Developer Releases Xibalba 64 for N64, Notes Memory Bandwidth Limits

Two years after porting his JavaScript game engine to C, developer Dominic Szablewski has released Xibalba 64, a Wolfenstein 3D-style FPS for the Nintendo 64. Modretro will publish the game as a physical launch title for its M64, a modern N64 clone, complete with cartridge, packaging, and manual. This marks only the second physical release of a new N64 game since the console's commercial end, following Xeno Crisis by Bitmap Bureau in 2023. Szablewski built the game using his C engine, high_impact, which supports modular platform and rendering backends. He created a new backend for the N64 using Libdragon, an open-source library that provides compilers and tools for building ROM files.

Testing was done via the Ares emulator, which accurately emulates the RDP and RSP coprocessors, and on real hardware using the SummerCart64 flash cartridge, which supports USB-C uploads via sc64deployer. The developer notes that the N64's slow memory bandwidth can only be fully tested on actual hardware.