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 TrophyOverview

The game details screen that displays the trophies TrophyGameStats