Tiny ESP32-S3 Takes on an N64 Megatexture Demo
Who needs a graphics card when you have a microcontroller and a stubborn refusal to accept its limitations? CubeCoders’ Jet Megatextures Demo adapts James D. Lambert’s Nintendo 64 chapel demo for the ESP32-S3, rendering everything in software using the Jet engine. A 90-second camera tour explores stained-glass windows and detailed stonework, with optional controls for looking around freely.
The trick is making simple geometry look expensive: 325 triangles, 18 textured materials and a 5.01 MiB texture pack. The colourful lighting is baked into the artwork rather than calculated dynamically, while a cache reuses filtered texture samples to reduce rendering work. The complete reduced texture pack fits in memory, so this is not a demonstration of streaming a world larger than RAM.
The tested setup uses a 240 MHz ESP32-S3 with 8 MiB PSRAM and 16 MiB flash, driving a 480×320 display through half-width rendering and alternating fields. Source code, converted assets and build instructions are available on GitHub. Tiny hardware, thoroughly oversized ambition.