Nintendo's big mistake that made Super Mario 64 super slow 

Inaccessible features are ubiquitous, specially in physically distributed games, where there is no benefit to optimizing for space you don't need, as the storage won't be shared with anything else.

That makes sense ~ honestly the game does feel like it was rushed in some ways. The back of Princess Peach's Castle is just an invisible wall, the two rear pillars textures you can walk through. I mean especially when you look at some earlier builds in 1995, they changed so very many things in such a short amount of time. I often wonder if they were given more time, like let's say if they wanted they could have had another year or two, how the game might've looked and what file size it may have been.

@@godlyBlade But what about the fact that no compiler optimization was used?

@@thenurseinblack1810 if they shipped a debug build, they probably didn't felt safe releasing the optimized version without testing it a little, and decided it was better to just release a stable debug version without compiler optimizations, might sound crazy but think about it, nobody is gonna know that you didn't use compiler optimizations, at least not for a while, and once the truth comes out most people (non technical people/casual players) aren't going to care, but if the game crashes under some circumstance because of the compiler optimizations, people are going to notice you did something wrong and are going to care

The crunch is ancient

This comment needs to be pinned

Hi man love your ROMs!

So you're saying if the sub never left there would be no lag?

@@SSDARKPIT no

How did you learn how to make all those ROMS or fangames Kaze?

RuRo is the binary example at the beginning even real?

@@KamiKrazyFR Probably not, but it would be compiler specific anyway.

Yeah lol

Solix No, a simple program to print “Hello World!” would be a good bit bigger than that

William system.out.println("Hello World!");

Wow your icon takes me back

24 years

kirby 64 this and OOT

This was one of the first 3D platformer games ever and it is still one of the best. Controlling Mario in this world gives the player an undeniable sense of weight, momentum, and intention that no other game has ever quite captured again.

@@shadoxfm8822 he said over 20 years

It’s sad that we can’t compile the game cause it’s not really the complete source

I'd scan it for viruses if I were you.

@@Sparkette >scanning .c files which when compiled output a .n64 file

flarn2006 source code is human readable and you can run the game on a n64 emulator anyways so if there are any viruses I believe as long as your OS has protected memory then your pretty good tbh.

@@Sparkette Ah yes, the infamous n64 virusses. Though I heard that if you just download with an incognito browser, the virusses can't legally infect your computer.

Nintendo gonna shut that shit down. Kazar emuar or whatever the guys handle is who produces hacks constantly get his roms taken down pretty quickly these days.

@@calebb7012 They can't really do anything to stop it, only slow it down. No amount of legal action will permanently erase the decomp from existence

I wish we could do what we did with Doom to Mario 64

Someone should create a super sonic 64

Go clone the repo now while you still can.

Modern Vintage Gamer has a video about it. That's actually the most likely reason.

They also forgot to disable the debug flags like dumbasses

Well that's kind of true. They actually tested the hell out of it. But it's important to remember the circumstances. The N64 was a stripped down version of cutting edge hardware and it had a lot of unique mechanisms and features developers had never used before. In top of that almost none had worked on a full 3D game before especially not one with so much riding on it as Mario 64. On top of even that since it was a launch game there was no development history or even a development kid as the N64 was still being designed so there was a lot of guesswork and trail and error involved. A lot of optimization of Mario 64 was actually done by hand so that they could very carefully observe the effects and immediately catch any bugs. Not to mention Nintendo was entirely relying on Mario 64 to sell the console and was not doing well financially at the time. Mario 64 having some kind of game breaking bug at launch would have been absolutely catastrophic. Also it's not that there is no O2 optimization, there is plenty. Just only in the areas deemed safe.

And talking about if O2 is bug free is oversimplifying. There’s two questions: 1) Are there bugs in the compiler? 2) Are there bugs in the game that might be triggered by turning on optimizations, such as race conditions, or undefined behavior. We can’t even answer these questions. We can’t answer the first one because we don’t have a copy of the compiler. And we can’t answer the second one, because if there were bugs that might’ve caused undefined behavior, the people doing the decompilation would have instead written the safe version of the code rather than the buggy version. The fact that the PAL version is optimized, makes me think there may have been a compiler bug. Something that was breaking the game in odd ways. Maybe it was even fixed near release, but they didn’t have time for enough testing after fixing the compiler.

I prefer the 3DS version. Lots more stars and you can play as Yoshi, Luigi, and Wario beside Mario. Mario floats Luigi goes invisible. Wario has the iron suit. Yoshi breathes fire. Also, the lag was fixed.

*THAT TORNADO IS CARRYING A CAR!*

@@firstbits650 *WHAT???!!!*

It makes me think of the AI fuck up in Aliens: Colonial Marines.

I don't get or see it being slower where ?

@@oceanix91 Sonic 06 meme son, the best kind of memes.

Nah.

@@kane00000 yes

@@kane00000 yes

@Kane Williams yes

I don't think there's a reason to change the geometry. A lot of what exists currently is used in speedruns and patching it out would be stupid at best. I think that just telling Nintendo to re-release SM64 with the updated PAL version code would be fine (the same way Banjo Kazooie has a 1.0 version and a 1.1 version).

oof I wish. Unfortunately the code is still not available as the leaked source only contains a very small portion of it, the rest is just precompiled code in the form of object (.o) files used to assemble the game. Also a lot of files are zeroed.

@@enigmatico6209 We do pretty much have the source code though. Look up the SM64 decompilation project. It's a project to decompile SM64 into fully readable C. It recompiles into exactly the same ROM as the release ROM. I know that's not the exact same thing, and some structure, comments, ambiguous code, constants, etc are impossible to reverse to the actual original version. But given that it was a compiler from 25 years ago with optimizations not fully enabled, it's pretty damn close. Also almost (or all by now?) all of it is now commented, variable names have been brought back, structure, etc. So while we may not have *the* source code to SM64, we have source code for SM64.

@@lost4468yt I know about the decompilation project (wasn't it also mentioned in this video?). But unfortunately it's also not the original source code.

@@enigmatico6209 Sure but it has come a long way since this video. It's very documented now. If you just go and look through the git you'd swear it's the original source code. Yeah as I said it's not *the* source code. But it's functionally, and even practically equivalent now. The only thing you could really hope to gleam from the original source code vs the decompiled one would be the comments, variable names, and maybe a slight change in some of the architectural choices in the code. But other than those you wouldn't discover anything else at all from the actual source code vs the decompiled source code.

@@lost4468yt No amount of work on the decompilation project will give the answer to why the optimizations were left out. The only thing we could hope for is either one of their developers saying something (unlikely) or a leak of some documents from back then discussing the matter.

i had trouble reading the c code until I actually learned c (partially from the decomp itself) asm scares me

But my guy, it goes one step further. Assembly gets assembled into machine code, which is even more bare than assembly. So they were doing both the disassembly and decompilation.

The amazing thing is: it's MIPS64 assembly. As with all assembly languages you need to have intimate knowledge of the hardware in order to understand how to read it. So not only is this guy really good with the MIPS architecture (which isn't a very common architecture), he had enough time and resources to go through the entire sm64 machine code and decompile it

It was translated from machine code, which is usually represented in hex. It is the literal byte contents of the ROM. Assembly language is actually represented in key words and instructions, like C, just at a much lower level of detail. Assembly language has to be compiled just like any other language. Translating assembly language to C is pretty hard but most people could do it. Translating hex code to C is borderline impossible. Especially C code that compiles down exactly to the same ROM. That is nothing short of amazing.

Machine code and assembly are a 1:1 transform. Yes, machine code is nigh impossible for humans to read, but translating it back to human-approachable assembly is trivial (for a computer). They're just different representations of the same information.

The N64 has only 4MB of RAM. Mario 64 alone is 8MB, so they wouldn't load the entire game onto the RAM. And Mario 64 is one of the smaller cart sizes, the biggest was 64MB. So, actually, the games are pretty much constantly loading from the cart. Carts are just so fast that it's like transferring from area of RAM to another.

@@SpeedfreakUK He means the on-board memory of the EverDrive. The cart has 64MB of SRAM to store the currently selected ROM.

Lord Mordington ah gotcha

Pretty sure the reason flash carts aren't typically accepted for speedrunning is because it's hard to check if the runner is running a hacked rom.

Correct

Any SM64 version released after US uses -O2

The code says explicitly: if its (the code's, essentially) version is 'eu' then set the optimization flag to -O2, else go with -g. So no, I think PAL is the one and only that uses it.

You're wrong. The decomp doesn't support Shindou

69 likes, make a wish!

Keep in mind this -O2 "if" must've been added to the decompilation makefile based on observations of the PAL binary being different and optimized, since an NTSC binary wouldn't have any traces left of unapplied flags from the makefile

How much better would the world be if Matthew Patrick never "graced" us with his presence on RU-vid?

I wouldn’t say they are all like that. Some of them are yes, but he’s made some good videos. And the main purpose is just to be entertaining, and some are very believable and evidenced.

If you only have one layer of transparency, it gets considerably easier, though, First render all opaque objects, then render the transparent object on top. I don't know SMB64 very well but I assume that's what they did.

@@IkeFoxbrush They likely tried this back then. A lot of ideas for optimization were still new back then. hell Z-fighting and face culling was still a discussion back then. Sorting your renderer before pushing data out to the GPU was a lot more expensive back then. Extra step for transparent objects would need more attention than a simple priority queue that checked Delta-Z from camera.

It's important to keep in mind as well that the N64 at the time was cutting edge exotic hardware that worked very differently than developers were used to and had a lot of features none had ever used before. Also since it was a launch title there was no development kid as the exact specifications were still being worked on until the last moment. So during the development of Mario 64 there was a lot of guesswork and trail and error involved. A lot of optimization was actually done by hand so that any bugs or logic breaks could be caught immediately. Not to mention most of the O2 optimization is actually enabled in the initial release. It's only the ones most likely to break game code that was not. Not to mention the N64 even now is very troublesome to work with. From it's single RAM that is both Super fast but also super laggy and it's tiny texture cash. Even now emulating that weird hardware is still very tricky.

The Wii VC ROM is identical, bit for bit.

Virtual Console just runs better than original n64 I assume

@@Wyatt_James it isn't

ZEROTWOOOOOO oh wait wrong video. hehe, sorry

@@Wyatt_James ...kinda. there's a change the VC does to the ROM after loading it, and some of the emulation is faulty.

Well, Google is so ubiquitous for searching on the internet, that it's actually pervaded colloquially used language to just mean "searching on the internet". Thus is completely valid to say "I'm gonna google that" and then use some other search engine.

Says... C (Shows Qt C++) Hardly the C89 that SM64 uses.

​@@kenziemac130 that was so frustrating to watch haha

@@janikarkkainen3904 Isn't that a problem for google, because then their name is no longer copyrigt protected or something like that?

@@UCgx7OseCrundqkE8oEVeobg I feel like he could have just shown the reverse engineered source code for SM64... For some reason he went out of his way to show the incorrect language.

Lol

25*

yeah it's 25

That's why you have to manufacture carts that can't be rewritten to (if possible) with the proper ROM loaded on; a MD5 hash could be used to ensure a valid cart/game.

@Lassi Kinnunen I dont think checking if the cart is valid was ever a problem in the speed running community. To just give it a different category just splits things even more

Make the game not run w/o internal checksum, hash of which is shown on screen at boot.

@@lovedeath9075 Then a cheater makes the game display the expected hash as a fixed message instead, and can change anything else without being noticed

There is no loading-benefit as the game is loaded to ram beforehand and it can not load any faster as the games also were not coded to do anything during loading but wait the exact programmed amount of time as then the data was ready.

Realistically these aren't related at all, it lags because Nintendo choose to build the map like that and just deemed the frame rate drop as acceptable. A funny story overall though

​@@tiernanmccarthy well yes, but still if they would compile it correctly it wouldn't lag So they didn't do that right anyway

@@tiernanmccarthy They might've done testing with compiler optimisations, noticed it ran fine and assumed it would be releasing with the optimisations

@@r033cx Enabling compiler optimization would increase the likelihood that an out-of-bounds glitch would cause memory clobbers in ways that might corrupt the contents of save game states or have other undesirable consequences. Compiler writers take the attitude that when the Standard doesn't specify how implementations should process non-portable code or code that receives erroneous input, all possible behaviors should be regarded as equally useful. In the C language invented by Dennis Ritchie, many actions are characterized as having "machine-dependent" behavior, and code which is written to exploit that in cases where the Standard imposes no requirements but the target platform is known can be more efficient than would be possible with code that was written to be "optimization proof".

@@ShadowGaro of they had no time to do it, because it had to be released in last minute.

Unlikely. Spaceworld 1995 build is also unoptimized thanks to the DDD lag being the indicator. It's been there from the start.

@@Mobius14 What's unlikely? The guy leading the RE effort explicitly mentioned on the Discord, the various UB bugs they fixed. As Kaze posted in another comment, there's more that creates lag than the compiler optimizations. Mainly, the inefficient use of the graphics hardware.

Interesting you can hardly blame them either game was still a masterpiece

@@dkosmari You said "The debug mode was enough to shield the final code from all the coding errors, so that was the chosen quick fix." which implies they turned it on last minute. it was enabled since Spaceworld 1995.

@@Mobius14 Debugging output is used throughout the development. Because every time you change the code, there's a chance for introducing bugs, or revealing old ones that went unnoticed. Notoriously, the audio code isn't built in debug mode, possibly because it was developed separately, and was a more mature code base; so it got built separately without debug flags, and just linked into the game, that was still not working properly without debug. I didn't mean to imply they were 1 day from shipping the game out, and somebody said "let's try enabling debug flags", and it suddenly ran without crashing. Software in general is developed in debug mode, as the norm. It's just that they relied on the extra safety created by debug code too much, and couldn't afford to fix the code in time for launch.

Exactly. The main reason to frown upon custom ROMs is it's hard to verify they're indeed identical, and that some smart ass didn't just load a patched ROM into his flashcart. 6 months from now, the reverse-engineering team might find and fix more bugs, they might be using a different compiler version that is better at optimizing.

@@dkosmari what the fuck are you talking about

@@Porygonal64 What language do you speak, if not English?

@@Porygonal64 I legitimately had to laugh when I read your comment.

Ever heard of checksums?

I think this is something you only realize after years of technological improvement in video games. I think at one point this was natural for everyone.

Hey, that's a good point. It probably wouldn't have been noticed back in the modding scene of the past.

@@BeretBay Yeah, it's the same with resolutions, back in the day they looked perfectly fine.. But as we've gotten older and can see higher resolutions and frame rates we now see how awful the games looked in their native resolutions and frame rates..

It's not just slowdown, it's actually slow motion, which effects the movement and control of the game, a very cool different look and feel compared to standard gameplay, I've always enjoyed it.

In all honesty I thought the slowdown was intentional, I was only able to notice it on water levels and just thought "you can't swim as fast as you walk, so you move slower in-game to reflect that". It was only recently that I played an emulator and noticed the framerate drop.

this is the correct answer

Yeah my understanding is that they were using a shitty broken version of gcc where O2 didn't work.

This is actually what is true, the N64 development kit was still not complete at the time of the release of Super Mario 64, so the developers were wary to do any hardcore optimizations.

Eat your arms and then again Do the mario I am god and then you know Eat the dario Do do do do do Just like that

Joker DIC.

"Hey paisanos! It's the Super Mario Bros. Super Show!"

MISTAKES WERE MADE

pasta power

I c..

also not a single & pointer

@@gnaurai6251 & is a reference or address.

@@pow9606 & is a reference in a declaration and an operator to get the pointer when used on a variable.

And it's Qt

and them not having the time to test whether the bugs in the compiler actually affected the game or not, so they just went with g just to be safe

oh my aching tentacles

Brush your teeth bitch

The fucking moment I see a mario pop outta the pipe and he's in a fucking wheelchair I'm gonna fart my soul alright?

Thanks, this guy doesnt know what hes talking about anyway

Nintendo might have released a debug build* Or they made a real build but choose to not go O2 because of UB in their code.

@@Guztav1337 I don't think O0 would be that bad. The build almost certainly contained debug assertions & other binary bloating.

This comment is amazing. Just sayin

In that era it was pretty common for all sorts of software. Processor speeds were very limited and graphical hardware provided relatively little assistance (esp on IBM compatible PCs, but some other computers were better in this regard). In any case when you're up against a lot of hardware limitations you have to be very efficient with your code. Also, if you go back to the early 80s I'm not sure how efficient compilers were. I know they had optimizations but I have no idea how they compare to today. I remember PC games in the 80s that didn't even run under DOS. They would just boot right off the floppy directly. If you weren't trying to read DOS filesystems it wasn't like that OS did much for a game anyway, other than allow it to be run from a hard drive. Actually, I think even MS Flight simulator booted straight from floppy without DOS in that era.

@@RichFreeman Hell, PS1 games though they used c, they used assembly also.

ASM in that era wasn't really that time consuming. C-code is almost the same in terms of complexity, and back then a C-Compiler could run for days if not months over your entire project whereas an Assembler would be much, much faster.

It's the only way to fly, lad. Well, on classical processors. Might be fairly pointless on modern processors.

later games were made with a new compiler, likely for Windows

Perfectly spec-faithful code or something UB related?

​@@LightTheMars ​ @Sullivan I was making an LED blink and used something along the lines of "brightness = (millis() % 1024) < 512 ? 0 : 1023" and it didn't work (nothing UB about it as far as I can tell). Changing the 0 to some greater number would magically make it work, but I couldn't go below (I believe) 13. I can't remember too many details but changing the ternary operator to an if statement didn't do anything. Going down to -O1 was the only thing that I could do to make it work. I didn't look at the compiled assembly to find out what the issue was, though it might have been interesting if I had the time to do it.

Knowing nothing whatsoever about how brightness is used, @@ThePC007, I'd guess loop unrolling.

@@MrOmegatronic brightness in this case is just a variable that I use later on to set the duty cycle of a PWM output. There weren't really any loops that could get unrolled.

Hmm... not sure what could've caused it, then, @@ThePC007. That's the only thing that comes to mind, unless it's a case of extremely subtle UB that the compiler assumes isn't there, or a slight bug in the compiler, or something. Strange.

Maybe they mean that they played the PAL version, slower overall but less frame dips?

Ok boomer

@@Patrickblox No. Not anymore. C++ evolved a lot since times when it was "C with classes".

@@Patrickblox Maybe C++98. C++11 and on is a completely different language.

Ikr

Try it out! There are instructions for how to compile it if you look.

Make a video and comment back for notifications bump

I would guess it would. Usually O3 does things like unrolling loops and changing floating point instructions. Probably would still work just fine.

@@zabotheother423 floating point optimization can cause weird "glitches", like already seen as differences between virtual console and real hardware. (subtle errors when removing a few instructions increases or decreases the math accuracy, leading to drifting values over long time)

@@kneesnap1041 It didn't compile with -O3. The compiler says "wrong file format" right at the end. Tried with -O2 and it worked fine, so it's not my setup that's making it fail.

with a buggy compiler not even directly designed for the Nintendo 64 (called Ultra 64 at the time) hardware that had the chance of introducing bugs just because you enabled optimizations

With appendices, "The Importance of Your Toolchain Being Tested on Your Target Platform", and "The Importance of Your Target Platform Existing Long Enough to Have a Fully Functional Toolchain". ;3

listen closely to the part where he said it was decompiled they did it by hand

@@sodiboo that sounds even worse.

Me too. What is this level i never bothered to find

Its mandatory to beat the game tho, maybe your older brother/sister beat it for you? lol

@@taxtapyinc.2921 I've literally never seen this level but I know I've beaten the game o-o

@@azazellon you literally need to beat this specific star in order to beat the game casually. Unless you were a speedrunner god when you were a child you had to play this stage in order to beat the game.

@@diegomedina9637 Maybe he had some weird version of the game? I had a mario kart ds catridge wich was straight up missing a stage. I know it might be Extreme-Lyrik unlikely and rare

Yeah this is absolutely something that could fall through the cracks when putting together a submission

Well, your entire game was slowed down

Try KAZE Emanuars 60fps romhack

You're absolutely right!