Abhinav pivoted from a career in banking to pursue his first love in writing. Even while working full-time, he continued contributing as an editor-at-large, a role he has held for more than 7 years. A lifelong tech enthusiast who has built three gaming and productivity powerhouse PCs since 2018, his passion for technology keeps him closely following the semiconductor industry, from NVIDIA and AMD to ARM. His MSc dissertation explored how artificial intelligence will reshape the future of work, reflecting his curiosity about the wider social impact of emerging technologies.
One of the most underrated luxuries of having a gaming PC is that any game, from almost any platform and era, is always one download and one ROM dump away. Without emulators, I never could have played Pokémon Sapphire, FireRed, Gold, or Silver after my Game Boy Advance got lost, and all I had left were the cartridges.
The beauty of it is that I can enjoy games from an era before I was born, built for consoles much older than me. Modern emulators also scale with my hardware, and that's how I was able to run three of N64's most beloved games, including Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and Ocarina of Time through Project64 at 4K on my RTX 4070 Ti Super. That's nine times the console's native resolution, and it uncovered some fascinating details about the games of that time.
Some of Super Mario 64's 3D visuals are a clever illusion
Don't believe it? Try walking around a tree
Super Mario 64 ranks near the top of the most beloved N64 games, and one reason it's so special is that it took Mario into 3D for the first time. An interesting aspect, however, is that not all of that world is 3D; instead, the game relies on a technique known as billboarding.
Instead of building certain on-screen assets out of polygons, it draws a flat 2D image and keeps adjusting the angle as the camera moves to follow it, so anyone playing can never see it from the side. When I panned the camera from one side to another while Mario stood next to a tree, the tree showed the exact same face from both angles, which made this clear. It's not just limited to the vegetation in the world. You can also pan the camera around other characters, like Bob-ombs, to see billboarding in action.
In fact, when Digital Foundry looked at a fan-made ray-traced port of the game, the trees stood out as a problem: they were flat 2D bitmaps, which aren't suited to ray-traced lighting, so the modders had to swap them for full 3D models. Of course, that doesn't mean all the models are billboarded. Mario and most other major enemies are genuine polygon models with flat colors, and that's clear in the 4K-upscaled run.
Mario Kart 64's racers were never 3D models on the track
The banana peels weren't either, but they fooled us all
Mario Kart 64 took the karts into the 3D world for the first time, but only the maps and the tracks made the jump, and that much is noticeable while revisiting the title in 4K. If you look at the starting grid, it becomes rather obvious that the eight racers are pre-rendered sprites. According to the team behind the 2022 Mario Kart 64 HD mod, Nintendo modeled and animated the characters in 3D and then inserted them as flat images. The game just swaps in whichever image matches the angle you, as the racer, are viewing them from.
This applies to the obstacles as well, because as you can see in the 4K screenshots, the banana peels on the racecourse didn't have any depth either. Many other track obstacles are 2D sprites inserted into the world. Hideki Konno later explained in an Iwata Asks interview that fully 3D characters weren't exactly impossible, but they would've slowed the game down too much for eight racers to share the track. It's also the trick that made four-player battles possible by reducing the rendering workload.
Many rooms in Ocarina of Time are paintings on the wall
But they could only be spotted in 4K, 28 years later
When it came to the Ocarina of Time, I expected a similar pattern to follow, revealing similar tricks that Nintendo had made to optimize the bustling open world and make it work with the hardware of its time. The game hints that the developers were more inventive than I expected. Various locations, including the Castle Town Market, the entrance to the Temple of Time, and the interiors of smaller buildings are pre-rendered images with 3D characters placed on top.
The one that immediately popped out at the resolution was the very first room Link spawns in as the game begins. It's obvious that it's pre-rendered. What's funnier, though, as was also observed by The Cutting Room Floor, is the view through Link's doorway. The visual doesn't match what you'd see outside in the Kokiri Forest, likely because it was drawn before the village was finalized.
In another Kokiri house, the juxtaposition between pre-rendered visuals and interactive assets became glaringly obvious. After upscaling, Link and a single pot kept clean outlines, while the cauldron, barrel, shelves, walls, and floor were smeared into blocky streaks. At the native N64 resolution, none of these details would stick out like a sore thumb, and the soft images on a CRT monitor preserved the visuals and maintained the illusion.
Nintendo buildt 3D worlds out of whatever the hardware could spare, and that's genius
Rendering these games upscaled to 4K feels like a weird sort of deconstruction in practice, but it also made me appreciate the craft even more. Every compromise made in these three games was a trade-off that freed up the resources that the N64 had for everything else, and it's evidence of an era when developers meticulously crafted details by hand long before DLSS, neural rendering, and frame generation automated the idea. That alone is inspiring.