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Palette lighting tricks on the Nintendo 64
May 17th, 2025 This article is a continuation to my Bluesky thread from April. We made a Nintendo 64 demo for Revision 2025! It has baked lighting with normal mapping and real-time specular shading, ahem, well sort of.
Another view of the above potato-shaped rock mesh.In the above example I also did shading in linear space by undoing the gamma correction of the color texture :) In the final demo it wasn’t possible because I split the ambient and direct light terms to be combined by N64’s RDP unit in hardware. Lighting isn’t interpolated smoothly on this arch because the tangent spaces are constant over polygons, unlike in proper tangent-space normal mapping. I’d love to see the shading discontinuity issue solved somehow (Spooky Iluha’s techniques don’t have it) without losing support for both ambient and direct lighting.
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