@@M1XART he is talking about having a physical copy, not about compatibility with real hardware. Something like blast arena advance, a homebrew game for GBA, that was unofficially released on cartridges
If/When a ROM is released, it's pretty easy to get programmable cartridges, when you you can then put in an authentic-looking N64 cartridge shell with some portal box art on it
This continues to blow me away. It may be a recreation of something that already exists, but it really should be seen as a creditable work of art on its own. To port a game that far backwards and to be constrained in these ways and to be forced to find new creative ways around problems for something to work on nearly 30 year old hardware will truly be something to behold. If it is ever finished all the way through, I'd be down to port it to a physical cartridge. Someone would just need to make some kick ass 90s Portal art.
To tell the truth, Valve would be idiots not to sell actual N64 Portal cartridges. I know a lot of people---including people like me who don't even own an N64--would buy one (at a reasonable price). Heck, even if they made only 100 and sold them for $1,000 each I'm sure they'd sell out.
@@whirl3690 honestly, would that really be more difficult than the portal programming, which he already implemented and showed here? I don't know much about N64 programming, but the momentum through portals thing could be dealt just by copying and keeping the variables for momentum after the transfer through the portal. Right?
This is absolutely incredible. Figuring out how to render stuff like that is not easy. I have a Nintendo 64 and I would absolutely LOVE a physical copy of this.
@@mem3b0i_ they didn't reply, so probably? not sure I was just testing if pinging a person on another comment works and I was arguing that this isn't Discord/Twitter and pinging a person without directly replying to them doesn't do anything
I was watching this at midnight in my apartment with paper thin walls. I had my TV turned down to the appropriate night level until your video came on. Since your vocals were low I turned it up figuring you don't often yell or anything suddenly... then that Game Voice kicked in and scared the living shit out of me as I scrambled to grab my remote to turn my TV down! lol Edit: I got my first ever wall pound from the neighbor.
@@GameOn0827 yes, the designers of portal were from digipen. Gabe Newell went out there to recruit and when he saw narbicular drop he immediately made an offer to hire them
I kind of have this feeling that Portal might become the next DOOM in the idea of it becoming one of the next "Hello World" 's of gaming, with people porting it to anything that can run 3D.
Doubt it. Remakes? Yes. But entire demakes? No. For instance, I have an idea along with a friend , of making something similar for the PS1, but I can guarantee it won't work well because one of the most required elements for portal rendering (z-buffer) isn't available, along with a even weaker hardware, may make this task impossible. So have that in mind Incase you wonder why it wouldn't become a Doom. Doom was made to be optimized and with portability in mind, so it has this point in it's advantage. Get someone familiar with it's codebase, and you get the usual "Can it run doom?" Mumbojumbo we have nowadays.
The thing is, OG DOOM is very lightweight compared to Portal. They're like more than a decade apart. I don't think we'll be seeing Portal being ported (heh) to Texas instruments calculators and pregnancy test any time soon.
@@carl8790and after that you have to plug the red wire into the socket to make sure the engine boots at launch. Wrap the green wire around it's coil that sits directly beside the A button. After you put the back shell on, place the battery in the slot. Screw the Vr26 Jeeper back up and press the reset button. If everything worked according to plan you're device should show a thumbs up sprite. Plug the HDMI port into a monitor and wait three seconds. If it boots up on TV your in the good side. If it doesn't boot in less then 5 seconds quickly unplug. This can severely damage your TV and possibly start a fire
Wow that is great work right there. I would be fine even if gladOS was text only. I know Conker's Bad Fur Day managed to get the entire N64 game fully voice-acted. Though it was developed by RARE during their peak N64 dev days so could be hard to copy. The fact the first area is even fully functional is something I was not expecting. Keep up the incredible work!
Sound on the N64 can be a nightmare because the dev tools were just really crappy, but one of the hardest parts isn't sound, it's graphics. Conker's Bad Fur Day was one of very few N64 games to push graphics to the limit and that's because the team spent significant time before the games development drilling down deep into the N64 graphics, more than most companies and basically invented a whole new graphics library.
This honestly made my day. Your videos are light-hearted , informational, inspiring and interesting. Thanks so much for posting and feel free to take your time and continue to have fun.
This is really impressive. I also want to say you do an excellent job of explaining the technical details of how it works in an easy to understand manner. I really enjoyed this video
This is just plain impressive and deserves way more praise and attention than it gets. The technical struggles you must have had to fight through in order to get such a smooth system running on such an old console must have been nothing short of daunting. I thoroughly applaud your dedication and talent.
The N64 is such a little beast. The fact that it retains such a small shape and has the ability to push out clean poly, so awesome. Also, that looks like a solid frame rate, it looked above 20 fps!
Rather than partitioning the Z-Buffer per portal view, couldn't you instead mask the region with the portal object's depth. You can then do something like std::nextafter of C++ to bring the portal ever so slightly closer to the camera than the wall, removing the need to create the wall hole.
That part was confusing to me as well... But I take it to be a general explanation of how the z-buffer works. The portal view is inherently further away in the depth buffer because, well... it's further away. I'd be surprised if there's actually code necessary to explicitly partition the z-buffer. Though I have messed around with trying to program portals before and I ran into trouble where walls and objects inside the portal view, behind the portal, cover the entire portal view, but I recon that explicitly partitioning the z-buffer wouldn't fix that. It's more likely solved because he renders only what's inside the view frustum, which is probably adjusted to start at the portal and no closer.
Simply moving the portal coordinates by the smallest unit possible wouldn't solve the z-fighting since the coordinates are transformed every frame and the magnitude of the smallest possible unit will vary based on how far a given pixel is from the camera. Even if you correctly accommodated it every frame, the portal would visibly jiggle and the math would be a pain since you need to ensure every pixel is far enough away but you only have direct control over the vertices, and doing the math naively would not work for the same reason that z-fighting happens in the first place
this is awesome, I imagine that the next update would have to deal with load zones and the mono portal device stand. btw, this is a great pace you're working at! the original creators of P0RTAL spent 3 years making the original and your clone+Engine took you only a few months to make and it looks Great! keep up the great work!
@@FoxyAnimater They didn't import any engine, do you mean recreate? They created their own, also they didn't take any time to create... creating maps, story, every models base atleast, voice acting. Not saying this isn't impressive but you are just objectively wrong when you mentioned this being more impressive than the original game.
@@flintfrommother3gaming considering that we haven't got a new Portal game for well over a decade, this is impressive. Also, I ment new relative to the system.
@unsubtract tou are wrong on so many levels, have you ever played the steam version? Also, have you ever watched a documentary on portal's development? I guarantee that you have no idea of what you're talking about.
Textures work different on the N64, this isn't like Unity or Unreal. Textures can be very expensive and often require strategic ways to load and apply them in order to get more out of them. Many N64 games such as Mario 64 tried to avoid textures and just use vertex coloring where possible using textures where it had to be done. On the N64, rendering polygons with added vertex coloring was infinitely easier.
Rendering the portal view to a texture and then applying the texture to the portal is a nightmare. That's how the old minecraft portal gun mod did it. The problem that you get is that textures are subject to the same transformations that the faces are so it will stretch and morph in accordance with perspective. Let alone all the different kinds of filtering. I think the method he uses is the same as the original game.
The original game does use textures, but they are rendered from a transform of the players view, and use some frustrum trickery to stop things in front of it.
@@svlmain ruclips.net/video/riijspB9DIQ/видео.html Here a portal developer contradicts this. They show something really interesting though. They do it in the opposite order compared to this N64 version. EDIT: later in the video they show that the original portal uses textures beyond the first portal view.
This is actually incredible. I just caught up through all the progress updates and I must say that you're just an absolute madlad for this. Please keep up all of your hard work!
and after that you have to plug the red wire into the socket to make sure the engine boots at launch. Wrap the green wire around it's coil that sits directly beside the A button. After you put the back shell on, place the battery in the slot. Screw the Vr26 Jeeper back up and press the reset button. If everything worked according to plan you're device should show a thumbs up sprite. Plug the HDMI port into a monitor and wait three seconds. If it boots up on TV your in the good side. If it doesn't boot in less then 5 seconds quickly unplug. This can severely damage your TV and possibly start a fire
This is a fantastic down to earth explanation of the challenges you faced. I’ve built a couple of very basic 3D engines over the years and would have loved simple explanations like these when figuring out these sorts of problems on my own!
Really hope that you remake either the entire game or "The First Slice" as a N64 game. Doubt the entire game would fit due to mapsizes and voice lines, but would love to see it! As for the first slice, it's probably more doable (Chambers 00 to 10, just before the dual portal device upgrade), so really hope you keep that going to have the game implemented this far.
@@Matsilagi Those are probably all 44.1kHz 16-bit stereo, though. You can fit a whole lot more at 32kHz 8-bit mono, and even more still with ADPCM. Not saying it's nothing, but it's less than half the size just by using more hardware-appropriate sample quality. And you could make it even lower of a sampling rate if you didn't use linear PCM as your source and instead used something like A-law or mu-law on the voice lines. We have the benefit of hindsight and fancy encoders to get a format that's compressed and easy to decode on the N64.
Dude the concept of Portal itself is one of those “it’s hard for me to even believe what my eyes are seeing, how did people program this to begin with??” Things. And you not only learned/reverse engineered this but optimized it for super legacy hardware. Unbelievable, and AMAZING job
I wouldn't call it genius, but this incredible. I hope other hobbyists could use your code and ideas to create similarly impressive projects in the future. When this is complete I hope Valve will acknowledge you in some way.
The robotic voice sounds good and is fitting but when GLaDOS gets her cores removed her voice starts changing to sound a lot more fluid and human. Could you put some lines of that in your remake and show us how the bitcrunching of the N64 hardware sound when doing it with a much more normal voice?
@@SirScallywagger *"Yes but what's the point of doing that?"* There is the principle of attempting to fit within all of the technological and economical constraints of the era as you suggest, and then there is the principle of attempting to get the most out of a piece of hardware. After all, those space constraints back then weren't entirely technological but also economical---it ultimately came down to how much money one wanted to spend.
Bro, that's just amazing, been following the process for a while now and the fact that you built a portal remake for one of the hardest consoles to develop for (from their time), just amazing.
I love this, especially since the original Half Life was largely influenced by Goldeneye, so seeing a game on the Half Life Engine retrofitted to the N64 feels right in a way.
Huh, it's the first time I heard about the GoldenEye influence in HL. Last time I heard it was influenced more by Quake (and the engine HL runs on is a modified Quake 2 engine as well).
half life's engine isn't the same as portal. HL is goldsrc and portal is source. there is HL source and black mesa if you want to experience the same story on the source engine.
4:00 I notice the portal simply cuts off after too many portals. I find this common but a simple solution that works basically the same way as real life pointing a camera at a screen showing that cameras output is to simply render the portal view from previous frame into the portal displayed in current frame (or a solid colour if no data exists) if you know what I mean
He made a video adressing this, he's able to go upto 16 portals but would rather use the performance left over by cutting off portal recursion for other visual effects and graphics
This is really cool. I'd be interested in seeing how you handle the rest of the physics (speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out) which would also need that thing that Valve implemented where there is almost like a portal vacuum to correct for the user if the placement is slightly off. Oh and acceleration. I have doubts that it could do all be done and I'm very impressed by your work.
May I suggest, in the second test chamber, having buttons that change where the portals are instead of a timer? the second portal, when recreating that exact same chamber, added that to help with game flow.
that's what portal 2 did and it was much better. portal 1 should retro-fit it back to itself. (and then portal 2 improves upon it another time and then portal 1... ok i need to sleep)
It looks like you are really far along developing this. Soon you might be able to start making all the levels up to chamber 19. I figure the non testing areas might take a bit more work and if you do the final boss area that might be a lot too. I don’t care how long it takes I’m gonna stick around to see this finished. Makes me wonder if Half Life could be done too.
I think Half-Life could be, in a very, VERY cut-down state. Turok 3 is close to Half-Life game wise but it runs bad and looks meh, maybe HL would be doable, but I imagine the cartridge space being a bother. Unless it is done for the 64DD platform.
Half Life has a never released port for the Dreamcast, which is not quite the same, but still marvelous. It's kind of a pain in the ass on real hardware though. Because it was never released, you can't find a GD-ROM of it, so you'll need a Dreamcast capable of playing games burnt to a normal CD, and of course need to burn the image to a CD. Also, saving is rather poorly optimized, and takes up more and more space the farther into a level you get. I'm unsure if it ever reaches a point where it costs more blocks to save than a VMU contains, but I have an entire VMU dedicated just to HL, because it absolutely can and has taken up the entirety of its free space at one point. Aside from that, it's a faithful port that I believe was finished by fans, as the unreleased leak was incomplete. And very fun on a DC controller
@@RemyJustice97 I’ve heard about that. It’s super interesting knowing it was supposed to have a Dreamcast release. It would be neat if he could port it to n64 but that would take a bit of work. Who knows maybe he could use the knowledge he has learned from the portal port to do Half Life. I know it did release for the ps2 so I might pick up a copy of that just for fun at some point.
Yup! He made a whole video on how he did that, it's on this channel and it's called "Portal Demake for Nintendo 64 | Buttons and Doors" Edit: I got the video wrong the first time, changed it the correct one
this is the best n64 homebrew project that i've ever witnessed, as an learning n64 romhacker myself (mostly sm64) this is brilliant, and you are very talented.
I am still wondering how you made the game run so smooth on a n64. I have an old low range phone that can run ocarina of time at 30 fps, but your "port" runs at more than 60 fps while looking at multiple portals
Emulation uses much, much more computational power than original hardware. In fact, today's low range phone could easily run the first Portal game without any problem, and Portal 2 with low quality settings. Modern low range phone are incredibly more powerful than a Nintendo 64, they have hundreds time more RAM, they have much faster programable shading unit, they have AI acceleration unit, more CPU cores running at faster speed, higher storage capacity, higher bandwith.
And Ocarina of Time has a caped framerate, so no matter how fast your emulator can go, you cannot get higher framerate without modifying the rom. If you speed up the CPU, the game itself also speed up.
@@Quesbe ik the cpu inside my phone has 8 cores and the original n64 has 1 and a pretty bad one for a 2004 computer(as an example) but since emulation requires more resurces bcus it has to translate the data using n64 and the game language, not just the game lang, it should work slower especially if running with unintended(not really) "mods" to be able to run in a bigger res or make some elements render differently.And this could harm the performance a lot
@@Quesbe btw, I ran portal 1 on my phone and it ran at 60 fps average(50-40 while looking into a portal), and I've tried also the gm_construct map but my phone ran out of memory so I had to delete some textures and some sounds, but it still worked very good at 60 fps
I really can't believe that this is real! This is what i've always wanted Homebrews to be! It's so awesome that the N64 hardware is capable of doing this! Also your physics system works so well, it's so awesome!!! Keep up the great work, can't wait to see more, this is truly amazing 😁!
This got me so excited! Sure they have Portal on the Switch and pretty much everything else. But there's just something about playing a new game on very old handwear that just gets me excited!
This is beyond fascinating. Disregarding the fact that I didn't understand a single goddamn concept in this video, there are two things that stand out to me. First, even when a piece of technology is outdated, we'll never run out of ways to use it. And second, no matter how advanced a piece of tech or software becomes, there will always be people who make these sorts of demakes. It's a really weird universal constant that I adore. It runs right alongside the other universal constant that I love; if there is anything with an electric current, it will be used to run DOOM.
I must be 1 of the few people who knew and played Narbacular Drop, the game that first used these 3D portal mechanics, that were later acquired by Valve. Portal 1 & 2 remain some of my all time favorite games though, Great work on this, it looks great in that Goldeneye style, I hope you will be able to complete this project and that I can play it some day. Kraken sent me over, I do metal casting too 😁
The trick is to know how much of the physics to cut and still retain the core game feel. the first portal game could been implemented on a commodore 64, and there are probably some old games that have portals. but its how exactly the game mechanics work that made that game so awesome. having the polished design in hand gives you a huge advantage for back porting it. its pretty sweet to see how it gets applied to different platforms. i remember the flash version came out almost immediately after the orange box, and it was awesome (its still on Newgrounds)
Sorry about the quiet audio. I'm not sure how I missed adjusting that in the final cut.
I'm not sure either lol you managed to do the impossible with this project yet didn't slap a compressor on yer audio
@@andrewkovnat however many times this reply appears is how many times @RUclips duplicated your reply
@@andrewkovnat however many times this reply appears is how many times @RUclips duplicated your reply
@@andrewkovnat however many times this reply appears is how many times @RUclips duplicated your reply
@@andrewkovnat however many times this reply appears is how many times @RUclips duplicated your reply
Just realized we're now about as far away from Portal 2 as Portal 1 was from the N64's debut
O shit
Damn, we’re all so damn old
bruh n64 came out in 1996 and portal was in 2007
edit: i read that wrong
@@Lunarcreeper yea 11 years
gex was released closer to the moon landing than today
I would pay SO MUCH for a physical cartridge of even just the FIRST level
Same
Then why don't you? It's running beautifully on real hardware via flashcartridge.
@@M1XART he is talking about having a physical copy, not about compatibility with real hardware. Something like blast arena advance, a homebrew game for GBA, that was unofficially released on cartridges
If/When a ROM is released, it's pretty easy to get programmable cartridges, when you you can then put in an authentic-looking N64 cartridge shell with some portal box art on it
@@marikiri5119 yes and those unofficial cartridges use flash! gasp! omg! oh my god! (who invited this kid?)
This continues to blow me away. It may be a recreation of something that already exists, but it really should be seen as a creditable work of art on its own. To port a game that far backwards and to be constrained in these ways and to be forced to find new creative ways around problems for something to work on nearly 30 year old hardware will truly be something to behold. If it is ever finished all the way through, I'd be down to port it to a physical cartridge. Someone would just need to make some kick ass 90s Portal art.
To tell the truth, Valve would be idiots not to sell actual N64 Portal cartridges. I know a lot of people---including people like me who don't even own an N64--would buy one (at a reasonable price). Heck, even if they made only 100 and sold them for $1,000 each I'm sure they'd sell out.
After *attempting* to play PortalDS, it feels nice to see a port of portal that actually works
Hey now, PortalDS works just fine.
...Sometimes.
@@obvfw most of the time, it doesn’t show portals lol
I can’t even figure out how to get past the title screen. It does nothing for me
@@Nightcaat if your taking about the screen with GladOS on it, just spam a and start
Ok, I'ma google search for this game...
Seeing the entire game on n64 would blow my mind. Really hope you don't ever cancel this before you finish the full game!
I think it would be extremely difficult to implement the transference of momentum through portals while airborne.
@@whirl3690 replace it with trampolines :troll face:
@@whirl3690 honestly, would that really be more difficult than the portal programming, which he already implemented and showed here? I don't know much about N64 programming, but the momentum through portals thing could be dealt just by copying and keeping the variables for momentum after the transfer through the portal. Right?
@@gaetanodepaola2ndchannel179 It wouldn't be that simple when one portal is flat on a floor, wall, or ceiling while the other is on an incline.
@@whirl3690 would it not be possible to just have a 3D vector with your speed that is edited by the difference in portal angles?
This is absolutely incredible. Figuring out how to render stuff like that is not easy. I have a Nintendo 64 and I would absolutely LOVE a physical copy of this.
i am sorry, just testing something to prove a point
ignore this comment, OP
@Nesy boi
Everdrive and a copy of the rom would technically be a physical copy for your N64.
@@andrixsotheraccount6744 did ya prove em' wrong?
@@mem3b0i_ they didn't reply, so probably? not sure
I was just testing if pinging a person on another comment works and I was arguing that this isn't Discord/Twitter and pinging a person without directly replying to them doesn't do anything
@@andrixsotheraccount6744 If you managed to copy the actual data and not the text, it might be possible.
No words can describe just how cool this is!
THis is so cool, only complaint is that the game audio was waaay louder than your voice, but great vid otherwise
This is why audio normalization is important.
I got startled by the GLaDOS earrape
I was watching this as my last video before bed and i'm not as tired as I need to be for sleep, now 😂😭
I was watching this at midnight in my apartment with paper thin walls. I had my TV turned down to the appropriate night level until your video came on. Since your vocals were low I turned it up figuring you don't often yell or anything suddenly... then that Game Voice kicked in and scared the living shit out of me as I scrambled to grab my remote to turn my TV down! lol Edit: I got my first ever wall pound from the neighbor.
@@RobotnikPlays *audio leveling
rather impressive considering that Narbicular Drop, the game that inspired portal, was built to originally run on the gamecube.
Digipen grad?
@@GameOn0827 yes, the designers of portal were from digipen. Gabe Newell went out there to recruit and when he saw narbicular drop he immediately made an offer to hire them
I obviously know that, 'detective'. I was asking if you were a graduate.
@@GameOn0827 oh no, not my expertise. Though I was a big Nintendo fan when I was a kid and I wanted to go there.
@@GameOn0827 Don't act like a prick, mate.
I kind of have this feeling that Portal might become the next DOOM in the idea of it becoming one of the next "Hello World" 's of gaming, with people porting it to anything that can run 3D.
I can't wait for someone to try running Portal on a calculator
Do not take this man's amazing attempt at making Portal for the N64 as indication that it might be easy or feasible like Doom is.
Doubt it. Remakes? Yes. But entire demakes? No.
For instance, I have an idea along with a friend , of making something similar for the PS1, but I can guarantee it won't work well because one of the most required elements for portal rendering (z-buffer) isn't available, along with a even weaker hardware, may make this task impossible. So have that in mind Incase you wonder why it wouldn't become a Doom.
Doom was made to be optimized and with portability in mind, so it has this point in it's advantage. Get someone familiar with it's codebase, and you get the usual "Can it run doom?" Mumbojumbo we have nowadays.
The thing is, OG DOOM is very lightweight compared to Portal. They're like more than a decade apart.
I don't think we'll be seeing Portal being ported (heh) to Texas instruments calculators and pregnancy test any time soon.
@@carl8790and after that you have to plug the red wire into the socket to make sure the engine boots at launch. Wrap the green wire around it's coil that sits directly beside the A button. After you put the back shell on, place the battery in the slot. Screw the Vr26 Jeeper back up and press the reset button. If everything worked according to plan you're device should show a thumbs up sprite. Plug the HDMI port into a monitor and wait three seconds. If it boots up on TV your in the good side. If it doesn't boot in less then 5 seconds quickly unplug. This can severely damage your TV and possibly start a fire
my god, this is sooo cool!!!! thank you for sharing your progress!!
"Why are you porting Portal to the Nintendo 64?"
"Science isn't aby 'why', it's about 'why not'!"
Yes Mr. Johnson sir.
Aperture Science.
We do what we must,because...
We can!
Wow that is great work right there. I would be fine even if gladOS was text only. I know Conker's Bad Fur Day managed to get the entire N64 game fully voice-acted. Though it was developed by RARE during their peak N64 dev days so could be hard to copy.
The fact the first area is even fully functional is something I was not expecting. Keep up the incredible work!
Sound on the N64 can be a nightmare because the dev tools were just really crappy, but one of the hardest parts isn't sound, it's graphics. Conker's Bad Fur Day was one of very few N64 games to push graphics to the limit and that's because the team spent significant time before the games development drilling down deep into the N64 graphics, more than most companies and basically invented a whole new graphics library.
I believe we have algorithms for compressing audio better than 90s. Also 64 megabit of flash storage is not that expensive now.
This honestly made my day. Your videos are light-hearted , informational, inspiring and interesting. Thanks so much for posting and feel free to take your time and continue to have fun.
This is really impressive. I also want to say you do an excellent job of explaining the technical details of how it works in an easy to understand manner. I really enjoyed this video
This is just plain impressive and deserves way more praise and attention than it gets. The technical struggles you must have had to fight through in order to get such a smooth system running on such an old console must have been nothing short of daunting. I thoroughly applaud your dedication and talent.
This is amazing and very much interesting, thanks for this!
Interesting- Zelda Ocarina of Time was going to have a medallion that developers described as “just like portal did 10 years later”
@Viewer could you send the link for that clip please?
Really cool work man
The N64 is such a little beast. The fact that it retains such a small shape and has the ability to push out clean poly, so awesome. Also, that looks like a solid frame rate, it looked above 20 fps!
This is so cool, good luck on your project, I will definitely be following your progress :)
Rather than partitioning the Z-Buffer per portal view, couldn't you instead mask the region with the portal object's depth. You can then do something like std::nextafter of C++ to bring the portal ever so slightly closer to the camera than the wall, removing the need to create the wall hole.
would that run faster or slower on an n64?
That part was confusing to me as well... But I take it to be a general explanation of how the z-buffer works. The portal view is inherently further away in the depth buffer because, well... it's further away. I'd be surprised if there's actually code necessary to explicitly partition the z-buffer. Though I have messed around with trying to program portals before and I ran into trouble where walls and objects inside the portal view, behind the portal, cover the entire portal view, but I recon that explicitly partitioning the z-buffer wouldn't fix that. It's more likely solved because he renders only what's inside the view frustum, which is probably adjusted to start at the portal and no closer.
Simply moving the portal coordinates by the smallest unit possible wouldn't solve the z-fighting since the coordinates are transformed every frame and the magnitude of the smallest possible unit will vary based on how far a given pixel is from the camera. Even if you correctly accommodated it every frame, the portal would visibly jiggle and the math would be a pain since you need to ensure every pixel is far enough away but you only have direct control over the vertices, and doing the math naively would not work for the same reason that z-fighting happens in the first place
Big words, me no understand. :(
the big issue is this is a n64 not a modern pc with a whole lot of ram to mess with
this is awesome, I imagine that the next update would have to deal with load zones and the mono portal device stand. btw, this is a great pace you're working at! the original creators of P0RTAL spent 3 years making the original and your clone+Engine took you only a few months to make and it looks Great! keep up the great work!
@laff. The same probably has to be applied here, except taking a game from a new engine importing it to an ancient system? That's something awesome.
@@FoxyAnimater They didn't import any engine, do you mean recreate? They created their own, also they didn't take any time to create... creating maps, story, every models base atleast, voice acting. Not saying this isn't impressive but you are just objectively wrong when you mentioned this being more impressive than the original game.
@@flintfrommother3gaming considering that we haven't got a new Portal game for well over a decade, this is impressive. Also, I ment new relative to the system.
@@flintfrommother3gaming And most importantly: Level design
@unsubtract tou are wrong on so many levels, have you ever played the steam version? Also, have you ever watched a documentary on portal's development? I guarantee that you have no idea of what you're talking about.
I imagine unless the portal gun is animated, a texture would work just as well.
Textures work different on the N64, this isn't like Unity or Unreal. Textures can be very expensive and often require strategic ways to load and apply them in order to get more out of them. Many N64 games such as Mario 64 tried to avoid textures and just use vertex coloring where possible using textures where it had to be done. On the N64, rendering polygons with added vertex coloring was infinitely easier.
Rendering the portal view to a texture and then applying the texture to the portal is a nightmare. That's how the old minecraft portal gun mod did it. The problem that you get is that textures are subject to the same transformations that the faces are so it will stretch and morph in accordance with perspective. Let alone all the different kinds of filtering. I think the method he uses is the same as the original game.
The original game does use textures, but they are rendered from a transform of the players view, and use some frustrum trickery to stop things in front of it.
@@svlmain Ah thanks. Any insight if it would work on the N64?
@@svlmain ruclips.net/video/riijspB9DIQ/видео.html Here a portal developer contradicts this. They show something really interesting though. They do it in the opposite order compared to this N64 version.
EDIT: later in the video they show that the original portal uses textures beyond the first portal view.
This is actually incredible. I just caught up through all the progress updates and I must say that you're just an absolute madlad for this. Please keep up all of your hard work!
Each new devlog never ceases to amaze me. You're doing god's work here, man.
and after that you have to plug the red wire into the socket to make sure the engine boots at launch. Wrap the green wire around it's coil that sits directly beside the A button. After you put the back shell on, place the battery in the slot. Screw the Vr26 Jeeper back up and press the reset button. If everything worked according to plan you're device should show a thumbs up sprite. Plug the HDMI port into a monitor and wait three seconds. If it boots up on TV your in the good side. If it doesn't boot in less then 5 seconds quickly unplug. This can severely damage your TV and possibly start a fire
This is a fantastic down to earth explanation of the challenges you faced. I’ve built a couple of very basic 3D engines over the years and would have loved simple explanations like these when figuring out these sorts of problems on my own!
I cannot wait for the to be finished.
me too, tyler. me too
I liked a lot the technical explanations, explains surprisingly a lot about inner workings of games (actually not only on N64)
Really hope that you remake either the entire game or "The First Slice" as a N64 game. Doubt the entire game would fit due to mapsizes and voice lines, but would love to see it!
As for the first slice, it's probably more doable (Chambers 00 to 10, just before the dual portal device upgrade), so really hope you keep that going to have the game implemented this far.
I doubt the size is an issue, as I'm pretty sure the N64 supports ROM bank switching, and modern ROM chips of that size are cheap
Trust me, along with base Source content, it has 300MB of sounds, it will take lots of creativity to make those smaller.
@@Matsilagi As I said, not a problem if it can swap between 10 64MB ROM banks
The final GLaDOS room is kinda big to render, also the climbs on escape_00. Those are the ones which worries me the most. The rest is chill, i agree.
@@Matsilagi Those are probably all 44.1kHz 16-bit stereo, though. You can fit a whole lot more at 32kHz 8-bit mono, and even more still with ADPCM. Not saying it's nothing, but it's less than half the size just by using more hardware-appropriate sample quality. And you could make it even lower of a sampling rate if you didn't use linear PCM as your source and instead used something like A-law or mu-law on the voice lines. We have the benefit of hindsight and fancy encoders to get a format that's compressed and easy to decode on the N64.
Dude the concept of Portal itself is one of those “it’s hard for me to even believe what my eyes are seeing, how did people program this to begin with??” Things. And you not only learned/reverse engineered this but optimized it for super legacy hardware. Unbelievable, and AMAZING job
I'm more and more impressed with each new update!
Weirdly overwhelmed by a combination of nostalgia and reverence of how smart you are. Good job dude.
I wouldn't call it genius, but this incredible. I hope other hobbyists could use your code and ideas to create similarly impressive projects in the future.
When this is complete I hope Valve will acknowledge you in some way.
The robotic voice sounds good and is fitting but when GLaDOS gets her cores removed her voice starts changing to sound a lot more fluid and human.
Could you put some lines of that in your remake and show us how the bitcrunching of the N64 hardware sound when doing it with a much more normal voice?
@@ZanaGBYT Imagine if Banjo games had 128MB carts lol
@@SirScallywagger *"Yes but what's the point of doing that?"*
There is the principle of attempting to fit within all of the technological and economical constraints of the era as you suggest, and then there is the principle of attempting to get the most out of a piece of hardware. After all, those space constraints back then weren't entirely technological but also economical---it ultimately came down to how much money one wanted to spend.
Bro, that's just amazing, been following the process for a while now and the fact that you built a portal remake for one of the hardest consoles to develop for (from their time), just amazing.
I love this, especially since the original Half Life was largely influenced by Goldeneye, so seeing a game on the Half Life Engine retrofitted to the N64 feels right in a way.
Huh, it's the first time I heard about the GoldenEye influence in HL. Last time I heard it was influenced more by Quake (and the engine HL runs on is a modified Quake 2 engine as well).
half life's engine isn't the same as portal. HL is goldsrc and portal is source.
there is HL source and black mesa if you want to experience the same story on the source engine.
@@filipealarza9079 You should be banished to hell for an eternity for mentioning HL Source
"Half Life being influenced by Golden EyE" that's fucking bullshit and you know it
@@ZX3000GT1Apparently it was the sophistication of the AI in Goldeneye that influenced Half Life, according to David Doak
Love this stuff! Glad to see it progress.
4:00 I notice the portal simply cuts off after too many portals. I find this common but a simple solution that works basically the same way as real life pointing a camera at a screen showing that cameras output is to simply render the portal view from previous frame into the portal displayed in current frame (or a solid colour if no data exists) if you know what I mean
That's how the portals work even on the PC version. It's cheap from a performance perspective and completely acceptable visually.
@@the_kovic but this appears to be not doing it
(Also I was mainly suggesting it to the creator)
In an earlier video they got the cutoff point at over a dozen portals. My guess is that they made it less for testing
He made a video adressing this, he's able to go upto 16 portals but would rather use the performance left over by cutting off portal recursion for other visual effects and graphics
This is mindblowing, you are a genius. It looked too good to be true, I'm too used to watching concept animations. Happy to see it's real!🙀
This rocks, it looks so good!
This is absolutely incredible! Fantastic work so far!
This is really cool. I'd be interested in seeing how you handle the rest of the physics (speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out) which would also need that thing that Valve implemented where there is almost like a portal vacuum to correct for the user if the placement is slightly off. Oh and acceleration. I have doubts that it could do all be done and I'm very impressed by your work.
the portal funnel
Holy Ravioly. Its alive.
This is a really impresive feat, congrats.
May I suggest, in the second test chamber, having buttons that change where the portals are instead of a timer? the second portal, when recreating that exact same chamber, added that to help with game flow.
that's what portal 2 did and it was much better. portal 1 should retro-fit it back to itself.
(and then portal 2 improves upon it another time and then portal 1... ok i need to sleep)
Portal is going to be the next Doom of insane ports.
It looks like you are really far along developing this. Soon you might be able to start making all the levels up to chamber 19. I figure the non testing areas might take a bit more work and if you do the final boss area that might be a lot too. I don’t care how long it takes I’m gonna stick around to see this finished. Makes me wonder if Half Life could be done too.
I think Half-Life could be, in a very, VERY cut-down state. Turok 3 is close to Half-Life game wise but it runs bad and looks meh, maybe HL would be doable, but I imagine the cartridge space being a bother. Unless it is done for the 64DD platform.
Half Life has a never released port for the Dreamcast, which is not quite the same, but still marvelous. It's kind of a pain in the ass on real hardware though.
Because it was never released, you can't find a GD-ROM of it, so you'll need a Dreamcast capable of playing games burnt to a normal CD, and of course need to burn the image to a CD. Also, saving is rather poorly optimized, and takes up more and more space the farther into a level you get. I'm unsure if it ever reaches a point where it costs more blocks to save than a VMU contains, but I have an entire VMU dedicated just to HL, because it absolutely can and has taken up the entirety of its free space at one point.
Aside from that, it's a faithful port that I believe was finished by fans, as the unreleased leak was incomplete. And very fun on a DC controller
@@RemyJustice97 I’ve heard about that. It’s super interesting knowing it was supposed to have a Dreamcast release. It would be neat if he could port it to n64 but that would take a bit of work. Who knows maybe he could use the knowledge he has learned from the portal port to do Half Life. I know it did release for the ps2 so I might pick up a copy of that just for fun at some point.
Mate, thats some brilliant bloody work you've done there! Keep it up my friend. Cheers.
Maybe you could also use the noise channel to make the poison goo look murky
just remember, the N64 is not an esolang, and you can probably just use a texture.
I want more videos like this, im pissed i didnt find this video sooner. this is absolutely amazing.
Wait were there physics on the companion cube??
Yup! He made a whole video on how he did that, it's on this channel and it's called "Portal Demake for Nintendo 64 | Buttons and Doors"
Edit: I got the video wrong the first time, changed it the correct one
@@maddscraft5459 oh wow that's nuts to see on an N64
This feels like resident evil n64 port levels of work, just neat stuff! good job man!
The real question it can a gamecube run Portal 2
Don't temp me
this is the best n64 homebrew project that i've ever witnessed, as an learning n64 romhacker myself (mostly sm64) this is brilliant, and you are very talented.
I am still wondering how you made the game run so smooth on a n64. I have an old low range phone that can run ocarina of time at 30 fps, but your "port" runs at more than 60 fps while looking at multiple portals
Emulation uses much, much more computational power than original hardware.
In fact, today's low range phone could easily run the first Portal game without any problem, and Portal 2 with low quality settings.
Modern low range phone are incredibly more powerful than a Nintendo 64, they have hundreds time more RAM, they have much faster programable shading unit, they have AI acceleration unit, more CPU cores running at faster speed, higher storage capacity, higher bandwith.
And Ocarina of Time has a caped framerate, so no matter how fast your emulator can go, you cannot get higher framerate without modifying the rom. If you speed up the CPU, the game itself also speed up.
@@Quesbe ik the cpu inside my phone has 8 cores and the original n64 has 1 and a pretty bad one for a 2004 computer(as an example)
but since emulation requires more resurces bcus it has to translate the data using n64 and the game language, not just the game lang, it should work slower especially if running with unintended(not really) "mods" to be able to run in a bigger res or make some elements render differently.And this could harm the performance a lot
@@Quesbe btw, I ran portal 1 on my phone and it ran at 60 fps average(50-40 while looking into a portal), and I've tried also the gm_construct map but my phone ran out of memory so I had to delete some textures and some sounds, but it still worked very good at 60 fps
This is a really cool video. You do a really good job at explaining :)
"how does a console 10 years older than portal run it?"
My brain got confused realizing that the n64 was closer to portal than we are now
I really can't believe that this is real! This is what i've always wanted Homebrews to be! It's so awesome that the N64 hardware is capable of doing this! Also your physics system works so well, it's so awesome!!! Keep up the great work, can't wait to see more, this is truly amazing 😁!
Very interesting. But please amplify your voice recording to a normal level using for example Audacity.
That mistake is exclusive to this video and was the result of absent-mindedness. His other videos don't have that issue.
Me in 2009: Wow games must be so cool in 10+ years
Me in 2022: *watching old games being ported to even older consoles*
4:55 maybe delay GLaDOS by a little bit and defidently fix the volume difference between her and the rest of the game
Dude you're a beast. This is above my understanding but incredible.
This is just brilliant. Thank you for the break-down!
Amazing work so far! im impressed by this project
This is amazing, keep up the great work, can’t wait to see the next update!
This got me so excited! Sure they have Portal on the Switch and pretty much everything else. But there's just something about playing a new game on very old handwear that just gets me excited!
@@geos-music-corner Alle grüßen den Anführer!
I thought I've seen everything, now this to shine my day.
These videos and this project just make me happy, keep up the good work
Great video! It's fascinating how you've achieved this.
That last part jumpscare tf outta me! You're voice is so quiet and calming, then it cuts to a loud ass bass boosted robot talking
This is very exciting. By far the coolest bit of n64 home-brew I've ever seen.
This is such a good video. Love your content.
I love what you are doing here, very well done and super interesting! 👍
This is wicked! I hope to try your port one day.
It looks amazing 😍 it looks like silicone games in the 90s 😮
Spectacular work, congratulations!! 👏🏻👏🏻💪🏻💪🏻
i understood none of the garbled alien technology mentioned in this but i enjoyed it nonetheless.
This is beyond fascinating.
Disregarding the fact that I didn't understand a single goddamn concept in this video, there are two things that stand out to me. First, even when a piece of technology is outdated, we'll never run out of ways to use it.
And second, no matter how advanced a piece of tech or software becomes, there will always be people who make these sorts of demakes. It's a really weird universal constant that I adore.
It runs right alongside the other universal constant that I love; if there is anything with an electric current, it will be used to run DOOM.
Really cool project man, hope you keep going, i truly wanna see how this is going to turn it out
This is really cool. I love the use of the noise channel it reminds me of how they used it for dark matter in Kirby 64
I must be 1 of the few people who knew and played Narbacular Drop, the game that first used these 3D portal mechanics, that were later acquired by Valve.
Portal 1 & 2 remain some of my all time favorite games though, Great work on this, it looks great in that Goldeneye style, I hope you will be able to complete this project and that I can play it some day.
Kraken sent me over, I do metal casting too 😁
Thanks for showing how you have done it, this video will help a lot o people in the future
You're awesome. Very impressive!
Porting newer games to old consoles is absolutely fascinating to me and I wish there were more amazing examples like this
this is right up my alley. youtube recs got it right for once. subscribed
The trick is to know how much of the physics to cut and still retain the core game feel. the first portal game could been implemented on a commodore 64, and there are probably some old games that have portals. but its how exactly the game mechanics work that made that game so awesome. having the polished design in hand gives you a huge advantage for back porting it. its pretty sweet to see how it gets applied to different platforms. i remember the flash version came out almost immediately after the orange box, and it was awesome (its still on Newgrounds)
I was surprised to see the glass distortion effect at 5:13. Very nice!
There is some decent optimization in this project, very impressive ! good job, great video
Oh my good lord why would you do this... i love it! Keep up the good work
Thx for the update video & continued work, ima start looking for a flash-able cartridge
Demakes are so cool
Good job bro 👌
portal 2 on N64 woulda slapped SO hard
Actually shocking that it only took 10 years to go from the N64 to Portal 1
It's so weird when put into perspective like that
Well 10 years is about 1/8th of your entire life. As the average male life expectancy is around 79.
James, you come from humble platformer and arcane beginnings. This project is your shining star, do not give up on this
I'm gobsmacked, you software skills are impressive to make this playable on N64.
Ur a genius bro thank you sm for the rom download!
TOTALLY rad, my-man! If only we had stuff like this back in 1997...
i just can't help but think about going back in time with this
The answer to a question absolutely nobody was asking. Thank you.