Today’s game is Mario Kart 64. I want to unlock the 200 CC option so i’ve been playing a bit of this, and plus it’s just straight up my favorite Mario Kart. It’s basic, and straight to the point of Mario Kart, and the Item Balancing feels great. This is nothing i haven’t said before though.

I did Toad’s Turnpike though on 150 CC, and came in first. I nearly lost to my Mortal Enemy, Donkey Kong, but managed to pull through after I rammed Donkey Kong into a truck and then he got plowed by Wario with a Super Star.

After the race though, decided to go back in Time Trials and peak around. I discovered the course is partly on a bridge, which i just didn’t ever realize. Specifically that green strip up there on the Main Screenshot? That’s the bridge and the player starts up there. Even more so i never realized the Toad on the bridge. I guess usually i’m moving too fast to notice these things.

I also did a race on Chocomountain, and the entire race Donkey Kong was stuck on that spot on the mountain. He never moved oddly enough. Serves him right though for what he did in Mario Party 2. The dick.

I won the Cup in first place, which is to be expected. The AI in Mario Kart 64 isn’t too hard, and the cheating isnt as bad as Super Mario Kart. Spaghetti Kart has a Harder CPU setting, so i’ll have to see if maybe that’s something i can handle.

If you’ll look closely at my victory though…

Donkey Kong is watching like some sort of Blurry Cryptid photo. Probably plotting his revenge. So if after tonight, news breaks that i was murdered by Donkey Kong (and quite possibly backed by Nintendo due to playing this on PC), don’t be surprised.

  • vaguerant@fedia.io
    13·
    3 days ago

    If you don’t mind revealing (hi ninjas), how were you playing this on PC? Only, there’s a lot of options these days. There’s the time-tested N64 emulators, but more recently we’ve got two new methods:

    The PC port of the source code decompilation:

    And the recompilation of the binary:

    For anybody who’s unfamiliar with decomps ports and recomps, they have outwardly similar results but are achieved using very different methods.

    Using the old “source code == recipe” analogy, a decompilation is where you purchase a meal and take it back to the lab where a team of scientists painstakingly analyze it to uncover the original recipe that made it, both in terms of ingredients and the cooking method. Once you have that, you can either make an exact copy of the meal or change it to suit your preferences. Dropping the analogy for a minute, you can modify the game any way you like and even go as far as building it for completely different platforms, across as many CPU architectures as you like.

    Recompilation is a bit harder to describe using the recipe analogy, because at no point do you actually uncover what the original recipe was. Let’s say you have a fancy Klingon delicacy prepared which is utterly inedible to humans. Unfortunately, you are human. Without knowing how it was made, you feed the dish into the back end of a replicator, which puts it back together in a form which offers the same flavor profile but is edible by humans. In this analogy, the Klingon meal is a game built for the Nintendo 64’s MIPS CPU, while your human anatomy requires food for an x86-64 CPU. However, you can’t feed the output to a Vulcan for the same reason you couldn’t eat the Klingon meal.

    As an end-user, the result doesn’t change that much if your goal is just to play Mario Kart 64 on PC. Decompilation is the more labor-intensive process which eventually results in a more flexible “recipe” you can mix around as you like, while recompilation gets you a meal without necessarily helping you understand what went into it or how to make it yourself or change its composition to your preference. Both of these analogies undersell the amount of work that goes into either approach, so I do apologize for making it sound as easy as the sci-fi technology suggests.