I’m happy to say that I’ve got the minimum viable product (MVP) for the trophy app all set. But, I still need to finish up a few things before it’s completely good to go. This includes being able to detect N64 games even if they’re not in the root folder, figuring out all the trophies for the current set of games, and tweaking the user interface.

Don’t worry, the trophy app MVP will still be pretty sweet. It’ll automatically find your games and give you three types of trophies: Bronze, Silver, and Gold (with plans for Platinum later on). Plus, when it launches, it’ll already support some classic games like 1080 Snowboarding (US), Mario Kart 64 (US), Super Mario 64 (US), Super Smash Bros (US), and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (US).

I have to confess, the screenshots in my previous post where made by reading embedded save data in the rom instead of the Everdrive SD card. But this has now been fixed, the program now detects installed games automatically by scanning the SD card for supported games (root dir only for now).

Here is a screenshot of the detection in action. Can you spot the newly supported game hint?

If you’ve been wondering why I was researching N64 save file formats. It’s not because I want to cheat my way to the end of the game (where is the fun in that?). But because I’ve always been a fan of Achievements and Trophies as seen on the Xbox and Playstation. They add some insentive to finish a game for me and shows a nice overview of which games I completed and liked enough to spend my time on.

Whenever I play on a retro console (or even the Nintendo Switch) I feel like there is something missing. I still finish most of the Nintendo games (they make great quality games that deserve to be completed), but it would be nice to see these stats in an overview.

I’ve recently bought an Everdrive 64 X7 and started developing an N64 rom to do just that. Add a Trophy system to N64 games!

Of-course there are some limitations, I am not able to read the state of the game when it’s running let alone inject any graphics, so I’ve taken a different approach. The Everdrive stores save games on the SD card which can then be read by custom roms. By checking the state of the save game I am able to verify if the player performed a given task or reached a milestone in the game.

Take a little sneak peek at the current development screenshots:

The overview screen that displays all supported games and their status

The game details screen that displays the trophies

I’ve added binary templates for Wave Race 64 and Super Smash Bros save files. They are not 100% complete but contain most of the interesting data. Enjoy!

For one of my (many) side projects I required information about save file formats for N64 games. After some searching I noticed that only a few of the most popular (Zelda OOT, Mario 64 etc) games are documented across the web, but there was not a single place that contained documentation, let alone documentation for all N64 games.

I started to document the currently available information into a single GitHub repository in consistent 010 templates, which are very easy to read even without 010 editor, for everyone to learn from and add to.

As of writing this post the repo only contains a template for Mario 64, 1080 Snowboarding and the start of Diddy Kong Racing, but I am planning to add more in the future.