Cave Story 64

Cave Story 64 is an unfinished homebrew port of Cave Story by cuckydev. There was a v0.1 release on 12 Dec 2020, but I couldn’t find much else about it. Most of the information about it has been scrubbed from the internet.

You can download the ROM for all version from their download page by using the password doukutsumonogatari.

About Cave Story 64

I found some strange file in my stash of game ROMs called “Cave 64.n64”. It was at first a collection of random purple blobs so I guessed it was an in-work game so I decided to have a further look into what game it is, and if there is a newer version of it.

The first thing I found was a cave story ROM hack for Super Mario 64 (might get back to it later). That’s obviously not what it was, so I’ll ignore it for now. What I ended up with was two additional versions of Cave Story that were made for the Nintendo 64, yet also never officially released.

The original Cave story was released in 2004 japan-only, but it gained a lot of popularity in 2010-11 due to its Wii and DS releases. Since then, it has become a sort of Doom-like game in the sense that it’s been fan-ported to several different platforms such as PSP, Flash and even Mega Drive/Genesis.

Cuckydev version

The first version known to be released is the Cuckydev version. It is made using the official SDK (LibUltra), based on a decompilation of the original game and translated into the N64’s own language.

This is a homebrew port of Cave Story to the Nintendo 64. This project is based off my own decompilation efforts of Cave Story Freeware 1.0.0.6, Cave Story belongs to Studio Pixel (https://studiopixel.jp). English translation done by Aeon Genesis (https://agtp.romhack.net).

It runs well at a solid 60 fps, but it lacks all audio.

Cuckydev is still around developing other projects, but has made no mention of Cave Story 64 since. He’s even deleted the original repository from Github so anyone wanting to continue the project is hard out of luck. There’s still a backup on the wayback machine, but only the repo’s homepage was archived.

Meeq version

This version by Meeq appeared about six months later. It’s quite different in the sense that it was made with Libdragon instead, but I couldn’t find any source code for this anywhere.

It has audio that runs well, but performance takes a hit by running at 20-30 fps. This is likely because it was using the old version of Libdragon’s hardware renderer, and used several full syncs per frame which is quite time-intensive.

Unknown version

The version that started my quest is the least advanced of all. It can barely even be called a proof of concept. It has no discernible graphics, just some purple blobs and plain text. You can only tell that it’s a port of cave story by the fact that the text is the same as the game’s opening cutscene.

Once you figure that out, you can play through the game like normal, except that every object is a purple square and all the terrain is invisible, so you have to figure it out by memory, only having the force to guide you along your way.

I have no idea where I found this one, or if it could be an early version of the Cuckydev/Meeq ports. I really should keep a better record of ROMs that I find around the internet.

Review and conclusion

All three versions of Cave Story 64 are unique in their own way.

The unknown version has a very creepy feeling to it. It feels like one of those “lost games” that has a demon sealed inside of it or something.

Cuckydev’s version is fast, sleek and fun, but it lacks the charm provided by the original game’s score and sound effects.

The Meeq version has the advantage of having audio and saving, but feels very sluggish and floaty.

Besides that, there are some minor differences in the way that the textures and text are rendered. Check this out, the one with the number is Meeq, and without it is Cuckydev.

They’re all good attempts in their own way, just getting a decompiled game to run is no small task, I just wish they’d had seen it through to the end so we could get a final flawless conversion of Cave Story on the Nintendo 64.