Castello

Castello is a homebrew demo by Pekkavaa of Macau Exports and released on 20 April 2025. It’s a 3D view of a castle showing some unique lighting effects. It was released for the Revision 2025 contest where it came in 6th in the “wild” category.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password viewingacastle.

About Castello

At face value, Castello is very simple. It’s a series of shots panning and rotating around a 3D model of a castle, all to the relaxing theme by Noby.

What is interesting about it though is the techniques displayed, as described in this blog post. The creator plays around with various lighting effects, bringing about a unique graphical system for the N64.

This demo uses CPU-calculated normals in object space rather than tangent space. This is generally considered better for an object that is static (doesn’t rotate relative to the light or deform) since it allows for more accurate lighting, but isn’t really effective for a game where there are objects that move around in space constantly.

The other interesting thing about Castello is that it uses palette shading rather than blending surfaces with a light. This makes it very fast to apply lighting, but again at the expense of flexibility since palette-space shading can only work with a limited palette size, and it wouldn’t work well with multiple textures.

Review and conclusion

As far as 3D scene demos, this one is very impressive. At a first glance, it might seem as though the demo is trying to show off the model but in reality it’s all about the lighting.

I particularly like how the demo keeps things interesting by simulating a sunrise – starting off at night and then moving onto a deep red light before ending with bright sunlight. The best part about it (in my opinion) is the way that the light diffuses around the corners, giving it a very realistic effect that contrasts well with the stony texture of the castle.

If I had to criticise anything, it would be that it feels very static. I realise that having anything move would be against the point of the way lighting is calculated, but seeing a contrast would be interesting for the sake of showing how the technology works in comparison. Also, the file size is huge, likely due to an uncompressed audio file.

Castello is definitely worth a view if you’re interested in a take on experimental lighting techniques on the N64.