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0 pointsdelroth5y ago0 comments

MVG regularly gets key technical information wrong and barely cites any sources, so I'd take this with a grain of salt.

Example: he claimed in [1] that a Nintendo leak contained "the entire source code of IOS" (IOS being the Wii operating system) and "the Verilog for the entire Nintendo Wii". Both of these claims are completely wrong and have been refuted by both console hackers and emulator developers for the Wii. I told MVG on Twitter, he replied saying approx. "oh it's not my fault I just read what was written online and haven't looked at the details myself" [2]. To this day the video is still up, there is no errata either in the description or in comments. This is not the only example, just the freshest one in mind and one I was directly involved with.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8G7eq0GlQs [2] https://twitter.com/ModernVintageG/status/125820871313715200...

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audunw5y ago

> so I'd take this with a grain of salt.

Well, in this video it's not like he's stating it as absolute fact that they didn't forget to use -O2. He just presents another much more plausible (IMO) explanation. And he backs it up with direct references to original documentation and a tweet from a developer experienced with early N64 development.

I think his claims here looks pretty solid, if you have reason to doubt them based on the content of the video, it'd be nice if you shared that.

More examples would be interesting too if you can remember other cases. To me, getting a fact like that wrong on a breaking news kind of video and not taking the time to correct it later isn't that big of a deal to be honest. If it was really important to me what the content of the leak was I'd check myself.

delrothOP5y ago

Looking at the SM64 video, he: 1. misrepresents the work from the SM64 decomp project (some of the decomp developers even commented in the video comments); 2. misreads and/or misunderstands the toolchain errata, what he describes in his audio track doesn't match at all what he shows on screen. But there isn't much of a claim to debunk, because it's all hypothesis that "Nintendo wouldn't make such a basic mistake, it's deliberate".

Anyone who has experience working on emulation and reverse engineering of Nintendo games can tell you that Nintendo keeps doing basic technical mistakes when shipping production games. Dolphin's wiki has a whole category for "games that shipped with debug symbols". Pikmin has a freakin' mostly-working PC port of an early version of the game on the GameCube disc. There's also no evidence that other N64 launch titles had the same idiosyncrasy of compiling in -O0, and the whole SDK is compiled in -O2 as he even mentions in his video. How does that fit with the "early toolchain" line of reasoning?

TL;DR: Actually forgetting to build with optimizations enabled is completely in line with what emulation developers and game reverse engineers have seen from Nintendo in the past 20 years. MVG just states his own theory as fact, without the Nintendo console hacking / RE / emulation experience, and with very little evidence which doesn't even match his own claims.

EDIT: See also [1] hidden in the 2nd page of YT comments on that SM64 video, from someone who was involved with the SM64 decompilation project.

[1] https://imgur.com/XZ45IZH

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