I've tried utilising these 3D rendering techniques myself in a small tech demo, and now I am in a maximum security prison serving a life sentence. I managed to break into the warden's office to log into my Reddit just to get the truth out there. These are some real illegal techniques Nintendo and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise don't want you to know about.
Unfortunately all copies of my small tech demo have been confiscated by the government so I don't have them.
Kaze is absolutely insane, it’s so cool what he’s managed to squeeze out of the N64 over the years. Btw for anyone interested, he’s making a fangame/Romhack of Mario 64 with a completely overhauled graphics engine and it looks incredible
I think he's safe - I expect he's using the SM64 decomp as a base. He can just distribute a rom patch with his own assets/code and there's not really anything they can legally do about it, as the decomp is not their original code.
This is Nintendo we're talking about. They're not quite as litigious as The Mouse but they're close. I would be shocked if they don't sue, even if their case lacks merit.
I think people are mixing up copyright and intellectual property.
If it looks like a Mario game, talks like a Mario, jumps like a Mario, they can go after it. They did for Pokemon Uranium, and that community basically never recovered.
He'd have to change the sprites, character dialogue, models, before shipping again.
I believe he has the goal of having no Nintendo code (even in the decompiled sense) in the engine when he's done optimizing it. However, a lot of his levels are very Nintendo-character themed, like his Bowser theme park and Bob-omb factory levels, so those would likely require a lot of reworking. All of his enemies are Mario enemies, so he'd also need to come up with new NPCs.
It scares me that there are such God-like programmers. Those are people that not only reverse-engineer the games but the very platforms they run on! They know secrets that were probably hidden from even first party developers who were spending 80 hours a week coding nothing but N64 games. How is this possible?!
I'd say it's because of two completely different development environments. One has time constraints, a budget, and a deliverable (the finished game), while the other has all the time in the world and zero expectations.
And the best part about all of this is that we get to see it all happen in videos like this!
Kaze bas been at it for possibly a decade at this point. I don't think it would be crazy to say he's dedicated his life to understanding the N64 and specifically Mario 64. So yes, he's managed to optimize Mario 64 rendering to insane levels, but he has the leisure of doing it after the fact, with modern tools and without the deadlines you have when working on a commercial video game.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not diminishing his skills, I was also in awe when I first heard about him. Jusy that this "God-tier" requires singular focus, which most people cannot pursue.
I agree. I'm certain almost every developer on the original Mario 64 team could reach that level if they had devoted their careers to it. Heck, some probably knew this stuff, they just didn't have the time to develop them, or the trade-offs weren't worth it or maybe it wasn't their call.
I would love it if anyone on the original team would attest to that.
If the original dev team released Mario 64, then spent the next decade working on Mario 64 Part II for a release around 2006, I'm sure they would have been able to cook up a very impressive game. The economics just weren't viable to spend ten years on a commercial game. By that point the N64 was deprecated and replaced by the GameCube... And then the GameCube was replaced by the Wii.
Just goes to show that statements like "By then they had mastered the console" are wrong. One generation is never enough to push a console to its absolute limits. The C64 has been around for almost 45 years and i'm sure there are still new techniques being discovered albeit at a slower pace.
I suppose. And it's actually better to adopt this attitude because otherwise one might fall into an anxiety spiral. I doubt Kaze64, although certainly brilliant, is a genius. That's probably the result of very deliberate and focused experience and as others pointed out - a community effort accumulated over the decades.
SM64 is has been studied and documented extensively for ages now. There's a lot of people who worked on the decompilation project, you have speedrunners and TASser combing through the inner workings from various angles and a bunch of emulator developers and hobbyist SM64 developers. All those people contributed a lot to the pool of knowledge that Kaze can draw from.
Plus of course he's got not commercial pressure. If nintendo let the engineers go as insane as him, the game would have cost 500 dollars per copy and shipped 4 years late.
Kaze has been working on this for a long time, but don't forget there is a big community of peers as well that contribute their parts to the collective knowledge
Remember that he didnt worked alone on this.
He did reached out to other n64 developers for help, and others helped him with issues in his Discord as well, along they all dedicate a lot of time to learn more about the N64 and the surrounding environment
We are all standing in the shoulder of gigants to do what we are able to do
Nintendo shipped the RSP as a general-purpose vector processor then told everyone to treat it like a fixed-function GPU, so "reverse-engineering the platform" is closer to "reading the chip spec Nintendo didn't want you to read."
What I find fascinating about N64-era techniques is how much of it was just raw problem-solving under extreme constraints. The RSP had 4KB of instruction memory and 4KB of data memory. Engineers weren't breaking rules — they were inventing rules on the fly. The same era gave us tricks like the famous Quake inverse square root hack, or the way Ocarina of Time cached its rendering data to mask the CD... wait, wrong console — but the cartridge streaming tricks were similarly inventive. Constraints breed creativity in ways that modern GPU compute shaders never require.
The video he made where a mathematician fan helped redefine the sin and cos in the standard library so the rotation of the camera was more efficient. Shit lives in my head rent free.
at the end of the day, simpler math / approximations are fine for game engines - it just has to be "good enough". nobody is going to notice - you're not running a physics simulation. case in point fast inverse square root
Always love seeing how developers pushed the N64 hardware beyond what Nintendo officially supported. The microcode modifications and RSP programming tricks were genuinely impressive - squeezing every last cycle out of that hardware. Makes you appreciate how constraints drive creativity.
I don't know how you managed to mishear it like that! He's saying HailToDodongo, it's the YouTuber that created those rendering showcases that this video is largely just summarising:
Nikku4211@reddit
I can confirm that the title is true.
I've tried utilising these 3D rendering techniques myself in a small tech demo, and now I am in a maximum security prison serving a life sentence. I managed to break into the warden's office to log into my Reddit just to get the truth out there. These are some real illegal techniques Nintendo and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise don't want you to know about.
Unfortunately all copies of my small tech demo have been confiscated by the government so I don't have them.
danielcw189@reddit
A video by Kaze Emunar
He does a lot of great videos about software design on the N64 and taking the strengths and weaknesses of the hardware into account.
Strongly recommended
apadin1@reddit
Kaze is absolutely insane, it’s so cool what he’s managed to squeeze out of the N64 over the years. Btw for anyone interested, he’s making a fangame/Romhack of Mario 64 with a completely overhauled graphics engine and it looks incredible
13steinj@reddit
To the extent he is going, I'm afraid you can't call it a romhack anymore.
I also wonder if Nintendo will send lawyers after him as a result. That thing better be datahoarded to hell and back.
Kwigg@reddit
I think he's safe - I expect he's using the SM64 decomp as a base. He can just distribute a rom patch with his own assets/code and there's not really anything they can legally do about it, as the decomp is not their original code.
jeremj22@reddit
He's also mentioned that he's in the process of going for 0% (non-trivial) Nintendo code. They can't go after him for it if there's none left
billsil@reddit
Don’t assume that. They can because they have lawyers and money.
ArdiMaster@reddit
But the game still uses a bunch of Mario characters and enemies.
alvenestthol@reddit
I think Kaze started the project long before the decomp was done, not sure how much crossover between the decomp and Kaze's work there is tho
pigeon768@reddit
This is Nintendo we're talking about. They're not quite as litigious as The Mouse but they're close. I would be shocked if they don't sue, even if their case lacks merit.
13steinj@reddit
I think people are mixing up copyright and intellectual property.
If it looks like a Mario game, talks like a Mario, jumps like a Mario, they can go after it. They did for Pokemon Uranium, and that community basically never recovered.
He'd have to change the sprites, character dialogue, models, before shipping again.
An1nterestingName@reddit
I recall him saying that if Nintendo comes after him, the project is so far from SM64 that he could spin it off to his own IP relatively easily.
nishinoran@reddit
I believe he has the goal of having no Nintendo code (even in the decompiled sense) in the engine when he's done optimizing it. However, a lot of his levels are very Nintendo-character themed, like his Bowser theme park and Bob-omb factory levels, so those would likely require a lot of reworking. All of his enemies are Mario enemies, so he'd also need to come up with new NPCs.
DerDave@reddit
It's really Wii level graphics at times. Unbelievable.
ande3577@reddit
I strongly recommend against watching anything from this creator... unless you have many hours to dive down the rabbit hole.
AtrusHomeboy@reddit
something something German Engineering
Revolutionary_Ad6574@reddit
It scares me that there are such God-like programmers. Those are people that not only reverse-engineer the games but the very platforms they run on! They know secrets that were probably hidden from even first party developers who were spending 80 hours a week coding nothing but N64 games. How is this possible?!
TheIcyStar@reddit
I'd say it's because of two completely different development environments. One has time constraints, a budget, and a deliverable (the finished game), while the other has all the time in the world and zero expectations.
And the best part about all of this is that we get to see it all happen in videos like this!
IQueryVisiC@reddit
Later games on the N64 have this level of polish. Or check out how John Carmack dissected like 4 platforms for Doom and Quake within 4 years.
franz_haller@reddit
Kaze bas been at it for possibly a decade at this point. I don't think it would be crazy to say he's dedicated his life to understanding the N64 and specifically Mario 64. So yes, he's managed to optimize Mario 64 rendering to insane levels, but he has the leisure of doing it after the fact, with modern tools and without the deadlines you have when working on a commercial video game.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not diminishing his skills, I was also in awe when I first heard about him. Jusy that this "God-tier" requires singular focus, which most people cannot pursue.
Revolutionary_Ad6574@reddit
I agree. I'm certain almost every developer on the original Mario 64 team could reach that level if they had devoted their careers to it. Heck, some probably knew this stuff, they just didn't have the time to develop them, or the trade-offs weren't worth it or maybe it wasn't their call.
I would love it if anyone on the original team would attest to that.
wrosecrans@reddit
If the original dev team released Mario 64, then spent the next decade working on Mario 64 Part II for a release around 2006, I'm sure they would have been able to cook up a very impressive game. The economics just weren't viable to spend ten years on a commercial game. By that point the N64 was deprecated and replaced by the GameCube... And then the GameCube was replaced by the Wii.
Revolutionary_Ad6574@reddit
Just goes to show that statements like "By then they had mastered the console" are wrong. One generation is never enough to push a console to its absolute limits. The C64 has been around for almost 45 years and i'm sure there are still new techniques being discovered albeit at a slower pace.
f3hp@reddit
It's still crazy to think that was the launch game with no follow up on the platform. Absolute masterpiece though.
Rakn@reddit
Why? You could do this too if you spent the time on it. Most folks just don't take the time or care enough about it.
Revolutionary_Ad6574@reddit
I suppose. And it's actually better to adopt this attitude because otherwise one might fall into an anxiety spiral. I doubt Kaze64, although certainly brilliant, is a genius. That's probably the result of very deliberate and focused experience and as others pointed out - a community effort accumulated over the decades.
lotgd-archivist@reddit
SM64 is has been studied and documented extensively for ages now. There's a lot of people who worked on the decompilation project, you have speedrunners and TASser combing through the inner workings from various angles and a bunch of emulator developers and hobbyist SM64 developers. All those people contributed a lot to the pool of knowledge that Kaze can draw from.
Plus of course he's got not commercial pressure. If nintendo let the engineers go as insane as him, the game would have cost 500 dollars per copy and shipped 4 years late.
myrsnipe@reddit
Kaze has been working on this for a long time, but don't forget there is a big community of peers as well that contribute their parts to the collective knowledge
WJMazepas@reddit
Remember that he didnt worked alone on this. He did reached out to other n64 developers for help, and others helped him with issues in his Discord as well, along they all dedicate a lot of time to learn more about the N64 and the surrounding environment
We are all standing in the shoulder of gigants to do what we are able to do
sean_hash@reddit
Nintendo shipped the RSP as a general-purpose vector processor then told everyone to treat it like a fixed-function GPU, so "reverse-engineering the platform" is closer to "reading the chip spec Nintendo didn't want you to read."
monocasa@reddit
To be fair, very little of this video has to do with the RSP, and in at least one place that it does, it uses the stock microcode.
The_Band_Geek@reddit
Wake me up when Kaze releases his optimized engine for vanilla SM64.
miyakohouou@reddit
ad embedded in the video, downvoted.
ClassicPart@reddit
Man, what trauma to endure. We’re all rooting for you.
D3PyroGS@reddit
sponsorblock
BlueGoliath@reddit (OP)
checks profile
-linux subreddits
-/r/politics
sigh Easy block.
blazarious@reddit
Do I need to watch the video to find out how a render technique could be illegal? Is it against the TOS or something?
AndreDaGiant@reddit
He did not mean it literally.
Jumpy-Baseball-4983@reddit
What I find fascinating about N64-era techniques is how much of it was just raw problem-solving under extreme constraints. The RSP had 4KB of instruction memory and 4KB of data memory. Engineers weren't breaking rules — they were inventing rules on the fly. The same era gave us tricks like the famous Quake inverse square root hack, or the way Ocarina of Time cached its rendering data to mask the CD... wait, wrong console — but the cartridge streaming tricks were similarly inventive. Constraints breed creativity in ways that modern GPU compute shaders never require.
Mr_Sagoo@reddit
The video he made where a mathematician fan helped redefine the sin and cos in the standard library so the rotation of the camera was more efficient. Shit lives in my head rent free.
OffbeatDrizzle@reddit
at the end of the day, simpler math / approximations are fine for game engines - it just has to be "good enough". nobody is going to notice - you're not running a physics simulation. case in point fast inverse square root
AmeriBeanur@reddit
No. The game must feel as its intended original. Otherwise people like me will put it down and move on!
Mr_Sagoo@reddit
Daft.
Mr_Sagoo@reddit
Not the same thing at all. The FISQ was less accurate but much faster to calculate.
Whatever Kaze was doing with polynomials was more accurate and more computationally efficient.
Smart_Doctor@reddit
This was awesome!
Global-Ear1111@reddit
Always love seeing how developers pushed the N64 hardware beyond what Nintendo officially supported. The microcode modifications and RSP programming tricks were genuinely impressive - squeezing every last cycle out of that hardware. Makes you appreciate how constraints drive creativity.
programming-ModTeam@reddit
No content written mostly by an LLM. If you don't want to write it, we don't want to read it.
YamGlobally@reddit
Bot
max123246@reddit
Yup, you're right. This is their second ever post and their first one was completely unrelated to the post they commented on,
https://old.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1s0bv04/to_everyone_earning_from_saasmicrosaas_could_you/obu4yuf/
Sarke1@reddit
CrysisN64 when?
HappyAngrySquid@reddit
What is the “hail to the king” he keeps referring to?
thenickdude@reddit
I don't know how you managed to mishear it like that! He's saying HailToDodongo, it's the YouTuber that created those rendering showcases that this video is largely just summarising:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfPKx8Hfy_YFns-WSCuZfrA
happyscrappy@reddit
He does a great job explaining this.
Looks like he's been breaking down the Analogue 3D's compatibility issues too.
inio@reddit
I love that the "high res textures" thing is basically just deferred shading and happens on the RSP or CPU while the RDP just does interpolation.
Sorta surprised how they get 256x256 textures though with only 5-bit color data being written into the frame buffer.
VictoryMotel@reddit
You're going to jail kiddo
BlueGoliath@reddit (OP)
Abuse N64 hardware? Believe it or not, straight to jail.
dustingibson@reddit
Kaze Emunar does amazing work. I highly recommend his N64 trig optimization video.