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> Actually this goes for pretty much all Nintendo devices. Roughly 30 years later and N64 emulation is not fully solved.

by rounce 1y ago

mrguyorama 1y ago
Fully solved how? It's in a great state. Angrylion brought a new paradigm to n64 emulation, which is "fuck it, Low Level Emulation is fully doable now", and then that incredibly successful work was ported to run as a GPU shader, where it works a million times better! Now even medium powered devices, like the Steam Deck, can run low level emulation of n64 games at upscaled resolution and never run into graphics bugs, have fewer other bugs, have great performance, etc. Classic bugs like the perfect dark remote camera that always had trouble on High Level Emulator plugins are just gone, no tweaks required. Games that wrote their own microcode run with no trouble. The crazy shit Rare and Factor 5 did at the end of the console's lifecycle just works in emulators. https://www.libretro.com/index.php/category/parallel-n64/ https://www.libretro.com/index.php/category/parallel-n64/ Notably, Modern Vintage Gamer released a video titled "Why is Nintendo 64 emulation still a broken mess in 2025" and to make that video he had to contrive dumb scenarios: Running n64 emulation on the Playstation Vita and a Raspberry Pi. Efficient and accurate high level emulation of the n64 is just not possible. You can't properly emulate the complex interactions going on in the n64 without huge amounts of overhead, it's too interconnected. Angrylion and Parallel-n64 proved, with that amount of overhead, you might as well do pixel accurate low level emulation and just eliminate an entire class of emulation bugs. When angrylion came out, around 2017, even a shitty laptop with a couple cores could run n64 games pixel accurate at native resolution and full speed. In fact, on the Raspberry Pi that MVG is complaining about in the above mentioned video, he is complaining that "n64 emulation is a broken mess" because he is getting 50fps in conkers bad fur day. Because he is running it upscaled. He's complaining "n64 emulation is a broken mess" because the Raspberry Pi has a garbage GPU. Laptop integrated GPUs, even budget laptop integrated GPUs have no problems with parallel-n64 High level emulation was always a crutch, and never a good approach for n64 emulation. Even in it's heyday, it relied on per-game patches. Notably, the Dolphin team ended up finding the same reality. What finally solved some serious emulator problems dealing with the gamecube having a mostly Fixed Function Pipeline graphics system that could be updated whenever, a situation that does not translate at all to computer graphics systems that expect you have individual shader programs to call with certain materials, was to write a giant shader that literally emulated the entire gamecube graphics hardware and use that while you wait for the emulated shader to compile. Ubershaders they call it.

> Actually this goes for pretty much all Nintendo devices. Roughly 30 years later and N64 emulation is not fully solved.

by rounce 1y ago

> Actually this goes for pretty much all Nintendo devices. Roughly 30 years later and N64 emulation is not fully solved.

mrguyorama 1y ago

Fully solved how? It's in a great state. Angrylion brought a new paradigm to n64 emulation, which is "fuck it, Low Level Emulation is fully doable now", and then that incredibly successful work was ported to run as a GPU shader, where it works a million times better! Now even medium powered devices, like the Steam Deck, can run low level emulation of n64 games at upscaled resolution and never run into graphics bugs, have fewer other bugs, have great performance, etc. Classic bugs like the perfect dark remote camera that always had trouble on High Level Emulator plugins are just gone, no tweaks required. Games that wrote their own microcode run with no trouble. The crazy shit Rare and Factor 5 did at the end of the console's lifecycle just works in emulators. https://www.libretro.com/index.php/category/parallel-n64/ https://www.libretro.com/index.php/category/parallel-n64/ Notably, Modern Vintage Gamer released a video titled "Why is Nintendo 64 emulation still a broken mess in 2025" and to make that video he had to contrive dumb scenarios: Running n64 emulation on the Playstation Vita and a Raspberry Pi. Efficient and accurate high level emulation of the n64 is just not possible. You can't properly emulate the complex interactions going on in the n64 without huge amounts of overhead, it's too interconnected. Angrylion and Parallel-n64 proved, with that amount of overhead, you might as well do pixel accurate low level emulation and just eliminate an entire class of emulation bugs. When angrylion came out, around 2017, even a shitty laptop with a couple cores could run n64 games pixel accurate at native resolution and full speed. In fact, on the Raspberry Pi that MVG is complaining about in the above mentioned video, he is complaining that "n64 emulation is a broken mess" because he is getting 50fps in conkers bad fur day. Because he is running it upscaled. He's complaining "n64 emulation is a broken mess" because the Raspberry Pi has a garbage GPU. Laptop integrated GPUs, even budget laptop integrated GPUs have no problems with parallel-n64 High level emulation was always a crutch, and never a good approach for n64 emulation. Even in it's heyday, it relied on per-game patches. Notably, the Dolphin team ended up finding the same reality. What finally solved some serious emulator problems dealing with the gamecube having a mostly Fixed Function Pipeline graphics system that could be updated whenever, a situation that does not translate at all to computer graphics systems that expect you have individual shader programs to call with certain materials, was to write a giant shader that literally emulated the entire gamecube graphics hardware and use that while you wait for the emulated shader to compile. Ubershaders they call it.