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Does anyone around here remember when Lik Sang used to be Bung Enterprises? Nintendo shut them down. About a month or two later, you were able to buy their new 'LikSang' branded products.

They'll be back.

Sorry, the real link to Bung Enterprises is

http://www.bung.com.hk/

If you dont want to build one, Bung used to sell the Xchanger and 64mbit flashcarts for a pretty reasonable price. Unfortunately, for several reasons, Bung suspended business and now you have to poke around the net for resellers. Shouldn't be too hard to find them, though.

You can pick up RPMs for GCC at

http://n64dev.50megs.com/

Then all you need is a transfer device to copy your code to the N64 but Nintendo has sued Bung so they have stopped selling them.

I got this nice little device called a v64jr to allow me to write code for the N64 (I intended to port linux to it but it hasn't happened yet). It can also be used to pirate games. Nintendo recently sued Bung and won.

Bung has officially stopped selling these things because of a lawsuit and there web site looks like its been hit with an injunction.

The solution to this legal crap is for those of us who bought the v64jr to develop code should sue Nintendo in our own class action suit. These big companies lawyers are good at being offensive against the little guy but are clueless about going on the defensive side agasint lots of little guys. The result is the company legal team gets in arguments with the hotshot hired guns and the results that I've personally seen are entertaining.

For details about coding for the N64 see Dextrose.com assuming it comes back up.

I got this nice little device called a v64jr to allow me to write code for the N64 (I intended to port linux to it but it hasn't happened yet). It can also be used to pirate games. Nintendo recently sued Bung and won.

Bung has officially stopped selling these things because of a lawsuit and there web site looks like its been hit with an injunction.

The solution to this legal crap is for those of us who bought the v64jr to develop code should sue Nintendo in our own class action suit. These big companies lawyers are good at being offensive against the little guy but are clueless about going on the defensive side agasint lots of little guys. The result is the company legal team gets in arguments with the hotshot hired guns and the results that I've personally seen are entertaining.

For details about coding for the N64 see Dextrose.com assuming it comes back up.

The latest developer carts have 64megabytes (512 megabits) of RAM.

I wish I had the link, but I've already seen X on an N64.

And why's this guy taking everything apart to learn? dextrose has compilers, assemblers, disassemblers and all manner of documentation on programming this fscker.

Get yourself a Doctor V64 or, what I use, a Z64 and start programming. I like the latter because it's smaller, doesn't use CDs or take up a parallel port and (upon taking it apart) is an embedded 386. The V64 is a 6809 (IIRC) machine with a lot more custom circuitry.

My goal for it is to hook up a network card to it's internal PC/104 slot and get rid of the need for a Zip drive altogether. Boot via BOOTP, grab games from my server via TFTP. The source for the BIOS is available on the 'net and all it is ATM just OpenDOS with some custom executable to run the embedded PC <-- N64 part.

There's no need for custom hardware. Hell a simple ROM emulator would work. There *are* tricks to doing it in hardware (they have a lock chip on each cart IIRC) but if you got one of those V64jr units you could hack it and put a ROM emulator on that if you *really* felt you needed to. (the V64jr lets you read/write to its onboard memory with a parallel port so a ROM emulator is not necessary, but most good ROM emulators let you have breakpoints and other good things for development). From what this guy's website said, he was using custom hardware to read/write to N64 memory. Waste of time / energy / effort! Proprietary interface!

My brother already programs for the N64 (just simple stuff but his time is limited too :-) -- All you're doing is writing a ROM image. You do *not* need to rip the thing apart to run Linux on the pig. All the info (hell you can even get detalled info / memory maps / etc on the hardware) is available from dextrose or #n64dev on efnet. All this scope tracing / etc is bullshit if you want to really program it / port Linux to it.

Mind you now, if he was the curious sort like myself, he'd have done it just for fun. :-)

I wish I had the link, but I've already seen X on an N64.

And why's this guy taking everything apart to learn? dextrose has compilers, assemblers, disassemblers and all manner of documentation on programming this fscker.

Get yourself a Doctor V64 or, what I use, a Z64 and start programming. I like the latter because it's smaller, doesn't use CDs or take up a parallel port and (upon taking it apart) is an embedded 386. The V64 is a 6809 (IIRC) machine with a lot more custom circuitry.

My goal for it is to hook up a network card to it's internal PC/104 slot and get rid of the need for a Zip drive altogether. Boot via BOOTP, grab games from my server via TFTP. The source for the BIOS is available on the 'net and all it is ATM just OpenDOS with some custom executable to run the embedded PC <-- N64 part.

There's no need for custom hardware. Hell a simple ROM emulator would work. There *are* tricks to doing it in hardware (they have a lock chip on each cart IIRC) but if you got one of those V64jr units you could hack it and put a ROM emulator on that if you *really* felt you needed to. (the V64jr lets you read/write to its onboard memory with a parallel port so a ROM emulator is not necessary, but most good ROM emulators let you have breakpoints and other good things for development). From what this guy's website said, he was using custom hardware to read/write to N64 memory. Waste of time / energy / effort! Proprietary interface!

My brother already programs for the N64 (just simple stuff but his time is limited too :-) -- All you're doing is writing a ROM image. You do *not* need to rip the thing apart to run Linux on the pig. All the info (hell you can even get detalled info / memory maps / etc on the hardware) is available from dextrose or #n64dev on efnet. All this scope tracing / etc is bullshit if you want to really program it / port Linux to it.

Mind you now, if he was the curious sort like myself, he'd have done it just for fun. :-)

This has been on my projects list for years...

What has happened:
1) Gcc makes code for the beast
2) its well documented. (and it runs a mips CPU)
3) its got a damn fast coprocessor (that no one is using in any game)
4) bung makes a device that lets you copy code to its "rom" image. A guy in .ru has a design to roll your own roms.
5) www.dextrose.com exists

What needs to happen:
1) someone needs to build a decent memory card for the silly thing. It uses rambus. hint take a Pelican expansion pack (it uses 2 2mb devices) and replace its rdram with ones out of Nintendos rampack and fix the heat problem)
2) a decent HOWTO to build gcc for this thing.
3) undo the nintendo lawsuit against Bung who makes a device to run your own code on the box.
4) write a network driver to talk over the controller ports
5) someone with more time and a bit of interest
should check out a simple page with some notes about coding on the N64

Keep in mind that at upto 200m instructions per sec the thing isn't a slow box for its price.

Think the B-word and a room full of N64's...

... in the gbdev mailing list. I run the archive at mixdown.org/gbdev.

The add-on would be a DSP or fast processor because, as one poster correctly put it, the GB processor (a bitched-up Z80) simply does not have the balls to decode an MP3 stream at any usable rate.

I too consider a GB MP3 device totally useless. A RIO gives you all that, has more memory (IIRC) and is better on batteries, to boot. The GB can't even be used as a (proper) audio output because there is only a single pin on the GB cartridge you can inject audio on, so that leaves stero operation out. Unless they've somehow used the GB sound chip in its digitized mode.

The people in that list have a lot of great ideas, but some seem to want to push the platform too far (read: beyond something economically worthwhile). Things like MP3 addons, PDA software, raycasted 3D graphics and <cough> a multitasking OS are, IMHO, a waste of effort and brainpower for otherwise bright minds. However... full-colour imagery, robotics and a multitude of cheap computing projects are well worth the effort.

If you've got one and you want to hack it, join up. You can buy Bung's cartridge to transfer your software to a real GB or use one designed by one of the list gurus. There are some people in there who do GB code for a living, others who are under Nintendo NDAs, and even others who seem to know more than Nintendo themselves knows about the GB. :-)

http://www.bung.com.hk

• LCC [free, compact, portable C compiler] has been hacked to compile to GB. It is reasonably bug-free.
  
• Several companies (such as Bung) sell dirt-cheap GB programmable cards (Bung even provides an NT device driver in their kit).
  
• There are several GB emulators/debugging IDEs.
  
• Lots of tools and documentation available (eg., image/tile editors, conversion tools).
  

So yes, you can code games for it.