Valve’s version of Portal works on Nintendo 64
valves Portalreleased in 2007 (!), is one of the last games that the humble little N64 could handle, and yet we’re in 2022 and we can see it handles it pretty well.
Programmer James Lambert worked on Portal demake for the Nintendo system for some time, but in his latest development video, he reveals that not only has he made “enormous strides behind the scenes in the game engine,” but that he has the most important thing working: the portal gun.
The video below shows a rough demonstration of Lambert’s progress, but even at this stage, he looks incredible. Portals attach to walls – with some smart detection to go around corners – and when you get close to them, you can look straight into them and whatever is reflected inside them moves exactly as it should.
To give you an idea of how far this takes the hardware – remember this is not something like the N64, it’s actually designed for the N64 and this video was shot on the N64 hardware – Lambert says in the video that he usually already has some sound effects in the game, but wanted to “make sure the Nintendo 64 can even create portals” before doing it here.
In terms of how many portalviews the N64 can actually support – like how many times the room you’re in will be repeated when viewed through the portal – you can see it topping out at four in this video, although Lambert says that the final game will probably need to do a smaller amount to keep things running smoothly.
If any of this looks vaguely familiar, it’s because Portal was also recreated – at least in part – by fans for the Nintendo DS a long time ago.which was also an impressive feat.
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