Play Nintendo 64 games on Bitcoin

Old games, new wonders: a team has written an N64 emulator as an ordinal on Bitcoin - with two clever tricks and $5,000.

Bitcoin becomes a game console - more or less. Thanks to Ordinals, the Nintendo 64 can now be played on it with the right boundary conditions. This reports Decrypt.

The Pizza Ninjas team has written an emulator for the old console on the blockchain, called an Ordinal protocol.

It is Ordinal 61.648.429, but you need certain game files to start it.

Ordinals are Bitcoins version of NFT's. More on this here.

The development has been made possible by two technical breakthroughs in data compression. Google's Brotli algorithm and a recent improvement in ordinals. This made it possible to reduce file size by 80 percent.

Bitcoin has very limited storage space, currently 551 gigabytes, less than a conventional hard drive. However, space increases by one MB per block.

Therefore, the price of storage space is very expensive. Writing the N64 emulator cost the team about $5,000.

Ordinals are a controversial topic in the Bitcoin community. But they have already made the blockchain the largest platform for NFTs.