A fan developer has released Halo 64, a Nintendo 64 multiplayer port of Halo: Combat Evolved, bringing split-screen shooting to the VR4300 in a way that really has no business working as well as it apparently does. Retro Dodo covered the release, noting this is not a port of the campaign but a standalone multiplayer experience supporting up to four players locally via split-screen.
The project pulls Halo’s own game code from the halo-ce-universal decompilation, objects, physics, collision, weapons, game types, the HUD, first-person weapons and pathfinding, and compiles it for the N64’s VR4300 processor. A new renderer, menu, HUD drawing and sound system are built on libdragon and tiny3d, while the maps themselves are converted directly from the original Xbox game’s files. Players choose from 13 maps, including Blood Gulch, Sidewinder, Boarding Action and Hang ’em High, each carrying its own vehicles, weapons and teleporters.
What modes and features does Halo 64 include?
Game types on offer include Slayer, Team Slayer, Slayer Pro, Capture The Flag and King of the Hill. There is also a Firefight mode, which sends waves of Grunts, Jackals and Elites at one to four players on shared lives, across four difficulty settings. Bot support is present too, with up to 12 players and bots combined tracked on the pause-menu scoreboard, which shows score, kills and deaths for every participant.
The port carries a number of features that feel at home on original hardware: Halo’s shield, health, ammunition and motion sensor HUD, weapon and vehicle sounds, the main menu’s music, and Rumble Pak support for each player independently. The main menu runs at 640×480 interlaced. Four control schemes are available (standard, bumper jumper, GoldenEye and north) with options for inverted look, toggle or hold crouch, and separate look speeds for the analogue stick and C buttons. Settings and control preferences are saved to the cartridge via EEPROM.
What you need to run it
Running Halo 64 requires your own copy of the original Xbox game, since the build process converts its files rather than distributing them. The build runs on Linux or Windows, and some technical skill is needed to convert and patch the game using the developer’s GitHub repository, where it can be downloaded free of charge. An Expansion Pak is required for play on original N64 hardware.
Retro Dodo notes that the project was AI-assisted, with the developer stating that Claude was used in co-developing the game. The source article also flags that, as with any file from GitHub, users should carry out their own checks, as files may contain malware and the port has not been independently tested by Retro Dodo.
