Palette lighting tricks on the Nintendo 64

Palette lighting tricks on the Nintendo 64 This article is a continuation to my Bluesky thread from April. We made a Nintendo 64 demo for Revision 2025! It has baked lighting with normal mapping and real-time specular shading, ahem, well sort of. More on that later. The beautiful song was made by noby with guitar performed by Moloko (https://soundcloud.com/sou_andrade). Below I have some notes on the directional ambient and normal mapping techniques I developed. They are both pretty simple in the end but I haven’t seen them used elsewhere. But wait, normal mapping on the N64? I knew normal mapping on the N64 was possible due to earlier experiments by fellow homebrew developers WadeTyhon and Spooky Iluha. I had also done some emboss bump mapping hacks myself. The approach explained in this article is not new: the renderer computes lighting directly to textures at runtime. It’s great because no specialized hardware support is needed and you can run arbitrary shading code on the CP ... Read full article.