nesdev.com

The fanmade Touhou PV "Bad Apple" has been ported to retro 16 bit and 8 bit consoles with success, but has anyone ever thought of making a BA rom that could be dumped on an Everdrive 64? If a NES can play it I see no reason that the 64 wouldn't be able to handle it as well.

Which is precisely why there would be no fun in doing it.

Bad Apple in color might be more fun on N64.

Oh wait, is that broom clipping through her clothes?

It just being on the 64 would be fun enough.

Though a big attraction would be the audio. The Genesis version of BA sounds pretty darn crisp considering the hardware it's running on; so it would be interesting to hear the results. Also the 64 just needs more love in general.

The thing is that there's no challenge in porting it to the N64... The N64 will not have trouble handling the colors, the resolution, the frame rate, or even the sound. You don't need to think of clever ways deal with the limitations of the system, the console can pretty much do it all out of the box. The only thing that might be a challenge is space, but not nearly as much as in other platforms, IMO.

Not a challenge to the point were someone like me could do it?

Haha that I don't know. I've never done any N64 development myself, so it probably would be a challenge for me.

What I actually meant was that this kind of content isn't beyond the scope of what the console was designed to do, meaning it would be possible to implement without any need for compromises or clever tricks. Compromises make these demos interesting for the general public because we get to analyze how much of the spirit is retained after some aspects are sacrificed, which is much more fun than watching something that looks 100% like the original video. As for the programming tricks, they help keep things interesting for programmers, who need to do more than simply follow a manual to implement something the machine can do effortlessly.

I guess a compromise for the N64 is how small you can make it, because in the "spirit" of a game, you'd want to leave room for both FMVs and actual gameplay. There are only a handful of games larger than 256 megabits on N64, including Conker and Resident Evil.

And if you can get the original 3D models used to make the original animation, and then you run a skeletal engine on those, it can be even smaller.

Yeah, you definitely need a twist to make this interesting on the N64. I did mention space as a possible constraint on the N64, which would be the case if you wanted to leave room for an actual game to go with the video, but that's generally not the spirit with Bad Apple demos, which often use custom codecs optimized specifically for B&W/grayscale graphics.

A more fun solution would be making/using tools to generate vector frames, and render the silhouette shapes in real-time. The audio would take up the bulk of the space if kept as-is, but the video would be cut down a lot. The N64 should be able to handle that solution at 60fps as well.

How many MHz does Vorbis or Opus audio take to decode on a MIPS R4300?

The Vorbis Tremor library should be perfectly up to the task ... Rockbox (using Tremor) has a MIPS build. http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CodecPerfor ... rison#MIPS