If you are interested in Mario 64 have a look at Kaze Emanuar's YouTube channel.
https://youtube.com/channel/UCuvSqzfO_LV_QzHdmEj84SQ
From Wikipedia:
> Starting from 2022, Emanuar would begin uploading videos discussing Nintendo 64 technical details and optimization techniques,[15] along with outlining Super Mario 64's bugs, technical shortcomings and poorly optimized features, fixing them in the process.[16][17][18][19] He would heavily rework the game's source code in 2024 and use it as a base for his collaborative ROM hack Return to Yoshi's Island, which resulted in increased frame rate and improved graphical fidelity compared to the original game, even when running on the original Nintendo 64.
I came in here to suggest this channel, it's an absolute blast hearing him talk about the N64 hardware with such passion and interest in optimization.
Played RtYI this summer! Really stunning work and incredible optimizations from Kaze.
Did he release those optimizations anywhere?
He has worked with folks and repos under the HackerN64 collection, which has some generic forms of these optimizations. As for the actual code for each specific game I think he only releases it when he's ready to release the games.
This guy has been at it for a while. Was first person I thought of while reading this article.
I was wondering how he has adapted to using LLMs. If they might have significantly advanced his work.
Wouldn’t be a hacker news post without shoehorning chatbots
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He made a few videos about it last year and the consensus was basically that none of them have a good enough understanding of the hardware to actually be useful for optimizing anything. They end up making a lot of assumptions about how the caching behavior and memory architecture works and kind of insist that it must work the way modern PCs do. And it led to a number of cache misses and RAM bus contention that basically didn't work as well as he can do by hand.
he seemed to be doing fine without them
Clearly. But we’ve seen demonstrations of highly skilled folks being able to make outsized progress using LLM.
It can be an acceleration when wielded by someone who can keep the model focused.
I mean, most of the advances he made in Mario 64 come from having a deep understanding of the game's code, while enjoying the process of coming up with new ways to improve the code. Having an AI go through your hobbie like that (since he's doing it both for the sake of it and for his M64 romhack) is kind of spoiling the fun, I guess?
You really gotta lay off this childish “all or nothing” mindset. You can use AI without it doing all the work for you. You can use AI to work on a hobby. You set the limits the tool is allowed. AI is a tool.