Soon, You'll Be Able To Play Diddy Kong Racing Natively On Your PC

these headlines are so clickbaity, Paper Mario has been 100% for ages still no PC port, Nerrel showed Rocket Robot on Wheels and Superman 64 running on PC natively forever ago, still no port of those
it was a little irritating how he showed those as a proof-of-concept with "just to show you can do it with any old game" with an implied undercurrent of "who would ever want to play these", and then nothing ever mentioned about them again, because Rocket Robot on Wheels owns and I want to play it in glorious 120fps
the Nintendo-centric bias comes through even when their fans are talking about their own console's third-party libraries 😩

Please stop reporting on decompilation as if it directly means a port is in development. That's rarely the goal of reverse engineering console games, and perpetuating this misconception places undue pressure on the people working on these RE projects.

Furthermore, these decompilation projects tend to slow down in that last 10-20%. You often see rapid progress early on as all of the simpler functions are blitzed through and merged with the main repo, but the more complicated stuff takes longer to work through.

And having completed, binary-matching functions is one thing, but actually having that code documented and readable is an ongoing process. The Banjo-Kazooie decomp is a good example where the documentation is currently lacking.

As for Paper Mario, for reasons I don't fully understand, I'm told that due to some complexities specific to that game, you shouldn't expect a multiplatform port any time soon if ever.

"100% decompiled" really doesn't mean anything when it comes to the possibility of a port. And just because we have frameworks like Libultraship and N64 Recompiled to make translating that code to other platforms easier, it doesn't mean that creating a port isn't still a lot of work. – It would help everyone involved these projects so much if people took the time to understand what actually goes into them and why the distinction between all these terms matters.

All this to say: if a port were actually in development for Diddy Kong Racing, you would hear about it.

What is this? There been ways to play it on PC.
The heck? This is why people shouldn't use drugs.

@Aiden_Warren I think we all know about emulation here!

Decompilations, and especially native PC ports, allow for all kinds of enhancements that aren't possible through emulation. For example, there's a hack that makes the N64 version Diddy Kong Racing run at 60fps, but it has a few bugs, as all it does is change a single number. A decomp would make it easier for someone to go through the code and tweak any of the timings that aren't working properly.

And imagine all of the new content that modders could add to a PC release: new characters, new tracks, etc.!

@smoreon if you look around, you'll find a good one.
It's just all people doing their own and not many are aware.
It happens to all of us. We don't look around.
The guy of this post, didn't know and is just posting on what he finds of this.
I hate to be the "Charlie Kirk" but sometimes, it's super late and there's always been ways to play it on PC.

@smoreon I didn’t realise that was all it changed to make DKR run better. There’s a fix for Final Fight 2 SNES that puts 5 enemies on-screen at once and that’s just a single number change too.

Do you know why the game wasn’t originally released with this turned on? You’d think the dev team could have fixed any bugs it could cause.

I came across the 60fps version a while back and was amazed to see the game running so well that I got back into playing it again. The only bug I found was the game would lock up during the ending sequence. 😢

@BulkSlash probably because the N64 wasn't powerful enough to run the game at 60fps but an emulator on a modern computer is

@Cooluser99 This is running on real hardware. Admittedly, it's not a locked 60fps, but it's way smoother than the original.

@BulkSlash I had no idea that this worked on real hardware now! It seems that modders found ways to optimize the game considerably. It's far from a true 60fps, from what I'm seeing, but it stays above 30 most/all of the time, which is an accomplishment in itself.

Note that this optimization most likely took a lot of work. Removing a 30fps cap is simple, but making the game engine fast enough to actually run at 60 on real hardware is not!

The 60fps code itself is, as with many games, just changing a single number. Some games immediately work flawlessly with this (at least on emulation), whereas others need a ton of manual work to fix everything. DKR was in-between: its 60fps hack needed a few tweaks, but it's possible that the people behind the N64 optimization have fixed that, or are going to.

It's rare that a game is capable of considerably better performance, but simply doesn't enable it- that'd be a huge oversight! There's almost always a reason for the limitations. Though I will say that some games, such as Tomb Raider Legend on GameCube, or the Sonic Storybook games on Wii, run quite well at 60fps. It would seem that the devs couldn't get it stable enough for their liking, and made a judgement call to cap it at 30 for a more consistent experience.