It's in the third post or so. Apparently Nintendo didn't turn on any compiler optimizations so porting the mips assembly back to c and fiddling around a bit until the original compiler produced identical instructions again was a feasible thing to do.
That makes me wonder how much better we can make it perform by turning on optimizations (and likely fixing undefined behavior in places). There's quite a few locations in the game where the framerate and gameplay suffer.
My unfounded suspicion is that optimizations might have been turned off to avoid bugs in the toolchain. The developers would have had to deal with very early versions of these tools before the comsole was launched and in development itself.
It was one of the first games and easily outclassed by later releases so I'm sure there are many optimizations that could be made.
I hope we get the same with Waverace one day, nothing since has matched the feel of the wave physics in that one, it would be interesting to see what they did.
Some people need everything explained don't they? "What do you mean first game? I distinctly remember playing tag at school and that preceded Wave Race 64 by at least 2 years. Please stop spreading FUD".
