Reflective Regret (Inércia 2021 Talk)
Released: October 31, 2021
Tags: C, Libultra, Presentation
I was invited to give a seminar about Nintendo 64 homebrew game development at Inércia Demoparty 2021. Because I have a sense of humor, I decided to forgo making a powerpoint presentation and instead I programmed my presentation on the N64. This required me to write my own text rendering system, complete with formatting options like bold, italics, multiple bullet point levels, and underlining. I even have an in-game laser pointer!
Unfortunately, due to time constraints (since Inércia was happening close to my exam season), the presentation ended up quite a bit text heavy. This also meant that I didn't get the chance to program audio support for the presentation, so I don't really do much in that department either (to be fair there isn't much particularly noteworthy of the N64's Audio Interface). Another side effect of the time constraints was that I didn't get the chance to implement a filesystem for the assets, so many of the graphics and 3D models are loaded in via overlays (since I had full control of when each one would show up).
Overall though, I think the presentation was quite good. It gives a brief overview of the hardware, the software toolkits (as of 2021), and the history of the scene. If I were to do this presentation again, I would have a lot more visual examples of the different tricks that one can accomplish with the RSP/RDP, and a catch-up of all of the recent developments with regards to Libdragon (hint: it's been a lot. OpenGL and Tiny3D being two major things).
