from Hacker News

First official release of 3DNES is available

by basdp on 11/8/16, 8:49 PM with 7 comments

  • by camtarn on 11/8/16, 10:25 PM

    As it wasn't too obvious to me from that page:

    The 3DNes emulator doesn't just automagically convert 2D games into 3D. It's got some algorithms behind it that attempt to partition a given scene into regions, then assign the region to a layer (front/back) and extrusion method (box, horizontal/vertical cylinder, character). Someone then needs to play through the game, and if they see anything that the algorithm has guessed wrong, they can pull up an editor window, click on the region in the emulator, and edit layer/extrusion/etc on the fly. Once that's all done, the collected data can be uploaded so that other people playing the same game can play it with everything looking correct.

    I'm not entirely clear on whether the partitioning/assignment/settings memorization works by detecting the actual sprites or graphics tiles that the emulated NES is drawing to the screen, or whether it's just calculating some sort of signature for that clump of pixels and looking it up in a table. My guess is the latter.

    It's a very nifty piece of tech :)

  • by voltagex_ on 11/8/16, 9:47 PM

    Shouldn't this link to https://geod.itch.io/3dnes instead of this blog?
  • by TazeTSchnitzel on 11/8/16, 9:29 PM

    Is this an offshoot of this previous work, or a separate project?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11411054
  • by gravypod on 11/8/16, 10:12 PM

    Why does the windows version start at 0$ but the linux version start at 4.99$
  • by planteen on 11/9/16, 6:08 AM

    Very cool! I love applications of emulation like this. I remember EmuDX many moons ago having similar goals of making retro games look more modern.