SOsome-guy·Oct 1, 2026Submission
LibDragon (N64): Explicit Anti-AI Contributor Stance (GitHub Issue)
5 points · Open discussionDragonMinded
libdragon
C2021–2026
DragonMinded / libdragon · Archived
libdragon
Open source library for N64 development.
9Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Open source library for N64 development.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year10 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-12-09 22:10:02 UTC to 2026-10-01 23:11:41 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
10 sourcesRelated to this, every ROM needs a "boot loader" that has to be signed and is verified by the lockout chip.
Nintendo's boot code is under copyright and thus cannot be used. So the boot code distributed with Libdragon is signed by finding a hash collision with a brute force tool running on the GPU[1]. Fun stuff!
[1] https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon/tree/trunk/boot#bu...
In How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026Or an alternative for the Sega Genesis https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK
Or the Super Nintendo Entertainment System https://github.com/alekmaul/pvsneslib
Or the Gameboy / GBC, Sega Master System, Gamegear, Nintendo Entertainment System https://github.com/gbdk-2020/gbdk-2020
Or the TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine, Nintendo Entertainment System (alt), Commodore 64, Vic-20, Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Apple II/IIe, or Pet 2001 https://github.com/cc65/cc65
Or the ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, Apple II (alt), Gameboy (alt), Sega Master System (alt), and Game Gear (alt) https://github.com/z88dk/z88dk
Or the Fairchild Channel F https://channelf.se/veswiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
Note: Some are slightly pre-1999 (all these, I have at least successfully made a "Hello World" with)
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If they're really wanting 1999, that's the 5th to 6th generation co
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nsole range with Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and Dreamcast. (on these, only recommendations, no successful compiled software)
Playstation is really challenging and remains so even in 2026. Lots of Modchip and disk swap issues on real hardware. Possibilities: https://www.psx.dev/getting-started and https://github.com/Lameguy64/PSn00bSDK
N64 is less horrible, and there's quite a few resources: https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon and https://github.com/command-tab/awesome-n64-development
Sega Saturn is still pretty difficult. However, there is: https://github.com/yaul-org/libyaul?tab=readme-ov-file and https://github.com/ReyeMe/SaturnRingLib plus the old development kits from the 90's are still around https://techdocs.exodusemulator.com/Console/SegaSaturn/Softw...
Dreamcast is similar to the Saturn situation, yet strangely, a little better. There's https://github.com/dreamsdk/dreamsdk/releases and https://github.com/KallistiOS/KallistiOS along with the official SDKs that are still around https://www.sega-dreamcast-info-games-preservation.com/en/re...
I’m not sure the N64 would be easier. The graphics hardware in the N64 is complicated.
In some ways the console is really modern (perspective-correct texture interpolation, z-buffering, subpixel positioning). On paper, it seems a lot like a more modern system. But the hardware complexity is a beast. and the design is permeated with bottlenecks. Half of the graphics pipeline is taken up by the RSP, which is a fully programmable vector processor--sounds cool, but in practice it is unapproachable. 4 KiB of texture memory (and if you use a palette, half of it is the palette). RAM bandwidth is barely fast enough to handle 3D scenes.
https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/nintendo-64/
The folks working on LibDragon have done a lot of work to make homebrew a better experience, but you’ll note that support for 3D graphics is still only in a pr
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eview branch.
https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon
Per the Portal 64 creator in the comments of their Patreon, the library in question was libultra,[1] which is owned and was distributed exclusively by Nintendo but has been extensively pirated.
There are open source alternatives, including libdragon[2] and libn64[3]. Not sure how feasible replacing libultra with either of those would be considering the scale of the project.
1: https://n64brew.dev/wiki/Libultra
2: https://libdragon.dev/, https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon
3: https://github.com/mikeryan/n64dev/
In Valve asked Portal 64 developer to take the project downLibdragon, an open-source SDK for Nintendo 64
4 points · Open discussionWIP OpenGL implementation for Nintendo 64 in libdragon
1 points · Open discussionIt is pretty much understood in most aspects that pertain regular software development, though there are still corners that are investigated.
The most accurate and fast emulator right now is Ares (https://ares-emu.net), which bundles the Vulkan-accelerated RDP emulation with a recompiler for both CPU and RSP. It is extremely accurate in many regards and in general much closer to the real hardware than any other emulators (with cen64 being a close second). Other emulators manage to run most of the game library but using several hacks, while Ares keeps a zero-hack approach, so not everything works, but it is for instance far more compatible with advanced home-brew stuff which use the hardware in ways that the Nintendo SDK did not.
The most advanced open source library for N64 development is libdragon (https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdrag
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on) which is currently growing very advanced RSP ucodes that do things that are not possible with Nintendo SDK. For instance, it was recently merged a command list support to send commands from CPU to RSP without any lock in the happy path, and fully concurrent access from both the processors. Another example would be its DMA support for fetching data from ROM that exploits undocumented partially-broken features of the RCP that were previously unknown to allow for misaligned memory transfers.
The most accurate source of hardware documentation is the n64brew wiki, which is slowly gathering accurate, hardware-tested information on how the whole console works. https://n64brew.dev/wiki/Main_Page. Unfortunately, it's still lacking in many areas (eg: RSP). It's a painstaking long work because there are many many documents floating around with partial or completely wrong information.
libdragon is what you are looking for: https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon
In Game-makers creating new Game Boy games (2021)Thank you! This is my second, albeit my first game is shorter and a bit less polished.[1]
n64.dev is a pretty good place to start as far as links go.[2] People often use an old copy of the official SDK. There's also libdragon, which is a promising new open-source toolchain. [3]
[1] https://danbolt.itch.io/lunar-assault-64
[2] https://n64.dev/
[3] https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon
In Show HN: Nintendo 64 ROM made over the course of two months