GoKawiil
Tech News
A previously unpublished, full version of a 2001 interview with Nintendo programmer Giles Goddard has surfaced, expanding on a shorter piece that ran in NGC magazine at the time. Goddard, who worked on the Mario face animation for Super Mario 64, recalls the game's development team numbered roughly 15 people and describes the open-plan Nintendo office layout where programmers and artists clustered around active projects.
A detailed technical breakdown has surfaced describing the PARTNER-N64 PC development kit, built for Nintendo by Kyoto Microcomputer (KMC), which paired with a specially modified N64 console to give developers real-time debugging access. The modified console allowed the debugger software to trigger breakpoints that halted gameplay for memory inspection, and to reset the console via software command, made possible by rerouting IRQ and RESET signals from the cartridge slot to the CPU using added tie-line wires.
A group of programmers who previously built the DK64 Randomizer have released DK64: ReKONGpiled, a project that recompiles Donkey Kong 64's original N64 machine code into C using the N64: Recompiled framework and RT64 rendering. Users must supply their own ROM, after which the game runs natively on Windows, Linux, and Mac without emulation overhead, gaining ultrawide support, uncapped framerates, and faster load times.