F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS (hypnotize.works)

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.

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.

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.

Get used to it. This is the future. It's okay.

this is why i don’t post anything here anymore...

Yeah and some of the article wasn't proofread (by himself or a clanker) and the project is missing some of the due dilligence.

One striking example is "No debugger, no stdout" which is baffling considering I implemented a GDB stub in the very first version of Rosalina which I released like... 10 years ago?

Stdout redirection is supported by both 3dslink and GDB stuff on 3ds, too.

I don't mean to be a party pooper - and the projects fullfills its role as a showcase of how far pure vibecoding can take someone - but it's this can of thing that gives the "absolutely no AI" crowd grounds to stand on.

Yup.

Something that the bot overlord didn't even think to say in its superdense page intro.

That's the problem with AI-generated text. They have no idea of what proper context is.

I love that idea! Please let me know if it's of any help :-)

Since the Playdate doesn't have any of the sprite rendering hardware that made the gameboy both underpowered in compute and overpowered in graphics at the time, some of the tricks may be unnecessary.

I suppose you could do some kind of shift of a whole row of the framebuffer easily with a memmove sort of operation. The gameboy's shift registers and the per sprite drawing are what really made this both difficult and possible at such a slow CPU clock speed. The playdate CPU is about 40x faster than that on the gameboy, so probably all these kinds of tricks and more would work just fine.

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.

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.

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

It seems to me that stereoscopic 3D is as much as "novelty" as is color. It's an objective improvement, because we perceive the real world in stereoscopic 3D. Of course the hardware implementation (not so much on the New 3DS) has various downsides, unlike color.

The PS Vita has a sweet 960x544 OLED

In no way am I suggesting that doing this without AI would be more practical. What I want to know is roughly how much is Anthropic subsidizing this stuff through the subscriptions currently and how much we can expect the real price paid to go up in the future.

Yep, I agree. Further in the notes it's mentioned this probably would've taken a handful of Senior Engineers anywhere from 6 months to 2 years. The range of budget on the project is like $200 to $500k. This was done for peanuts in my spare time. I share both your optimism and pessimism, depending on the day, lol.

> it's a huge savings over getting a human to do it

This of course assumes it's something anyone would consider worth paying a human to do (it's not).

On the stuff I have done (mostly Opus5.5) it came out at around 1/20 the cost, 95%. So a $20 subscription is around $1000 API. Somewhere in that ballpark.

> Good instinct, the bottleneck is on the CPU side though.

Have you, or rather your agents, tried to identify which CPU functions were the bottlenecks (e.g. in citro3d, perhaps)?

I find it surprising that your stuff is CPU bound. Are you doing one command-list submission for _both_ eyes (with one drawcall for each)? This should be relatively simple, only require viewproj matrix changes and avoid CPU<>GPU roundtrips.

If not, you are going to hit IRQ dispatching costs as well as shardmem dispatching costs as well as other costs.