Words On Wednesday

I recently discovered a project that allows Nintendo 64 games to be recompiled and personally got The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask running on my Steam Deck natively. It is absolutely insane, and I think it could breathe new life into playing N64 games on modern hardware. Back in May, I came across a reddit post in the r/SteamDeck subreddit about Majora's Mask Recomp. The post mentioned mod support (for an N64 game???), so I was both puzzled and intrigued. I decided to do a little research. It turns out, there has been a project running over the past year or so that allows  the user to "recompile N64 binaries into C code that can be compiled for any platform." To flex the Computer Science degree a bit here, a binary (file) is a program that has been converted into the necessary 0s and 1s to run on a particular computer architecture. Computer architectures vary wildly between different processors and platforms, so a binary for one chipset is unlikely or even impossi...

I spoke of how I had discovered StepMania back in November 2017 . I bought a PS2 to USB adapter online, and I had high hopes that it would allow me to play with my dance pad. Admittedly, I’m a little late on the followup, but I did finally try to use the USB adapter  with the game. Shipping from an obscure little company in China obviously takes a while, so I didn’t get in any hurry waiting for my package. It took a few weeks, but the adapter finally came in. I told myself I would try it out, but I sat it aside and didn’t get around to it for a while. And by “a while,” I mean about 5 months. Things came up, I forgot about the adapter, and I just never got back to it. Finally, in March 2018, a friend came up and asked if I had ever gotten to try it out. I obviously had not, but we decided to hook it up. I expected there would be some configuration, so I was prepared for some setup time. With a black belt in Google-fu, there are very few general tech issues that I can’t solve wit...