It's very impressive to see "realistic" graphics on the N64. The demo reminds me of "ICO" for the PS2.

I've always wondered if it would be possible to create an SDK to abstract the N64 graphics hardware and expose some modern primitives, lighting, shading, tools to bake lighting as this demo does, etc. The N64 has some pretty unique hardware for its generation, more details on the hardware are here on Copetti.org:

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/nintendo-64/

I love how the post, about N64 graphic tricks, ends with the question: "Is this the future?"

We did similar palette-based lighting techniques in our shareware game in the 90s. Basically, arranging the VGA 256-color palette so that each color we supported would have a gradient of N shades of the color. Illumination within each color could then be easily altered by adding or subtracting color indices.

While I'm really happy we have faster systems now, there was something fun about about having to subvert constraints in games, and so satisfying and lovely when you did it right.

HN folks are probably familiar with raster interrupts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_interrupt) and "racing the beam." I always associated this with the Atari 800. You weren't "supposed" to be able to do stuff like https://youtu.be/GuHqw_3A-vo?t=33, but Display List Interrupts made that possible.

What I didn't know until recently was how much Atari 2600's games owed to this kinda of craziness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFnWZH5FXc

It's stuff like this that makes me think that if hardware stopped advancing, we'd still be able to figure out more and more interesting stuff for decades!

Demo scene and work like this is impressive. Yet I can't help but notice that it tends toward simpler more empty scenes. The kind of stuff one might expect in the background or as only a part of a game mechanic. It's as if there's just not enough resources to really make complete experiences with most of the techniques.

What I find more impressive are efforts like FastDoom or the various Mario-64 optimization projects which squeeze significantly better performance out of old hardware. Sometimes even while adding content and features. Maybe there is a connection between demo sceners and more comprehensive efforts?