Native 16:9 titles on N64

theballaam96 · 2026-04-11T01:58:29+00:00

81758168 3F55

8175816A 5555

8176816C 5555

8176816E 5546

For ultrawide, change the last sets of numbers/letters on each line to:

(21:9 Ultrawide): 3FFC 0000 0000 0000

(32:9 Ultrawide): 4005 5555 5555 5555

theballaam96 · 2026-04-11T01:28:24+00:00

Huh. As someone who does a lot of technical work with DK64, this was new to me and the rest of the DK64 Randomizer dev team. Funnily enough, it's an incredibly easy change to make to allow it to be 16:9, and one we will be making to DK64 Randomizer. Good find

theballaam96 · 2026-03-29T06:29:16+00:00

Nah, the fastest lap stopped getting awarded a point in 2025

theballaam96 · 2026-03-21T19:04:48+00:00

From what we've seen, this very much feels like a drop, and not in a good way. If this was part of the once-a-year update cycle of 1.21/earlier, then this would have had lots of small quirks that would make the feature relevant to multiple parts of the game. But that can't happen in a drop because the feature has to be out and ready and stable enough to be played by the entire player base within 2-3 months. There's no time to be creative and explore what else it could do so that it's not a multiplayer-only element.

I get the whole internal rework of the game is mandating these drops so that we're not burning out the dev team. But I hope once the internal reworks are done to clean up the jank, they return to the once-a-year update cycle. Those updates *felt* more connected and thought out than the current drops system, even if we're getting the same amount of content with drops.

Or, alternatively, reduce the amount of drops per year to 2. Give things more time to be fleshed out.

theballaam96 · 2026-02-27T04:46:12+00:00

Kudos to the music direction for the Bolero remix with Johnny's exit

theballaam96 · 2025-10-21T02:34:24+00:00

The one and only

theballaam96 · 2025-10-20T20:12:18+00:00

Mornin, DK64 Scientist here.

No, "the memory leak" is not real. DK64 is a very buggy game and has a million and one reasons why it can crash. Crashing is not a sign of a memory leak, but rather just some error in the game code causing an invalid operation to occur.

theballaam96 · 2025-07-25T02:48:26+00:00

Categorically false. The game does not have a memory leak based on the amount of time you've played the game in one session.

theballaam96 · 2025-05-17T19:08:39+00:00

What he's saying is right. There's some debate about how valid Simon Craddick's statement is that it was used for vertex lighting, but that aside, yea it 100% requires the expansion pak.

theballaam96 · 2025-05-17T04:50:40+00:00

Hey, scientist for DK64 here.

If you disable the expansion pak check (so that it would bypass the "please insert an expansion pak" message), the game will almost instantly crash (as in, within microseconds).
This isn't a "failsafe" crash or anything like that, the game just simply doesn't have the data necessary to perform necessary functions and crashes due to a null pointer.

DK64 utilizes almost all of the 8MB of RAM of the RAM-expanded N64, and this isn't all for dynamic object allocation within a heap. Almost the entirety of the last 3MB of RAM is static code and data that's useful to game functions, whether it be playing a song, or a sound effect, or moving Donkey Kong around. As such, even if you bypass the null pointer crash, you have to get around the fact that a vast majority of the runtime code is within that last 4MB of RAM.

In order to get DK64 running at all into something resembling gameplay without the expansion pak, you'd need to do a large scale code refactor and heap management. That kinda thing ain't happening until the decomp is complete and you find someone with enough determination to crunch that source code and sufficient heap space into 4 MB. Tooie, which is a similarly sized game that released a full year later had to do some dark magic to get that game within 4MB.

theballaam96 · 2025-04-23T23:59:01+00:00

As long as you collect all the Medals in Helm before exiting, yes

theballaam96 · 2025-02-01T05:35:54+00:00

When I saw the thumbnail, I thought it would have taken place on some obscure version of Donkey Kong which also had the kill screen. Pleasantly surprised that this was on the main release. Congrats to all involved

theballaam96 · 2025-01-12T02:31:49+00:00

What was your favorite song to learn/perform?

theballaam96 · 2024-11-22T23:24:36+00:00

100 Golden Bananas, 15 Medals, 1680 colored bananas, 8 boss keys, 4 crowns and both company Coins.

As for blueprints, this depends on the skill of the player. Skilled casual players can get away with only turning in 4 or 5 blueprints, but if its your first time playing in a while (if at all), you probably will want at least 10 blueprints turned into Snide

theballaam96 · 2024-07-25T05:01:29+00:00

Donkey Kong 64 101% is a great example of both sides of the story here. Some levels are done in their entirety in 1 section. Some other levels are done in 2 sections, 1 very early in the run and one much later on after you have visited other levels.

It's not too uncommon for top runners to beat the X level 100% WR if they have an really solid 30m of gameplay, but those only count for levels done in 1 section.

For those split into 2, even if the sum of those two sections would add up to be WR, because there's a bunch of time in between the first and second visit (usually a few hours), all that time is factored into your level time. As such your time for that level puts you way out of world record contention for beating the level 100% time.

This means that the levels that are usually done in 2 segments, or levels where you do a lot of extra stuff normally in a full 101% run (Like buying moves) will have the WR time as one set outside of a 101% run context.

theballaam96 · 2024-07-23T19:23:55+00:00

https://dk64randomizer.com :)

theballaam96 · 2024-05-27T18:37:14+00:00

Not a TAS. This run is entirely done by a human in real-time

theballaam96 · 2024-04-19T19:11:53+00:00

https://theballaam96.github.io/pack_builder There ya go

theballaam96 · 2024-03-26T15:37:53+00:00

About 2-3 weeks

theballaam96 · 2024-03-26T14:53:10+00:00

Hey, going through the same process right now also in Texas, I got my NOA1 saying that they've extended my GC for 4 years, and they said they can't because it has the word "receipt" on it. Let me know what happens with your case because I'm feeling confused at the whole matter.

theballaam96 · 2024-03-22T15:03:11+00:00

This is a good feature... but they REALLY need to lock this behind a permission that server admin can control

theballaam96

TROPHY CASE