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F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS

https://hypnotize.works/gdx-3ds/postmortem/index.html
111bpierre | | 54 | HN
coffeesoda | parent | next
Hey, author of the project here! Thanks for posting! It's been a really fun project to work on, and a great way to learn about how to use Claude more efficiently. I'm just a few hours away from posting a big update with:

64dd on original 3DS

Local & Online Multiplayer

QR Code sharing for Custom Courses

I hope ya'll check out the authors notes, post-morterm, and give it a try on your 3DS.

cynicalkane | parent | next
Look, I'm gonna say what's been said a lot of times, but bears repeating: when the very first two or three sentences I read are mind-blanketing AI prose breathlessly em-dashing together fragments of stuff I don't care about, it makes me skeptical that there's value perusing the rest of the project. Like, you can't even be bothered to make your lede some form of human-to-human communication.
ryan_n | root | parent | next
In the "Read On" section at the bottom it says "Author's notes: The one page written by a human." Seems they're pretty open about everything being written with Claude.
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{"deleted":true,"id":50237819,"parent":50237808,"time":1792977243,"type":"comment"}
echelon | root | parent | next
Get used to it. This is the future. It's okay.
CursedSilicon | root | parent
I wonder how long it'll take people like you breathlessly chanting "this is the future!" before the slop bots hoover that up into their training data like narcissistic poison

Tell the slop bot it's wrong about something and it just starts berating you "get used to it!" "I'm the future!"

testernews | root | parent | next
this is why i don’t post anything here anymore...
opan | root | parent
All your stuff is vibecoded these days? Or is this a general complaint about negativity in the comments?
coffeesoda | root | parent
Appreciate it, but the info is there for anyone (or their LLM) to learn about the project in a technical sense. Like others have kindly stated, my notes (written by a human, for humans) are in a separate section.

The technical notes are dense and interesting in their own right, but I don't expect anyone not already familiar with the N64 to 3DS port scene to care.

aculver | parent
Haven't had a chance to check the project out yet, but wanted to say I love the idea of having a section dedicated to your human-written thoughts. It's the best of both worlds, with as much detail as possible throughout, but also still getting to hear from you personally. Congrats!
coffeesoda | root | parent
Thanks! As fun as the project is, the scope of it is not lost on me. I wanted it to serve as evidence of the frightening power these recent models have, and make it clear.
cdnutter | parent | next
I’m curious why people have started using the 3DS as the gateway device for ports of games, like Melee and F-Zero X.

Don’t get me wrong, the 3DS is a gem of a console, and it harks back to when Nintendo put more thought into what they released instead of just another Mario sports game; but since the Switch is so much more powerful, I’d expect ports to that be more of a priority.

Gigachad | parent | next
Not sure why others are doing it, but the switch is kind of a boring console imo. You may as well just use one of the million PC handhelds with the same form factor, and persistent hacks require a hardware mod.

The 3DS is a fun pocketable form factor which a lot of people already own and easy to permanently mod on any firmware version or hardware revision.

BoorishBears | root | parent
I'm surprised no one has mentioned online: most people don't want to risk console bans, and that immediately makes jailbreaking their Switch a non-starter

At this point most people getting a 3DS are probably doing so specifically to jailbreak it

coffeesoda | parent | next
The 3DS has the novelty of 3D. I always wanted to play F-Zero in this form factor and it seemed like a reasonable port to accomplish.
tempest_ | parent | next
I would guess the 3DS is far more "jailbroken" than the switch.
prophesi | root | parent | next
Jailbroken 3DS scene is usually for modding the console OS itself given how easy it is to run custom firmware. And for ports, and emulation. While the GBA has a pretty dedicated community for custom games and romhacks, people often create games for the platform at gamejams because of how great the dev tooling is. It's a bit lackluster on the 3DS, but I did find the Love Brew[0] framework to be really nice. Even has simulator support[1] for testing your builds locally, though fonts will look much different on real hardware, with likely a bunch of other gotchas. Running out of RAM being a big one.

[0] https://lovebrew.org/

[1] https://github.com/lovebrew/nest

edit: compared it to the GBA homebrew scene since it's a large dedicated community to derive pros and cons between the two from. Switch is still receiving updates from Nintendo to brick your system.

tourmalinetaco | root | parent
It is. Any 3DS can be jailbroken with CFW with a simple Internet guide and no physical modifications. As far as I know, the Switch CFW is locked to only V1 motherboards or modchips, making it far less accessible even if it is more powerful.
shoobiedoo | parent | next
The N64 dev scene seems to be taking off too. If I had to guess, working around limitations in hardware are the fun part for a lot of people.
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Gigachad | parent | next
The costings here are based on API pricing, but my understanding is that no one is paying the API pricing and everyone uses the subscription pricing, or even multiple accounts with a subscription each. I'd be interested to know the actual cost incurred here.
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matthewfcarlson | parent | next
I’m almost done with a port of two games from the original Xbox to modern platforms. While having a good background in assembly and understand of why x87 is problematic and SSE makes life a little easier to understand what it’s doing. And I’ve offered a few suggestions that I thought were useful but it’s been shockingly hands off
kingofspain | parent | next
Well this is interesting to see. I was thinking of porting my game to 3DS which is based on my memories of playing F-Zero X (mainly trying to make it as fast as possible!)

Now I’ll have to do it and see how they compare. I purposefully avoided playing it again during development so it’ll be most curious.

sara_kumodeck | parent | next
how are u planning to handle netcode for online muktiplayer on the 3ds?
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peggigulgow | parent | next
The 3DS fillrate budget is the interesting constraint here. F-Zero X was already doing a lot with the N64 T&L pipeline; mapping that onto a tiled GPU without dropping the 60fps target is the part I'd want more numbers on.
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{"dead":true,"deleted":true,"id":50237711,"parent":50237078,"time":1792976618,"type":"comment"}
26d0 | parent
I wonder how many years it would take to slopport every ROM-available game on every viable piece of hardware /s
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