this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
179 points (95.9% liked)

RetroGaming

20378 readers
146 users here now

Vintage gaming community.

Rules:

  1. Be kind.
  2. No spam or soliciting for money.
  3. No racism or other bigotry allowed.
  4. Obviously nothing illegal.

If you see these please report them.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The Nintendo 64 has always been a difficult machine to emulate correctly. But in 2025 - we should be well and truly past all of it right? Not exactly. Issues with Plugins, performance, graphical glitches, stutters. Unless you have a very powerful machine, these are common things many of us will run into when emulating the Nintendo 64. But why? And Is there any hope for fast, accurate N64 emulation in 2025 and beyond?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Back in 2015 I used the emulator "1964" to play some MarioKart64 and it ran well on a very weak computer, fwiw.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

Do you remember if you had the black screen in this track?

It's a classical issue in n64 emulators.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

It looks different than I remember. Usually it was just a black screen.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Or in perfect dark when the camspy didn't work with a black screen thus being hard locked out of the game pretty early in

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Maybe it is a similar issue: framebuffer emulation.

[–] mindbleach 2 points 1 month ago

And technically, the whole frame is subtly wrong, because that's bilinear texture filtering instead of trilinear.

The more annoying "no other GPU works that way" issue is transparency. The edges of sprites can look awful in early emulators, because the N64 uses a cutoff instead of blending. This screenshot shows the correct crisp edges - which is a bit surprising considering it clipped the timer digits wrong. But if you just throw everything into OpenGL then everything's blurry and soft and usually black at the edges.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

How about the Kirby64 HUD?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (2 children)

The video says that emulation has always worked better on popular games. But if you try to emulate a less popular game, you will run into major issues. This is because the emulation must be tweaked for each game specifically due to how N64 hardware works.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

Especially Nintendo's own games. Mario 64, Mario kart, etc, were usually the first to be emulated correctly.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I've never been able to play though Goemon's Great Adventure on emulation. It always hits a game-breaking crash :/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago

Oddly enough this is the game I was trying to get to work a handful of years ago when I last gave N64 emulation a shot so I could play it with a friend. Ended up realizing the N64 emulation scene just wasn't there yet. Guess it's time to give it another go.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Where is the crash? I have it playing via the official N64 app on my modded Switch, but haven't gotten very far. Wondering if the issue still exists there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Turtle Island, it's like world 4 or so. Hopefully it's been updated, I haven't tried again for probably 8 years