this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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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?

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[–] [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?