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VIDEO: Why is Nintendo 64 emulation still a broken mess in 2025? (www.youtube.com)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] 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.