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- Hacker News
- > Sorry, you have been blocked
Right. On Mobile Safari on first attempt to view the site
by jackjeff - Love it! N64 was amazing in its prime!
- Its interesting to see how mad they went just trying to avoid using discsby hefner1456
- I wonder if M64 / miSTer N64 core have the necessary wiring to the FPGA so that this could be supported there.by snvzz
- This is really cool. The full tower of cartridges in each other with the last one sticking out horizontally looks so comical.
This whole system feels so quirky and fiddly to work with compared to modern dev kits.
by Agentlien - Ugh, how the heck am I blocked, I don't think I've ever accessed this website before.by nubinetwork
- The article mentioned this needed a modified N64 to route the extra debug signals from the cartridge to the CPU. That got me wondering since afaik there are no unused cartridge pins on the N64.
Turns out it's actually a bit more complicated. The Partner-N64 uses some little-used analog input pins (LAUDIO, RAUDIO, VIDEO_SYNC) for this. The modification also requires cutting the lines to the system's DAC chip to work.
https://ultra64.ca/tutorials/make-your-own-partner-n64-conso...
by ginko - Ah nostalgia. I started in the games industry doing N64 programming, and our devkits looked similar to those flash carts but there was a big SCSI cable connector that went to the host PC.
Later on we had some "debug" cartridges that sat in between the console and a flash cartridge and intercepted reads/writes to a single address and replaced the data with whatever came in over a serial port back to the PC. That was enough of a backdoor to implement very basic dynamic reloading of art assets - I wrote a Photoshop plugin that added a "send to N64" button and some game-side support code and the cycle time for artists trying to see their work on a TV went from 30 minutes to 10 seconds.
by aappleby