Re:Happy Zelda's 40th first LLM running on N64 hardware (4MB...
by AutoJanitor on Saturday February 21, 2026 @09:45PM
(#47107605)
Partially correct. The value is not the game interface right now. Its proof you can do actual inference on an LLM the surprise I am developing is a bit bigger than this, just have to get the llm outputs right first!
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Re:Happy Zelda's 40th first LLM running on N64 hardware (4MB...
by danbolt on Sunday February 22, 2026 @10:28PM
(#47117746)
Can you elaborate on the “partially correct” bit? I’d like to understand the programming of the ROM better.
Re:Happy Zelda's 40th first LLM running on N64 hardware (4MB...
by AutoJanitor on Monday February 23, 2026 @08:05AM
(#47121797)
You’re right that the graphics layer is mostly 2D right now. Sprites are hardware-accelerated where it makes sense, and text is written directly to the framebuffer. The UI is intentionally minimal.
The point of this ROM wasn’t the game interface — it was proving real LLM inference running on-device on the N64’s R4300i (93 MHz MIPS, 4MB RDRAM).
Since the original screenshots, we’ve added:
• Direct keyboard input
• Real-time chat loop with the model
• Frame-synchronous generation (1–3 tokens per frame @ 60 FPS)
So it’s now interactive, not just a demo render.
The current focus is correctness and stability of inference. The graphics layer can evolve later.
Next step is exposing a lightweight SDK layer so N64 devs can hook model calls into 3D scenes or gameplay logic — essentially treating the LLM as a callable subsystem rather than a UI gimmick.
The value isn’t the menu.
It’s that inference is happening on 1996 silicon.
Happy to answer specifics about the pipeline if you’re interested.