Hacker News: coffeesoda

New comment by coffeesoda in "F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS"

coffeesoda — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 04:40:43 +0000

This is really great, thank you for sharing. I may borrow this technique for a Playdate project in the future.

New comment by coffeesoda in "F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS"

coffeesoda — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 03:22:04 +0000

It's already done. The race sim is fully deterministic so the consoles exchange controller inputs and run off the same seed. It uses the underlying VS. mode for the scaffolding but changes the screen render to full for each player.

New comment by coffeesoda in "F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS"

coffeesoda — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 03:16:57 +0000

Good instinct, the bottleneck is on the CPU side though. The PICA200 is an immediate-mode GPU not a tiler.

Other F-Zero X ports feed the N64 display lists to an interpreter, command by command, with the T&L on CPU. Pre-v1.0 of this port took that approach but did some double buffering on another CPU core.

When porting to Old 3DS, that other core wasn't an option, so we had to make better batch calls to the GPU. It ended up being that now we walk that list the first time and group triangles that share the same material, and moved the position & rotation transformations to the GPU too.

Rather than creating the mesh for tracks out of the spline on the fly, it also precomputes at the start of the race.

I'm fairly certain this is a pretty novel implementation for a N64 to 3DS port.

Most of these optimizations are just for race elements, which is why some of the menus are still pretty laggy.

New comment by coffeesoda in "F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS"

coffeesoda — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 01:33:31 +0000

It was, 15+ years ago, when porting N64 games to 3DS was a lucrative market for hired guns. We have the magic 'port' button and this tech just showed how easy it is with severely different architectures & constraints.

New comment by coffeesoda in "F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS"

coffeesoda — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 01:31:19 +0000

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.

New comment by coffeesoda in "F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS"

coffeesoda — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 01:22:57 +0000

The 3DS has the novelty of 3D. I always wanted to play F-Zero in this form factor and it seemed like a reasonable port to accomplish.

New comment by coffeesoda in "F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS"

coffeesoda — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:59:48 +0000

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.

New comment by coffeesoda in "F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS"

coffeesoda — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:53:55 +0000

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.

New comment by coffeesoda in "F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS"

coffeesoda — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:07:26 +0000

Hey, author of the project here! Thanks for posting! It's been a really fun project to work on, and a great way to learn about how to use Claude more efficiently. I'm just a few hours away from posting a big update with:

64dd on original 3DS

Local & Online Multiplayer

QR Code sharing for Custom Courses

I hope ya'll check out the authors notes, post-morterm, and give it a try on your 3DS.

New comment by coffeesoda in "Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one"

coffeesoda — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 19:53:16 +0000

I agree! I've been building this alternative file browser called 'Overlap' which uses Mac's tagging system. Mainly for images. It suggests tags based on Apple's photo classifier & similarity to your own tags. You can also explore data using a visual Venn Diagram. https://github.com/cruxxxxxx/Overlap

By no means perfect but it's helping solve my moodboarding needs.

Show HN: Unofficial 3DS Port of F-Zero X Written by Claude Code

coffeesoda — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 14:49:38 +0000

Hello HN! Sharing this because I think it's mind blowing, but I was able to port F-Zero X to 3DS using Claude Code. I learned quite a bit about how to guide Claude Code towards completing such a large project, but it's also filled me with quite a bit of dread. Still, I'm amazed that I can play this game in 3D at 60fps.

Thanks to Zorkats and inspectredc for their hardwork.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49565499

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Overlap: Local file tagging and querying for macOS with on-device AI suggestions