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not OP but yes, i consider the tech sphere's dive into mass surveillance to be war profiteering and have eliminated or minimized several in my life including amazon and spotify.

Why are you presenting your unfounded assumption as a gotcha? Do you have any basis whatsoever to believe GP supports AWS?

This is why I exited the tech industry.

They've all become war profiteers and fascist enablers.

The only way to live with my conscience was to choose not to be complicit.

A friend of mine did posit the quandary that an "unpalatable" individual such as Luckey appears to be one of the few making consumer-friendly products: Removable, swappable battery packs, AA battery support, standard USB-C charging, easy interoperability, open sourced designs, exposed screws, teardown instructions, etc. Apparently ModRetro is even looking into making dumb TVs for gaming.

It's ironic, in another world HN commenters would be lauding Luckey and ModRetro for all these virtues.

> Modretro agreed to publish the game as a physical launch title for their M64 (a modern N64 clone), complete with cartridge, packaging and manual!

The article says the game is published by ModRetro.

that's wild, it's not like the videos are hosted on an irrelevant platform like bluesky or something. Who knows

It common to reply to silly comments with more silliness. It's a obvious virtue signal, which rightfully draws ridicule. Some people use mocking as ridicule, and it says nothing about the person doing the mocking, since they're likely saying it as a joke.

Yeah, I’m seeing this a lot too recently. I guess polarization comes for us all eventually. Nuance and cognitive dissonance are so painful for some they simply flatten their position to something that feels safely straightforward, even if ghoulish?

Social media’s a helluva drug.

but your position that people just making nuanced non-emotional purchase decisions is somehow flawed itself is the main point of contention, its similar to how vegetarians keep pushing their views and preferences as a yardstick to measure others who don't share the same values.

so the question here is why can you not tolerate people simply separating a product from the manufacturer of another niche that is completely legal and is demanded by sovereign nations?

> And ? Are you upset that Google/Microsoft/Oracle sells their tech to the military?

Yes

> Xbox controller is used on nuclear subs too.

I have never played an Xbox, nor do I have any interest in doing so. There is nothing interesting about the Xbox.

That[1] was James Lambert, who was also responsible for Portal 64[2] and is now developing a completely new N64 game. His Youtube channel is worth a follow.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha3fDU-1wHk

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAkSHzR-P7M

To put this into perspective for youngsters, that horrible Sony SDK was considered a wonder for its time, and what kickstarted the movement away from Assembly into C for home console development, as main language.

Until then, only arcades had already made the switch.

On PS2, PS2Linux, Dreamcast there was already C++ support, by the way.

> "gaming is dead now"

One gets the impression that gaming is dead when one's only contact with modern gaming consists of reading headlines about a handful of AAA games.

In reality, the gaming landscape has never been better, as game production has expanded in several directions:

- The barrier to entry into game development has been lowered; People who are talented in design but not programming now have the opportunity to create games

- AAA budgets have increased; those who enjoy large-scale productions will find increasingly large games

- There is still a market for old-school games, so plenty of (especially smaller) companies produce retromodern games

Heck, they even still produce commercial Commodore 64 games o_O

Of course, there is less room for radical innovation, but people do not play only radically innovative games. And regardless, innovation still exists today, especially in smaller-scale productions.

I love that. My wife and I are hopefully having kids soon and that's one thing I really want to encourage. Not to say that modern games aren't any good, but there's an increasing lack of respect for the player's time and wallet. The goal is shifting to maximizing value because they're getting more expensive to produce, but increasing the game price itself is a cardinal sin. Not to mention that live service games just out-earn non-service ones.

I hope it works out. I can see it working in the reverse: I play n64/ps1/ps2/gamecube games with my kid, they go to school and their friends are playing fortnight or valorant, and then you become the bad guy for trying to be an obstacle in that.

>I think he picked up my "gaming is dead now" outlook since he doesn't really have any interest in new systems or games anymore

This is interesting, as I was about to say that gaming has never been more alive than it is now - but it's true that at least the developments in hardware are not nearly as exciting as they used to be in the past. Maybe that's what he's feeling?

I'm a bit of an old-timer now (almost 45), but I enjoy a lot of the classics on GOG. And at a price that can't be beat. Totally no interest in playing modern games.

> you could tell at a passing glance which system was displaying on the screen even if you didn't know what game it was

I always felt the same about the look of PS2 games

I demand Sega Saturn representation in this list!

I grew up playing diablo II and super smash bros (super nintendo before that!). While I don't have as much time for it these days, gaming couldn't be farther from dead, IMO. There are incredible games and worlds being created both from AAA and indie studios alike.

The same way it's done now with current generation consoles: the manufacturer would provide you with SDKs and development hardware once you paid them a decent chunk of money and signed an NDA. Prior to the fifth generation it was common for the SDK to be just an assembler, debugger and register-level hardware documentation, leaving the implementation of a kernel and game engine up to the game developer.

Sony however decided to provide a full C toolchain based on GCC as well as a set of very high level libraries that abstracted away basically all aspects of the PS1 [1], all the way up to implementing a ready-to-go 3D engine and MIDI sequencer. This was an unpopular move as the libraries were slow, inefficient and most game developers were used to having full control over the hardware, but it also allowed inexperienced devs to get started quickly (as proven by the thousands of low budget PS1 titles that used the high level APIs) and eventually contributed to the popularity of the console over its peers with worse tooling.

Sony would eventually go on to release some slightly lower level documentation for certain aspects of the console as well as APIs that better mapped to how the hardware actually worked under the hood. It wasn't however until years later that the hardware would be fully reverse engineered at the register level [2], and it took even longer for most homebrew to move away from the official SDK (which only really started happening a few years ago as accurate emulators and homebrew SDKs started popping up).

[1] https://psx.schnappy.xyz/sdk/Psy-Q/DOCS/LibOver47.pdf

[2] https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/

https://www.retroreversing.com/playstation-2-development-har...

The Dreamcast dev kits came with CodeWarrior as an IDE iirc.

They had stuff, but it was all proprietary. The N64 was a stripped-down implementation of the technology used on (high-end) SGI graphics workstations of the time. SGI certainly had all the required tools.

Yeah, pretty much.

They provide the devkit hardware, the specification technical documentation and the tool chain to compile the binary.

Companies have been building and selling clones of Nintendo consoles for many years now. I suspect if Nintendo had a legal angle against this they would've exercised it a long time ago.

Agree. There is a wall coming for "retro" video game nostalgia once we reach the end of the purpose-specific hardware era. Like, you can build an emulator for WiiWare games, but what does it mean to release a "new" WiiWare game when they're just built using an API like OpenGL which is still being used in new games today? What does following the constraints of an older system like that result in besides just another, lower, quality setting? What does "retro" Fortnite look like in 10 years besides just worse shaders?

Nintendo is notoriously litigious.

> It may be counterintuitive at first, but why wouldn't be possible?

For the same reason it wasn't possible at the time for a third-party to make N64 cartridges themselves to avoid Nintendo's fees. But I assume these lockout chips are replicated or circumvented by now.

Yes. The game was mostly developed with an original N64.

The cartridges from Modretro only work on NTSC N64s, though. I'm told the next production run should work on PAL, too.

If you go into the "Specs" tab on the right, it explicitly lists the original N64 as compatible.

Not the OP, but when I was kid I used to draw game level for 8-bit systems back when I wasn’t allowed on a computer (screen time).

My point is, people get enjoyment out of game design too. It’s not just about nerding out on technical specs.

While I agree with you, I think it's interesting that LLMs have progressed enough to be able to write working code even for niche and heavily-constrained platforms like the N64. I'm sure it helps that modern toolchains make that easier (I don't expect very many LLMs to be able to put up with the old Windows 9x or IRIX toolchains, to say the least!).

If your game fits in the bounds of N64 hardware it makes perfect sense IMO. You basically get virtually all modern platforms for free. Much easier than wrestling with all the modern API that are "platform independent" but not really.

I mean, there is plenty of people out there who enjoy the process of making a game(they have a really clear idea of gameplay mechanics they think would be fun when put together) but they really don't enjoy programming at all. I guess it's kinda the same - I Want to see my game happen, I don't want to code it. Which isn't that different from where all the other tools are leading us anyway. Nowadays you can make a video game by just downloading an engine and building everything using the included scripting language most of the time - no need to understand rendering, IO, input or anything else.

There's a time and place for everything.