious legality.
Your perspective is like saying LLMs have had no impact on mathematicians. Or dirt bikes don’t have impact on hiking trails.
Electricity shut down hunting whales for oil, cars shut down horse whip makers, etc. That's just progress. Like shopping malls, Blockbuster, buffet restaurants -- everything has its time.
There are more games being decompiled now than ever before, and the leap in accessibility is tremendous. While this may dilute your community and its practices, and while it may look like an Eternal September, it is bringing orders of magnitude more people into the fold. And that's worth a lot more than you're giving it credit.
Math, science, bio, and certainly CS and software engineering are going to change. That's progress. Nothing should stay the same forever.
I'm happier to see the world morph into something exciting during my lifetime rather than have slow and modest progress up until I die. I feel a bit like the people who were born early enough to witness the Wright brothers and who ultimately lived to see people walk on the moon. I'm glad tech is doing something like that rather than just having decades of uninspiring incrementalism.
I'm sorry you don't share the same outlook, but I promise there's a silver lining in this if you look more closely.
People are going to get closer and closer to owning their technology. The value of code is plummeting, and that means that in time these claims over our software will erode to nothing.
I would focus your energy on making sure we have open weights parity with the foundation models. We need to have a seat at that table. That is the real threat to our freedom and future, not petty IP squabbles or software rights.
Having read some of what this project had to do to fit 3DS, if you think “the only thing learned was how to use LLMs” then I don’t know what to say to you other than...are you sure about that?
This is totally fair, and I did learn a lot about agentic development which was my main goal (aside from playing F-Zero X on 3DS). I mean no harm to the community and my attempt is earnest. I learned a few things about the 3DS and N64 architectures and while it's cursory, it was still interesting.
As far as I could tell, this project was legitimately offering rendering techniques not yet used in N64 to 3DS ports, and I felt this documentation might be helpful.
I actually do care very much and would like to actively avoid harming the community. Any sort of resources out there to educate myself further would be appreciated.
Talk to the EFF or read what they’ve written, read USPCO opinions on fair use related to LLMs, read the petitions VGHF has made for supporting modern ways to play retro games; exactly what said in my original comment.
I do apologize however. I inferred from the repo that the decomp was done by LLM, but I’m glad to see it seems like an older, pre-LLM decomp.
I have mixed feelings about modern LLM implementations of older game SDKs, but generally support it. Though copyright and licensing there can be tricky as well. Caveat emptor.
> I wonder how long it'll take people like you breathlessly chanting "this is the future!" before the slop bots hoover that up into their training data like narcissistic poison
This is a real risk. The copyright washing machine is an average of our collective "spoken consciousness", and in turn it influences the way we express ourselves, then it ends up inside the next training slopdate. Real organic human reasoning will eventually be as valuable as low-alpha steel was for a long time, at least till the background levels drop. AI businesses are raiding libraries for "sunken knowledge", the similarity is uncanny.
Not the GP but the experience of being on the wrong end of a vociferous false positive is not great, and there are enough readers to make that not an unlikely outcome.
If what you'd post are pages of obnoxious AI generated text that you yourself couldn't even be bothered to think/write about in the first place, then thank you for your restraint. Your words, your thoughts, your voice may be interesting and worth our time, but those aren't something you can just copy verbatim out of a chat bot.
Do you not see what you're doing? How do you know they don't think about things? You're attacking with unfounded accusations, and it's incredibly uncivil.
Ok, for future reference, the next couple months you see any port, you can be 99% sure it was done by ai given the recent REA news. So if you don't want to see ai posts, avoid the port posts
Yeah and some of the article wasn't proofread (by himself or a clanker) and the project is missing some of the due dilligence.
One striking example is "No debugger, no stdout" which is baffling considering I implemented a GDB stub in the very first version of Rosalina which I released like... 10 years ago?
Stdout redirection is supported by both 3dslink and GDB stuff on 3ds, too.
I don't mean to be a party pooper - and the projects fullfills its role as a showcase of how far pure vibecoding can take someone - but it's this can of thing that gives the "absolutely no AI" crowd grounds to stand on.
> I guess for those who are interested in an F Zero X port you assume they already know what platform it was on.
You assume wrong. I would be interested and I didn’t know by name what the platform was. I never played F-Zero but I’m familiar with it thanks to Super Smash Bros.
> If I ever talk about Ocarina of Time, I don't feel the need to specify what platform it was on
Considering there’s a remake with the same name on the Switch 2, you do need to specify.
The costings here are based on API pricing, but my understanding is that no one is paying the API pricing and everyone uses the subscription pricing, or even multiple accounts with a subscription each. I'd be interested to know the actual cost incurred here.
On the stuff I have done (mostly Opus5.5) it came out at around 1/20 the cost, 95%. So a $20 subscription is around $1000 API. Somewhere in that ballpark.
I’m curious why people have started using the 3DS as the gateway device for ports of games, like Melee and F-Zero X.
Don’t get me wrong, the 3DS is a gem of a console, and it harks back to when Nintendo put more thought into what they released instead of just another Mario sports game; but since the Switch is so much more powerful, I’d expect ports to that be more of a priority.
Jailbroken 3DS scene is usually for modding the console OS itself given how easy it is to run custom firmware. And for ports, and emulation. While the GBA has a pretty dedicated community for custom games and romhacks, people often create games for the platform at gamejams because of how great the dev tooling is. It's a bit lackluster on the 3DS, but I did find the Love Brew[0] framework to be really nice. Even has simulator support[1] for testing your builds locally, though fonts will look much different on real hardware, with likely a bunch of other gotchas. Running out of RAM being a big one.
edit: compared it to the GBA homebrew scene since it's a large dedicated community to derive pros and cons between the two from. Switch is still receiving updates from Nintendo to brick your system.
Not sure why others are doing it, but the switch is kind of a boring console imo. You may as well just use one of the million PC handhelds with the same form factor, and persistent hacks require a hardware mod.
The 3DS is a fun pocketable form factor which a lot of people already own and easy to permanently mod on any firmware version or hardware revision.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned online: most people don't want to risk console bans, and that immediately makes jailbreaking their Switch a non-starter
At this point most people getting a 3DS are probably doing so specifically to jailbreak it
From what I understand if you take certain precautions like not doing piracy, installing anything to the homescreen or cheating in multiplayer games you can use homebrew online without being banned, I've been used it occasionally and not been banned at least
It seems to me that stereoscopic 3D is as much as "novelty" as is color. It's an objective improvement, because we perceive the real world in stereoscopic 3D. Of course the hardware implementation (not so much on the New 3DS) has various downsides, unlike color.
I'm saying that more colors are strictly better than fewer colors, not just a "gimmick", and that the same holds for stereoscopic 3D, modulo issues with implementing it in hardware via (auto)stereoscopic screens.
For example, if you play games on a virtual screen using a VR helmet, you pretty much always want the game to use stereoscopic 3D, because playing it without it would be strictly worse. (Okay, it would consume less GPU resources, which is good, but that would be the only difference, and this would also hold for things like lower resolution or frame rate.)
The Switch is powerful enough it could just straight emulate an N64 game if it needed to. It has a huge back catalog of games where it does this. It's basically a computer on the level of a mobile phone or tablet, or a laptop from 15 years ago.
The 3DS is still a _console_, purpose built and limited in what it can do. It is also approachably easy to find a good one in working order, and still has the vibe of a retro console.
One non-obvious reason might be that it's the only handheld console with a natively 240p height screen. This means all the 2d ui elements will remain crisp at the same size as they would be on original hardware.
I think there's currently a lot of nostalgia of the 3DS as the console people have grown up with. And the device has a good homebrew community around it, and is more interesting than something like the switch can definitely run it with enough horsepower
Not sure why online forums attract this kind of permanently grumpy person whose only contributions are complaints and nitpicks and snark, but I’m happy to shame, downvote, and flag them every time.
Is there a reason you've decided the current Web belongs to the pro-AI crowd? Why can't they start their own community of only AI lovers and leave the Web as it was? I hear lobste.rs has changed course on their AI stance, removing the relevant tags and deleting anti-AI comments recently. Compared to HN then I would think lobste.rs is like a safe haven for AI projects.
Good instinct, the bottleneck is on the CPU side though. The PICA200 is an immediate-mode GPU not a tiler.
Other F-Zero X ports feed the N64 display lists to an interpreter, command by command, with the T&L on CPU. Pre-v1.0 of this port took that approach but did some double buffering on another CPU core.
When porting to Old 3DS, that other core wasn't an option, so we had to make better batch calls to the GPU. It ended up being that now we walk that list the first time and group triangles that share the same material, and moved the position & rotation transformations to the GPU too.
Rather than creating the mesh for tracks out of the spline on the fly, it also precomputes at the start of the race.
I'm fairly certain this is a pretty novel implementation for a N64 to 3DS port.
Most of these optimizations are just for race elements, which is why some of the menus are still pretty laggy.
> Good instinct, the bottleneck is on the CPU side though.
Have you, or rather your agents, tried to identify which CPU functions were the bottlenecks (e.g. in citro3d, perhaps)?
I find it surprising that your stuff is CPU bound. Are you doing one command-list submission for _both_ eyes (with one drawcall for each)? This should be relatively simple, only require viewproj matrix changes and avoid CPU<>GPU roundtrips.
If not, you are going to hit IRQ dispatching costs as well as shardmem dispatching costs as well as other costs.
Bypassing Citro3D for raw PICA200 commands cut our per-draw CPU cost by 15x (11 µs to 0.7 µs). After that, there's no single hot function left.
The remaining bottleneck is the o3DS instruction cache. Our code is bigger than the 16KB L1, so the CPU spends a big chunk each frame waiting on instruction fetches.
We build the list for left eye, submit, and then re-submit the list offset for the right. Hadn't tried chaining both into one submission, it improved performance. Thanks so much for the suggestion!
Thanks for taking a look and the great questions. I really appreciate your contributions to the scene.
I’m almost done with a port of two games from the original Xbox to modern platforms. While having a good background in assembly and understand of why x87 is problematic and SSE makes life a little easier to understand what it’s doing. And I’ve offered a few suggestions that I thought were useful but it’s been shockingly hands off
It's already done. The race sim is fully deterministic so the consoles exchange controller inputs and run off the same seed. It uses the underlying VS. mode for the scaffolding but changes the screen render to full for each player.
Well this is interesting to see. I was thinking of porting my game to 3DS which is based on my memories of playing F-Zero X (mainly trying to make it as fast as possible!)
Now I’ll have to do it and see how they compare. I purposefully avoided playing it again during development so it’ll be most curious.
This is so cool! I've been working on trying to minimize the F-zero render loop to fit on gameboy and multiplayer over the link cable...it's been a journey. (I rushed the writeup cus of this article--still polishing the text), but give the game a try on the in-browser emulator: https://fireflyk64.github.io/makingfsub/
I had been working on getting claude to port Super Metroid to the Gameboy Advance. Was mostly curious if the GBA could run it at full speed. Looks like, yes!
Cool. I wanted to let Claude port Zelda Link's Awakening DX from the GBC to the NES. That's a bit of the opposite problem to yours: for Zelda the target resolution is higher than the source, so the backgrounds have to be expanded or (not ideal) a border added.
Really grateful the costs were included - just shy of 5K USD. Really out of morbid curiosity. And they estimate it was the equivalent of 250-400k for human work.
89 comments
[ 181 ms ] story [ 482 ms ] thread64dd on original 3DS
Local & Online Multiplayer
QR Code sharing for Custom Courses
I hope ya'll check out the authors notes, post-morterm, and give it a try on your 3DS.
The technical notes are dense and interesting in their own right, but I don't expect anyone not already familiar with the N64 to 3DS port scene to care.
Tell the slop bot it's wrong about something and it just starts berating you "get used to it!" "I'm the future!"
You know what people learn when they vibe code a decomp? How LLMs work.
If I come across a hacker news front page story, I want it to be something interesting about a topic. Seeing a topic I’m deeply familiar with actually be another vibe coding project is exhausting and click bait. I can’t learn anything more about what I was trying to learn about in the first place.
Publishing this on GitHub is actively harmful to the RE and decomp communities. Vibe coders don’t care and probably don’t even know. They haven’t talked to the EFF, read USPCO opinions on fair use, followed VGHF’s attempts to expand rights, or anything that will legally move the needle forward. They’re just dumping mountains of copyright infringement under terms previously associated with completely legal activity.
I've wanted to do this but had no time to learn this arcane science. Life is simply too short.
This is opening the world up to more people. You shouldn't be mad at them for coming into your hobby.
People want this. They shouldn't have to do it the way you bless or anoint.
Your perspective is like saying LLMs have had no impact on mathematicians. Or dirt bikes don’t have impact on hiking trails.
Electricity shut down hunting whales for oil, cars shut down horse whip makers, etc. That's just progress. Like shopping malls, Blockbuster, buffet restaurants -- everything has its time.
There are more games being decompiled now than ever before, and the leap in accessibility is tremendous. While this may dilute your community and its practices, and while it may look like an Eternal September, it is bringing orders of magnitude more people into the fold. And that's worth a lot more than you're giving it credit.
Math, science, bio, and certainly CS and software engineering are going to change. That's progress. Nothing should stay the same forever.
I'm happier to see the world morph into something exciting during my lifetime rather than have slow and modest progress up until I die. I feel a bit like the people who were born early enough to witness the Wright brothers and who ultimately lived to see people walk on the moon. I'm glad tech is doing something like that rather than just having decades of uninspiring incrementalism.
I'm sorry you don't share the same outlook, but I promise there's a silver lining in this if you look more closely.
People are going to get closer and closer to owning their technology. The value of code is plummeting, and that means that in time these claims over our software will erode to nothing.
I would focus your energy on making sure we have open weights parity with the foundation models. We need to have a seat at that table. That is the real threat to our freedom and future, not petty IP squabbles or software rights.
As far as I could tell, this project was legitimately offering rendering techniques not yet used in N64 to 3DS ports, and I felt this documentation might be helpful.
I actually do care very much and would like to actively avoid harming the community. Any sort of resources out there to educate myself further would be appreciated.
I do apologize however. I inferred from the repo that the decomp was done by LLM, but I’m glad to see it seems like an older, pre-LLM decomp.
I have mixed feelings about modern LLM implementations of older game SDKs, but generally support it. Though copyright and licensing there can be tricky as well. Caveat emptor.
It's not like we're insulting your work
This is a real risk. The copyright washing machine is an average of our collective "spoken consciousness", and in turn it influences the way we express ourselves, then it ends up inside the next training slopdate. Real organic human reasoning will eventually be as valuable as low-alpha steel was for a long time, at least till the background levels drop. AI businesses are raiding libraries for "sunken knowledge", the similarity is uncanny.
Do you not see what you're doing? How do you know they don't think about things? You're attacking with unfounded accusations, and it's incredibly uncivil.
Why are you in this AI thread spewing hate?
Think about it a second.
This is an AI thread.
You do not have to be here.
One striking example is "No debugger, no stdout" which is baffling considering I implemented a GDB stub in the very first version of Rosalina which I released like... 10 years ago?
Stdout redirection is supported by both 3dslink and GDB stuff on 3ds, too.
I don't mean to be a party pooper - and the projects fullfills its role as a showcase of how far pure vibecoding can take someone - but it's this can of thing that gives the "absolutely no AI" crowd grounds to stand on.
Something that the bot overlord didn't even think to say in its superdense page intro.
That's the problem with AI-generated text. They have no idea of what proper context is.
If I ever talk about Ocarina of Time, I don't feel the need to specify what platform it was on, or now that I realise, that it was even a Zelda game
You assume wrong. I would be interested and I didn’t know by name what the platform was. I never played F-Zero but I’m familiar with it thanks to Super Smash Bros.
> If I ever talk about Ocarina of Time, I don't feel the need to specify what platform it was on
Considering there’s a remake with the same name on the Switch 2, you do need to specify.
Don’t get me wrong, the 3DS is a gem of a console, and it harks back to when Nintendo put more thought into what they released instead of just another Mario sports game; but since the Switch is so much more powerful, I’d expect ports to that be more of a priority.
[0] https://lovebrew.org/
[1] https://github.com/lovebrew/nest
edit: compared it to the GBA homebrew scene since it's a large dedicated community to derive pros and cons between the two from. Switch is still receiving updates from Nintendo to brick your system.
The 3DS is a fun pocketable form factor which a lot of people already own and easy to permanently mod on any firmware version or hardware revision.
At this point most people getting a 3DS are probably doing so specifically to jailbreak it
For example, if you play games on a virtual screen using a VR helmet, you pretty much always want the game to use stereoscopic 3D, because playing it without it would be strictly worse. (Okay, it would consume less GPU resources, which is good, but that would be the only difference, and this would also hold for things like lower resolution or frame rate.)
The 3DS is still a _console_, purpose built and limited in what it can do. It is also approachably easy to find a good one in working order, and still has the vibe of a retro console.
Also, for fun, I suspect.
I imagine that's a big part of it.
Screw that word.
This took effort.
I don't want to share the internet with this bombastic negativity.
I wish anti-AI folks would find usenet or something and leave us to reinventing the web back into a magical place.
This is the Web 1.0 Wild West again. And it's beautiful.
I'm guessing well-adjusted level headed people are off doing more productive things.
Here's my answer for you:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50241798
Other F-Zero X ports feed the N64 display lists to an interpreter, command by command, with the T&L on CPU. Pre-v1.0 of this port took that approach but did some double buffering on another CPU core.
When porting to Old 3DS, that other core wasn't an option, so we had to make better batch calls to the GPU. It ended up being that now we walk that list the first time and group triangles that share the same material, and moved the position & rotation transformations to the GPU too.
Rather than creating the mesh for tracks out of the spline on the fly, it also precomputes at the start of the race.
I'm fairly certain this is a pretty novel implementation for a N64 to 3DS port.
Most of these optimizations are just for race elements, which is why some of the menus are still pretty laggy.
Have you, or rather your agents, tried to identify which CPU functions were the bottlenecks (e.g. in citro3d, perhaps)?
I find it surprising that your stuff is CPU bound. Are you doing one command-list submission for _both_ eyes (with one drawcall for each)? This should be relatively simple, only require viewproj matrix changes and avoid CPU<>GPU roundtrips.
If not, you are going to hit IRQ dispatching costs as well as shardmem dispatching costs as well as other costs.
The remaining bottleneck is the o3DS instruction cache. Our code is bigger than the 16KB L1, so the CPU spends a big chunk each frame waiting on instruction fetches.
We build the list for left eye, submit, and then re-submit the list offset for the right. Hadn't tried chaining both into one submission, it improved performance. Thanks so much for the suggestion!
Thanks for taking a look and the great questions. I really appreciate your contributions to the scene.
Now I’ll have to do it and see how they compare. I purposefully avoided playing it again during development so it’ll be most curious.
I had been working on getting claude to port Super Metroid to the Gameboy Advance. Was mostly curious if the GBA could run it at full speed. Looks like, yes!
https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/sm/tree/gba-port
https://hypnotize.works/gdx-3ds/postmortem/cost.html
Except, nobody does that. So that’s not a real number.
People regularly blow through all their Claude Pro tokens every week. It’s relatively easy to do.