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Nintendo Massive Leak #2 : (source code Zelda3, source code Star Fox, Mario Kart Prototype, much more...)

LarknThe4th

LarknThe4th

Member
Seems their is an early build of Kokiri Forest in the leaks as well!

I cant wait for someone with serious video editing skills to compile this whole saga into a youtube documentary

Also amazed Nintendo has all this stuff archived, considering how bad most other publishers are with stiff like that
 
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Orenji Neko

Orenji Neko

Member
Posting much I do not do, but I must voice my appreciation for a thread like this. Thank you. ありがとう
tenor.gif
 
SF Kosmo

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
Lionel Richie said:
Super Donkey kind of reminds me of Ristar lol.
Click to expand...
I got a Rayman vibe off it.

This leak is really incredible, I don't think we've ever seen anything quite this size or scope, especially from a company as tight-lipped as Nintendo. This probably would have had more of an impact had Nintendo not recently released Star Fox 2 on the mini, since that's the only complete-complete game here that was cancelled, but the insight into the development of these games is massive. Super Donkey is such a weird an unexpected one. Sleep is pretty interesting too.

I have a feeling this second leak with the N64 stuff might have a big impact on the Mario 64 PC port. If they can avoid the legal threats it will probably grow into a full on remaster.
 
SF Kosmo

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
alf717 said:
Is this still all related to that huge iQue leak from a while back? If so why would Nintendo have given them so much data to hold on to?
Click to expand...
So when you're dealing with Anon shit, a lot of this is rumor and urban legend, and I've heard conflicting stories on this, but I think people are getting their wires crossed because of two unrelated hacks that were both made public in May of 2018.

The iQue hack was not that big, just internal emulators and some ROMs of games that were already dumped. This is almost certainly connected to a much larger hack of Nintendo that occurred a few months earlier but wasn't discovered until May 2018. It's the same hacker that did the Microsoft hack that same year, and later got caught and pled guilty. The scope of this hack is incredible and is purported to have included as much as 2TB of data total, so we have seen only like 7% of that.

The hacker is not the leaker, obviously. I believe he is in jail. What I have heard is that someone on 4chan was given this data and had been leaking bits and pieces of it over the last year, and now large chunks of it. It's unclear how much this person has, if they have the whole of what was leaked or not. The fact that we got a second leak yesterday leads me to believe there may be more coming.
 
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McCheese

McCheese

Member
It's surreal reading the source code for these 90's SNES games, as these are the games that inspired me (and probably most other coders) to become developers!

Getting to finally see code from people I've idolised all my life, for games I've played for thousands of hours, and then to immediately notice most of them are mere mortals and do the same debug printf statements commented out in case they need them for later, is strangely humbling.

I also know how horrible it is having your work leaked; especially source code which is never meant to be public. But it's just too tempting not to look; and I would hope that when you've been responsible for creating some of the greatest games of all time, you are probably not going to give a shit if people see a few funny quirks in your coding style.

It's worth noting that there is a bunch of stuff in the code that you can't reverse engineer out of the ROMs, for example, anything that is wrapped in a DEBUG flag gets removed for the final build so there are large chunks of code, even whole features, that we never knew existed. Plus obviously variable names, code comments etc.

My random observations / musings:
  • Comments are mostly written in Japanese, and most files have the dates and author written at the top.
    • We finally know which sod put the Blue Shell into Mario Kart 64 and when, so if anybody does invent a time machine..
  • Mario Kart (SFC)
    • Has a crazy bunch of DEBUG things, there are more lines of code just for the DEBUG tools, than the whole of FZERO
      • Track editor
      • Palette editor
      • Ram debugger
    • There was originally a "Poo" weapon that left the characters poisoned
  • The person who coded the NES emulator in Animal Crossing also made his own little test NES ROM.
    • the NES emu itself is pretty nuts, it's all in a single .c file with barely any comments; looks super rushed.
  • The WaveRace 64 physics code is named 'Newton'
  • In all the first-gen N64 code you can really see how they struggled to adapt from writing low-level machine ASM code to C
    • Mario 64 code is very hard to read, which is sad, the lead programmer quit the business due to stress shortly before the game was released if I remember correctly.
 
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LarknThe4th

LarknThe4th

Member
McCheese said:
It's surreal reading the source code for these 90's SNES games, as these are the games that inspired me (and probably most other coders) to become developers!

Getting to finally see code from people I've idolised all my life, for games I've played for thousands of hours, and then to immediately notice most of them are mere mortals and do the same debug printf statements commented out in case they need them for later, is strangely humbling.

I also know how horrible it is having your work leaked; especially source code which is never meant to be public. But it's just too tempting not to look; and I would hope that when you've been responsible for creating some of the greatest games of all time, you are probably not going to give a shit if people see a few funny quirks in your coding style.

It's worth noting that there is a bunch of stuff in the code that you can't reverse engineer out of the ROMs, for example, anything that is wrapped in a DEBUG flag gets removed for the final build so there are large chunks of code, even whole features, that we never knew existed. Plus obviously variable names, code comments etc.

My random observations / musings:
  • Comments are mostly written in Japanese, and most files have the dates and author written at the top.
    • We finally know which sod put the Blue Shell into Mario Kart 64 and when, so if anybody does invent a time machine..
  • Mario Kart (SFC) has a bunch of things in DEBUG flags
    • Has a crazy bunch of DEBUG things, there is more lines of code jsut for the DEBUG tools than the whole of FZERO
      • Track editor
      • Palette editor
      • Ram debugger
    • There was originally a "Poo" weapon that left the characters poisoned
  • The person who coded the NES emulator in Animal Crossing also made his own little test NES ROM.
    • the NES emu itself is pretty nuts, it's all in a single .c file with barely any comments; looks super rushed.
  • The WaveRace 64 physics code is named 'Newton'
  • In all the first-gen N64 code you can really see how they struggled to adapt from writing low-level machine ASM code to C
    • Mario 64 code is very hard to read, which is sad, the lead programmer quit the business due to stress shortly before the game was released if I remember correctly.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the insight, a shame about that Programmer but he undoubtedly achieved one of the most important artistic feats in computer programming history
 
Chittagong

Chittagong

Gold Member
LarknThe4th said:
This is like getting our hands on all the master tapes that George Martin's son has access to from all the Beatles recordings

This image alone is so simple yet so powerful

tFNEp4f.png
Click to expand...

You know what the craziest thing about this is?

Super Mario 64 was developed in LESS THAN 2 YEARS. Development began 7 September 1994, around when Stunt Race FX was completed. A year and two months later, they had the big Shoshinkai Spaceworld world premiere in November 1995.

And just 20 months after the start of development, one of the most legendary, polished, belowed and successful games was complete.
 
LarknThe4th

LarknThe4th

Member
Chittagong said:
You know what the craziest thing about this is?

Super Mario 64 was developed in LESS THAN 2 YEARS. Development began 7 September 1994, around when Stunt Race FX was completed. A year and two months later, they had the big Shoshinkai Spaceworld world premiere in November 1995.

And just 20 months after the start of development, one of the most legendary, polished, belowed and successful games was complete.
Click to expand...

No wonder no one leaves Nintendo, why would you?

They are the best by quite a margin and being in that environment just makes you want to get better

I mean their first 3D game was Mario 64, Their first open world game was BOTW!!

And the best part is that all the young guys who where coming through in the N64 generation are basically running the whole company now!

Giants standing on the shoulders of Giants
 
SF Kosmo

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
Chittagong said:
You know what the craziest thing about this is?

Super Mario 64 was developed in LESS THAN 2 YEARS. Development began 7 September 1994, around when Stunt Race FX was completed. A year and two months later, they had the big Shoshinkai Spaceworld world premiere in November 1995.

And just 20 months after the start of development, one of the most legendary, polished, belowed and successful games was complete.
Click to expand...
Two years was a long time for game development back then. Usually it was closer to a year. Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus was like 8 months I think. In the 16-bit days it was less than that most of the time.

But certainly for such a novel game that tried so many new things, it's crazy to think how it could come together like that.
 
EverythingsOverrated

EverythingsOverrated

Member
Pretty awesome to see the things that have come out of this already. The Super Donk thing makes me wonder what other games had weird prototypes that were almost nothing like the final release.

Occasionally modern Nintendo shares things like the splatoon prototype or the 2D BoTW prototype but from a super secretive company this is a true goldmine for game historians.
 
SF Kosmo

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
Caffeine said:
Click to expand...

I wonder what this was from. My guy tells me they tried side scroing sections in LttP like in Link's Awakening, but then you would think he's have pink hair. Some suggested it was from a remake of Zelda II but who knows. It seems like whatever it was is just some sprite data and not much else.
 
Caffeine

Caffeine

Member
LarknThe4th

LarknThe4th

Member
I love the way the CG renders suit Mario, and hand drawn images suit Link

And how without even understanding why, it just makes sense to me 😂😂
 
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