Ballaam

5 June

Donkey Kong 64 on Nintendo Switch Online: What changed? What is newly possible? What weird things have been found? After a bunch of data mining and tests from the speedrunning community, here is what we know.

youtu.be5 developers test Donkey Kong 64 MultiplayerYouTube video by Ballaam

Highlights from last night's stream: "5 developers test Donkey Kong 64 Multiplayer" youtu.be/zUmcS36YWTY

Ballaam reposted

Taka

@takarikka.github.io

with the sunsetting of decomp.dev, people really need to come to terms with just how much damage vibecoders have done to our community and OSS in general. encounter is a fellow dusklight dev and friend, and seeing people treat him as replaceable in the scene is upsetting.

decomp.devSunsetting decomp.devAn update on the future of decomp.dev.

twitch.tvtheballaam96 - TwitchDK64 Glitch Hunter & TASer. Fan of Helm Escape — theballaam96 streams live on Twitch! Check out their videos, sign up to chat, and join their community.

Recomp Multiplayer with some folks:

Ballaam@ballaam.dk64randomizer.com

Almost certain stream tonight at roughly 6:30pm US Central featuring some members of the DK64 Rando/Rekongpiled Dev team www.twitch.tv/theballaam96/ (No it's not rando in recomp)

twitch.tvtheballaam96 - TwitchDK64 Glitch Hunter & TASer. Fan of Helm Escape — theballaam96 streams live on Twitch! Check out their videos, sign up to chat, and join their community.

Almost certain stream tonight at roughly 6:30pm US Central featuring some members of the DK64 Rando/Rekongpiled Dev team www.twitch.tv/theballaam96/ (No it's not rando in recomp)

@conkerhimself.bsky.social

Wrote a quick converter from the specific version of the .bmf format that Earthworm Jim 3D uses into a glb. Gives us a nice view to see exactly what the map looks like under the hood in Jim 3D. Yes, there are 2 copies of the arena in the Kim map. No, I don't know why

Ballaam reposted

Darío

@dariosamo.bsky.social

Just a warning for everyone, since Video Game Slopterica keeps being the most irresponsible YouTube Channel to exist these days. The Banjo-Tooie Recompilation is NOT associated with us. It is entirely AI-generated. Both Zelda: Recompiled and Banjo: Recompiled have very clear No AI stances.

Ballaam reposted

Chris Seavor 🎃👀🐿

Replying to @blennz.bsky.social

I think they're idiots.

Life is all about learning things when you have the motivation on how to do something. If you want to make something, learn how to make it. It's a rewarding and fun experience trying to learn a new hobby. Everyone who you think is great at what they do didn't get there in 1 day.

Whatever you do though, don't use AI to get yourself to that endpoint faster. You're just cheating yourself out. Would you learn how to draw by getting an AI to generate an image for you? Would you learn how to make music by asking AI to make a song? No, so why let it do that for your new hobby?

Ballaam reposted

22 Sept

66%

2dos @ DK64Randomizer.com@2dos.dk64randomizer.com

The DK64 recomp has helped push the DK64 decomp to 64% complete!

21 Sept

The 65 day drought is finally over

19 Sept

I've been saying vis-a-vis to my wife for 9 years now randomly in conversation. Only today did she tell me that in the US, its some brand of Expo Marker and she thought that I was randomly throwing "expo marker" into unrelated sentences.

19 Sept

90% of my life is finding out my vocabulary is full of things that US folks don't understand.

9 Sept

Multiplayer mod progress

9 Sept

Excuse the jank movement with "Another Ballaam". I couldn't get my controller to work on my other laptop, so had to just deal with WASD

6 Sept

Work in Progress

5 Sept

Guess I need to move to Rhode Island where people will understand me

The Sound Defense@thesounddefense.bsky.social

Yeah, this tracks. Grew up in northern Michigan.

30 Aug

Released a whole bunch of mods for Rekongpiled: - Start with all kongs unlocked - Slower beetle - Fixed beaver bother - Open coin door in Helm by default All available on the mod page for DK64 Rekongpiled: dk64recomp.com/mods.html (Yes I did have a lot of fun making the thumbnails)

30 Aug

I swear all AI bros just cough up the same "it's like a carpenter using a circular saw" analogy every time without fully considering that the analogy just isn't correct. AI isn't a circular saw It's asking another "carpenter" to do the job who has a history of not following orders.

Ballaam reposted

youtube.comDK64 RECOMP RELEASE ANNOUNCEMENTYouTube video by 2dos

29 Aug

The DK64 recomp is now out! Play "DK64 Rekongpiled" now! Playable on Windows, Mac and Linux, just provide your own DK64 rom. No generative AI used at any point in the process. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVUvGGXTk0E dk64recomp.com

Donk Recomp: We have fixed (easily) the biggest issue with the recomp left - The audio engine. There's a race condition within the audio code. On higher-end systems, this would not result in any issue. However, on lower-end systems, it could do one of two things: Kill the audio or crash the game.

View full thread

This fix took us about 3.5 weeks to find and is the kinda stuff which resulted in us not wanting to give a specific release date for the recomp. We didn't want to over-promise, run into a race condition like this with some deep buried nonsense, and then run past the date Summer 2026

Shoutouts to Linux btw. Apparently Linux is too goated that this bug doesn't show up even when trying to spam the overview menu over and over again. On windows though, everyone ran into it. QED: Switch to Linux. The only windows you should be looking at are in Key 8 room to prevent fake key.

A fix was found pretty early on to prevent it crashing, but unfortunately, the game would still kill the audio if the next internal frame happened before the race condition was over. This showed up on some of our private testers' streams when we gave them some alpha builds earlier this month.

@mariobrothblog.bsky.social

Next, we found a rough workaround which we thought was good enough for release, until we tested it further and found it was causing some weird double audio issues on those higher-end systems. I'm happy to say that we have finally found a good enough fix that works on both high and low-end systems!

Ballaam reposted

Supper Mario Broth

20 Aug

There is a secret code in Donkey Kong 64 that will only play a funny noise, and nothing else. Standing next to a torch in K. Lumsy's room and pressing C-Up, D-Down, C-Left, D-Right, C-Down, D-Up, C-Right and D-Left will make a burp sound... and that's it. There are no other effects.

Mirror (Play Paint Gal Adventures!)

15 Aug

DK looking at the mouse controls that I'm trying to implement right now

Ballaam reposted

@itsmirror.bsky.social

5 Aug

I was watching @ballaam.dk64randomizer.com stream testing the DK64 recomp and this moment sent my sides into orbit.

twitch.tvtheballaam96 - Live on TwitchDK64 Recomp - Testing | Streaming donkey kong 64.

3 Aug

All in all, pretty successful run. Couple minor issues found and added to the TODO list. Thanks to @tjblakely.bsky.social for putting together some route changes super quick last night to remove some tricks that I'm not good enough at.

Ballaam@ballaam.dk64randomizer.com

101% Redemption Arc: www.twitch.tv/theballaam96

twitch.tvtheballaam96 - Live on TwitchDK64 Recomp - Testing | Streaming donkey kong 64.

2 Aug

101% Redemption Arc: www.twitch.tv/theballaam96

twitch.tvtheballaam96 - Live on TwitchDK64 Recomp - First 101% run in 9 years | Streaming donkey kong 64.

2 Aug

Rough stream, but... I know why the game wasn't liking me. Turns out, there was something we had to do very early on in Rando that I forgot to do this time around. I should have just ran the debugger on the errors I was getting.

Ballaam@ballaam.dk64randomizer.com

DK64 Recomp - But this time I do 101% for the first time in 9 years: www.twitch.tv/theballaam96

twitch.tvtheballaam96 - Live on TwitchDK64 Recomp - First 101% run in 9 years | Streaming donkey kong 64.

2 Aug

DK64 Recomp - But this time I do 101% for the first time in 9 years: www.twitch.tv/theballaam96

1 Aug

Tomorrow, we make very bad decisions

Ballaam reposted

30 July

dk64 recomp update

29 July

Rabbit Race with no lag, behaving like N64. No induced lag. Just telling the rabbit to listen to how much lag is present vs what N64 usually runs at. Also, finally figured out how to get weather working past 4:3 bounds.

25 July

When Nintendo builds an emulator, they compete with the entire history of fan and official emulation. Recomps face the same standard. If you're making a recomp, you're up against emulation, and the original release. Make your recomp the best it can be.

Emily's Curse@emkultra64.com

so sick of all of these low-effort "recomps." Devs spent years disassembling, translating and commenting Mario 64, others made APIs and translation layers to make recompilation more effective and now fuckin slop coders are standing on the shoulders of both to make what is functionally bad emulation

🧵 Donk Recomp: The framebuffer has been a pretty weird thing to get my head around. The game uses a LOT of dual-perspective effects for transitions, which relies on a snapshot of the previous frame overlaid on top of gameplay to create neat transitions like the warp transition.

View full thread

The reason why it's not wise is that, if you have a quad-monitor ultra mega widescreen gigachad wanting to play DK64, they're going to put more load onto the game with memory allocation because it's storing more of the framebuffer to RDRAM.

After consulting Dario from the N64 recomp server, and some wizard RT64 magic (that I'm still trying to wrap my head around), we can get actual proper widescreen framebuffer transition effects. There's quite a few, so it's still WIP. But it looks glorious.

What becomes troublesome is that when you are working (properly) with RT64, the framebuffer is still in the 4:3 bounds, and it is not wise to try and bump the framebuffer itself to widescreen.

Ballaam reposted

23 July

Donkey Kong 64 for the Nintendo 64

Hank Green@hankgreen.bsky.social

Aside from the Big Bang, what is the most important thing that has ever happened?

twitch.tvtheballaam96 - TwitchDK64 Recomp - Testing a chunk fix & long form testing

22 July

Recomp chunk fix & general testing stream: www.twitch.tv/theballaam96/

22 July

Gonna do a testing stream for Recomp within the next hour. Still got some bugs we need to fix, but wanted to test a chunk fix I have with just running around different parts of the game. Will also be a great opportunity for me to note more UI things I need to shift around

19 July

Yo dawg, I heard you liked expanded minigame UI Turns out each minigame has it's own function for drawing the "GET/HIT" etc counter. The timer on the top right provided some interesting challenge (some code plundering revealed the fact that I was a bit of an idiot with my initial approach)

Ballaam reposted

youtube.comDK64: Recompiled FAQ with Ballaam and 2dosYouTube video by 2dos

18 July

DK64: Recompiled Progress Video - featuring @ballaam.dk64randomizer.com and 20 minutes of Angry Aztec gameplay! www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uaf...

16 July

Donk Recomp: Interpolation issues when the camera makes a sudden cut between one perspective and another during a cutscene has been fixed. Without disabling, it leads to the interpolation algorithm trying to make it's best guess on what the inter frames should be, and failing kinda badly at it.