Recompilation: An Incredible New Way to Keep N64 Games Alive 

I love that N64 emulation has been so bad for so long that now were just skipping straight to making native ports of every N64 game instead. Amazing stuff.

This is probably the craziest thing I've seen in the emulation scene in forever. That's wild.

whoever made the recomp must have been some sort of wiseguy

I love how your voice tone changed only when dissing superman lol

I can't help but notice how some ray traced upscaled N64 games manage to perfectly recreate the aesthetic of their official renders and concept art. It's amazing.

This seems like a pie-in-the-sky concept I would have come up with as an 11 year old with less than zero understanding of how programming works. But it's real. What an age we live in!

A version of Goldeneye 64 that runs smoothly, has a modern control scheme, and multiplayer would be an absolute dream come true!

This is incredible. I've been beating Majora's Mask today near 4k at 360 frames per second and it runs so well, better than emulation or even the reverse engineered stuff. This programmer is a genius. Good job with the modern DirectX. This programmer Wiseguy is a genius.

There's something so surreal about these old N64 games having RTX, I usually prefer to play these classics with minimum modern graphics enhancements but the RTX visuals here are almost ethereal or dreamy, like how my mind as a kid saw them. It just looks right.

It's incredible how much the lighting makes Hyrule field seem so much more bright and alive.

I love the contrast between a well spoken voice over and then getting derailed when superman 64 comes up 😂

Mr Wiseguy should make limited announcements. The more announcements he makes and traction this gets, the sooner it'll be for Nintendo to cease and desist him.

Dude Wiseguy was big in the Mario 64 romhacking scene for a long time, then he kinda disappeared for a while. We had a stupid little joke of "damn he went to a farm upstate 😔" that eventually just turned into "Wiseguy Farm." So THIS is what he's been busy with! This is insanely cool. Thank you Wisrguy and Nerrel for bringing something as cool as this to fruition.

The game preservation scene has never looked better.

This is staggering! Not only is it recreating the game practically perfectly, keeping the audio sharp and latency low, the enhancements are breathing new life into these legendary games. The dudes working on this project have achieved something incredibly special. I loved the n64 as a kid, still do and look forward to experiencing this all again.

Hope we get to see Nerrel’s texture pack in the recomp soon. Playing in 60 fps beats the heck out of the original, but I like the enhanced textures

I fucking love the dedication of these Nintendo fans keeping preservation as alive as possible

I appreciate that Nerrel's body still supports ultra-wide all these years later. The devs care.

This could result in SUCH a huge step towards preserving more games! The historical value of this project is immense, imo. I'll definitely be following the progress on this now!

wiseguy living up to the name

Can we mention how absolutely BEAUTIFUL Kirby 64 looked in that short clip

8:43 the lighting looks so good in this room

This literally brings me so much joy. I love MM and I'm so ready to jump back into this game.

I’m stoked to see all of this come out, I’ll be following this project to see where it goes.

The best result for this is if it somehow leads to a Superman 64 modding scene

Being able to nativley port n64 games is actually ground breaking for emulation, I really hope software like this can be adapted for all systems notably for games that have never received ports for modern systems.

I love your channel, Nerrel! Thanks for doing what you do! :D

Absolutely stunned with how much N64 progress the last few years has brought! I thought Nerrel's pack was the best MM could ever get, now look at us! I'm also beyond hyped that you're making textures for the OoT exclusive items, because now I'll finally have the full Nerrel icon pack for both Zeldas!

This honestly puts just about every "oot in Unreal" project to shame. I'm excited for what's to come

I had my jaw dropped throughout the whole video. Majoras Mask port with 60fps, widescreen, ray tracing, and many more games coming. I'm salivating.

This is truly incredible, I never thought I'd ever play my favorite game in what is essentially HD. I have just two very significant (and possibly very stupid) questions. 1) How long until we can inject your astounding texture packs into this program to create true HD? and 2) How long until we can inject Randomizer roms into this program?

"Imagine what games we could port using this great tool" Wiseguy: Yeah, like *Superman 64*

FYI the recomp will support texture packs later down the road, so you can definitely play this with Nerrel's texture pack in the not so near future

"like my body" gets me every time

Referring to Superman 64 as "A direct affront to God" both tracks and is the most accurate description I've heard.

Just wanted to pop in and say thank you. I'm going through such a nostalgia trip right now. I cannot wait for Ocarina. Or other games, like Kirby, Mario, Mario Party and Kart?? Ugh I'm so hype

Holy crap Wiseguy is a wise guy

3:21 Rocket: Robot on Wheels was actually the first game made by Sucker Punch, the same studio that later made Sly Cooper, Infamous, and Ghost of Tsushima. I had it as a kid, its a very fun 3D platformer.

This is fantastic. I've been having so much trouble recording footage for my Ocarina of Time Review due to how terrible Project N64 is (it kept crashing right before the shadow temple, and I lost hours of progress), so it'd be great to use something more stable in the future.

What an incredible project! Thanks for the great break-down, Nerrel!

Stunningly awesome. The fact that it is not limited to Windows is even more amazing. This is really a new age for retro games. I hope to see this for PS1 one day.

This is one of the coolest potential solutions to the N64's notoriously rough emulation scene I've ever seen. Nothing against the efforts of decompilations & making emulators better, both are still very important and have been so for years, but a tool which could bypass emulation entirely without years of manual effort on a game by game basis is truly special.

First time I ever heard of this. Thanks for covering it!

One of the best thumbnails I've ever seen.

Static recompilation is a technique that’s been around forever but never got very popular in emulation circles for some reason. I’m glad to see someone managing to make it visible! Not to mention all of the amazing work they’ve done on the graphical improvements, especially the drawcall interpolation stuff which is super cool. It’s also pretty much how Apple’s “Rosetta” works for running Intel applications on Silicon Macs and why that emulation is super efficient.

*slaps N64 automatic recompiler* "This programme can run so many [redacted] games natively on PC"

Just played it for a few hours. It's incredible! Buttery smooth at 1440p240hz. I hope Nintendo takes inspiration by this quality of ports for remakes in the future on the Switch 2

once a again a single person can do so much that a multi billion dollar company cant

I'm going to say this once: Diddy Kong Racing with Online Multiplayer

perfect example of work smarter, not harder Wait, THAT'S what the laundry pool screenshot on twitter was??

I am very much looking forward to raytracing. Nerrel's texture pack and raytracing is a dream I didn't know I wanted.

3:23 rocket: robot on wheels is a pretty good platformer from what I've heard. The devs that made that game also made the sly cooper games.

Getting flashbanged with Rocket Robot on Wheels on PC was insane

The ocarina of time and majora’s mask with real time lighting looks like an official HD remake made for the switch

This is crazy stuff. I hope we see a bunch of cool projects come out of this

these kinds of efforts are great examples of how impressive modern technology can be

Proper decompilation will be tremendously helpful for faithful fan remasterings of games, which is something I believe just about everybody wants

Actually insane what talented developers can come up with

Thanks for bringing more attention to this!

In laymen's terms: A regular decompile takes machine code and tries to translate & reverse-engineer back into readable interpreted code (that can then be edited and compiled back into machine code) , where as "recompile" if I'm understanding uses lots of tricks and patterns to translate machine code into different, new & more 'computer-readable' machine code (for instance using modern hardware-accelerated rendering available in openGL).

The project covered here is the coolest thing, but let me say, that thumbnail goes hard. Nerrel must of been an Nintendo Power magazine cover artist in a past life or something lol It looks really good, that's it

Love that this was the first game and can't wait to see the old line up running like new!

That split second of Goemon was all I needed, so excited.

1) This is mindblowing. The developers are heroes. 2) Please tell me this is at least possible for PS1, my youth love...

The ZeldaRET team whose Majora's Mask decomp just hit 94% and has been a labor of love for 3 years: fuck

These are amazing. Just finished a playthrough of Zelda OOT with the Ship of Harkinian project port. It was glorious. Time for some MM.

Majoras mask looks a bit buggy but looks amazing

I am so happy Nerrel could be the bearer of Best News. This seriously sounds like a dream; it just works??

4:10 is approaching higher "Hire This Man" energy than previously though possible outside of Unreal

Wish the saturn got this kind of love

Has this method been attempted for other notably hard to emulate consoles? Seems like an incredible tool for game preservation.

I never imagined that people would solve the problem of the N64 being so hard to emulate via bypassing the need to emulate in the first place. This is a truly amazing development.

Wow! Very informative and interesting! Another great video nerrel 👍 also, the vomiting tingle Superman at the end was just revolting! Another disgusting and horrifying image that’s sure to haunt me, nerrel! ❤

This will be amazing for making VR adaptations.

I have no idea what any of this means but I've heard some of these words before. The games look beautiful with this. This is amazing! Great video!

One thing I love about these recompilation projects is that not only does it give you the freedom to run the game as best as possible on PC, but it also gives people the opportunity to port the games to whatever platforms they want. It was incredible to be able to play Ocarina of Time on Wii U in Widescreen at 60fps, seeing the original Super Mario 64 running on a DSi was incredible, not to mention other projects like Sonic Mania that finally got a version for 3DS (which was going to be released but was canceled) and people are porting it to the Dreamcast, or OpenLara/Tomb Raider which runs on basically everything like the Sega 32x or GBA, there's even a port for a super unknown console called Zeebo, we even have a port of Street Fighter 2 for the Virtual Boy and I don't even need to talk about Doom then. This is simply incredible and ends up giving other old or forgotten consoles a chance to shine too.

Your Majora's Mask HD texture pack has long been a massive inspiration of mine, and I've been tenuously tossing up the idea of doing a retexture pack for Kirby 64 thanks to you. This breakthrough sounds like a huge step forward in making that entire process easier, without even mentioning the massive strides it takes in every other area!

Can we play the hd textures version you made witht this?

BABE WAKE UP NEW NERREL VID JUST DROPPED

Its crazy how far we have come to understanding how N64 games work. Now we can effectively run these games natively on PC which will help massively with enhancing these games. Hopefully one day we will have this for more newer systems like the Game Cube.

The audio desync due to the lack of hardware slowdown in OoT and Tooie always bugged me on emulator so definitely looking forward to a completely faithful, actually definitive way to play. Also 1.0/1.1 OoT is King. :p

I immediately downloaded this and tried it when I heard. It is so nice playing Majora's Mask like this. Finally, a clear best version of the game.

Thumbnail work is insane, props to whoever worked on it

MYSTICAL NINJA. SPACE STATION SILICON VALLEY. SNOWBOARD KIDS. ALL 90FPS NATIVE ON THE STEAM DECK?? INSANE.

The people behind this are for sure extremely talented, I wonder what properties static recomp has that made it the way to solve the issues with past n64 emulators.

This really is amazing. I also love how well they light the games with the added ray tracing. It stays true to the original arts intent, while looking better, and much closer to the pre-rendered marketing. Its really cool seeing that retro 3d style realized in real time. I cannot wait for the day where I can play Ocarina of Time at 4k, 120hz, with ray tracing on a PC!

This is a great time for everyone - those of us who are just discovering N64, those of us who have been playing since the 90s, and everyone in between.

Wiseguy came out of nowhere with MM PC on a silver platter for us.

Huge HUGE congrats on this! You guys blow my mind. What I didn't understand is if we can already use the software. Can we play it already? Majoras. 🤩

This is the first time i saw 60fps look good for Majoras Mask - the graphical fidelity is amazing!!

Love Nerrels videos. His dry sense of humor is perfection.

I only found out a few days ago how close the Ship of Harkinian port for MM was to completion and was really impressed, and now it turns out this port already exists as well? Crazy. I was also really hoping your texture pack for MM could get ported over to these versions. It's so good it's hard for me to imagine playing the game without it now.

Holy shit, this is amazing!! I'm excited for my next replay

I hope they add a "camera control on right joystick option"

You're right in considering Superman 64 an affront, but hear me out, projects like this could be used to fix the game and even make it an open world Superman game. The possibilities are endless. Also games like WWF No Mercy, holy fuck!

This is insane. The assets and instructions are colocated in the ROM file - solving this problem seemed near-impossible, I would love to hear more about how this works.

What a phenomenal idea! I wonder if the decompiled source files could then be compiled for different hardware. Specially for hardware that struggles to run full-blown N64 emulators, like a PS Vita, a Nintendo 3DS, or, hey, maybe even a smart-fridge.

4:32 Wave Race looks so awesome!

Rocket Robot on wheels is REALLY GOOD and it's pretty great to see it get some recognition here. I play through it again every few years. Killer soundtrack and the earliest examples of physics based gameplay and puzzles in a 3D game I've seen. The physics engine is also one where I almost never see anything clip through another thing. It's really impressive!

When I saw the title I thought you would talk about the decompilation project since they plan on releasing it later this year, But boy was I wrong. I was stunned for like 30 minutes, just couldn't believe what I was seeing. Wiseguy is a god damn genius. It's insane to think that this is not the future of game preservation, it's the present.