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 ...from the
princess's castle
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Last updated: June 9, 2026 at 2:15 am |
6/23/
2026
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Happy birthday, Ultra 64! 30 years since release in 1996, 29 (1997) in Europe and South America. I'm sure I'll still love it for 30 years to come.
It's amazing how extensive the console's library really is if you consider it was only really being developed for for four years, some developers were making multiple games a year for it, a pace that would seem incomprehensibly fast these days. Imagine if Bethesda or Bungie were putting out a new game every six months!
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6/9/
2026
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More Pyrite updates! Sorry I haven't been keeping up, life stuff has gotten in the way, and I haven't been able to get as much time in with Pyrite as I've been wanting to.
Version 0.6.0 adds vsync and custom framerate limits, scaling is now done as a proportion of the model's original size, and you can delete scenes from the right click context menu, alongside some of the other updates since the initial release I missed out on, like Macintosh support (0.4.0, thanks Rasky!), bug fixes, and autosaves.
The first article on the site, on making textures, is being worked on. I tried making it once before already on my Power Macintosh but the logistics of that were... questionable at best.
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2/16/
2026
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click for larger size
HailToDodongo has released a game engine that should be very familiar to those who are used to Godot Engine. It seems to get shockingly good performance with complex scenes from what I've seen of it.
link (https) video (https)
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2/14/
2026
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Anacierdem has released a Libdragon template for getting games up and running quickly from scratch. I haven't used it personally but there's no reason to not assume it works for 80% of projects.
link (https)
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2/08/
2026
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There's a new lightweight physics library in town for Ultra 64 and Dreamcast. I haven't seen it in action but physics is physics, all the things you'd need for games are all generally known quantities.
link (https)
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2/01/
2026
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The Winter 2025-26 N64Brew game jam has closed! I participated, but our team wasn't able to get a playable build out in time, in part my fault as well. Ah well, there were plenty of incredible submissions (Junk Runner is amazing!) and plenty of donors; $3,350 was raised for charity!
link (https)
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If you'd like to send in a tip-off to your project, please get in touch!
There are two pins
on the cartridge that will directly
mix into the audio stream, left and
right channel. This has so far never
been used.
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Development of Turok began as early as 1993!
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A
64DD disk has twelve randomly-placed
blank sectors. Writing a disk
without them doesn't seem to do
anything, and so far nobody has been
able to discern a purpose.
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Site News
It's only been, like,
three and a half years since Ultra Reality
left. It's like it never went anywhere!
Besides the snazzy new look, anyway. I
decided to reinstate the site because with
the release of Pyrite64 there's been a
surge of new interest in Ultra 64
homebrewing, and I want to help newcomers
flourish in their pursuits. This isn't hosted on Neocities like I thought it would be (as you can see in the note below that missed the mark by nearly a year), though I haven't tested it on an old computer. It should run if you're using IE 5 or Mozilla 1 at least, since there is an http-only version, though we'll see about that and that version won't have access to the forums. This is just a shell for now, but eventually there will be tutorials, starting with 3D modelling and texturing as that's what I have the most experience doing, both in general and for Ultra 64 homebrew, then after that I'll probably focus on music production, though I'm definitely less handy with that than I am graphics. Starting off will be a tutorial specifically for Pyrite and I'll do one for from-scratch games later on, but most of it should transfer over, the main differences will end up being in the process of exporting and importing the models.
Well, it's been a
while since I dusted Ultra Reality off
and gave it that long-overdue makeover
I'd always been planning before its
official release. Technically, the old
ultrareality.info test run was some sort of
public release, but that was just a test
phase. I suppose this is, too, but it's
one that's not coming out of my own
pocket so it should be more permanent,
at the cost of not running on older
computers (anything that doesn't accept
a TLS 1.3 connection; Power Macs and
Windows XP machines are just on the cusp
of that). That's alright. While I would
still prefer that everyone be
able to access this site, most people
are using libdragon now anyway, so it's
not something I feel pressure to do
anymore.
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n64brew Wiki
The
frontier of all Ultra 64 knowledge, and an
in-dispensable tool in creating this
website. Offers a community-editable (and so potentially the
most up to date) repository of know-ledge
for programming the system however you decide to.
n64squid
A
fellow Ultra 64 fansite. Very comprehensive and updates regularly, so go give them a look!
Nintendo 64 Forever
A forum for the console that I've found
helpful in the past. Donations
Running this site isn't super cheap (actually, the hosting service is pretty good, they start at a dollar a month and let me have more than enough resources for this site, it's the .info tld registration that's the real killer), so helping out is always good.
For a little while, this is also going to be how you get access to the forums.
I would rather not do that and just have them be free to access, but it's a
spam reduction feature since I don't have time to full-time administrate and
moderate them. They will still be fully public and search engine indexable, though.
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