N64 On PS2

Did you know you can (sort of) play N64 games on the PS2? Well you can, but you might not want to when you see what they run like. That is except for the amazing port of Mario 64 which runs great. Also what about other emulators on the PS2? There's many thanks to a recent RetroArch Port, but also some stand alone emulators that do impressive things too. Including a PS1 emulator, which might seem pointless, but does have it's uses.
And yes I am working on a proper "Games That Push The Limits of the PS2" video, that is on it's way!

[TAGMedia]

A couple notes on SNESticle: it was developed and compiled using the official Sony SDK and also utilizes hardware acceleration to take the load off of the PS2's CPU. If Retroarch cores were given the same level of attention and care, you'd easily see better emulation and more cores.

[Thinkofsomethingnew]

I enjoyed seeing the PS2 do these emulators, very interesting.

[danmanx]

Great vid. You really don't see a lot of emulators running on PS2...like ever. Honestly, I would've loved this back in the day....

[ninjapants]

The PS2 N64 emulator gives you all the same experience you get from Steam Early access if it was launched in 1996

[BeefJerkey]

Worth noting that the old Mega Man collections that were on PS2 and GameCube had PS1 games (Mega Man 8, X3-X6, and "Battle and Chase" which uses 3D polygons). I don't know whether these are source code ports, or emulation, but they look accurate as far as I can tell. As for the SNES games, they seem to be slightly modified source ports.

[myownfriend]

The N64 and PS2 have a decent amount of similarities. MIPS 5000 is the successor to the MIPS 4000 that the N64 uses. Both have programmable MIPS vector processors that support fixed point math. The PS2 actually has two and I believe one uses microcode just like the RSP on the N64. Both also have support for the same indexed texture formats and similar GPUs, with a unified memory architecture. They even both use RDRAM In theory, you could make an N64 VM for the N64 that uses dynamic binary translation (slightly different than dynamic binary recompilation) to redirect memory addresses (the memory map is no doubt very different) and account for some of their differences. I'm not saying it's easy obviously but there a whole lot less than the PS2 would need emulate about the N64.

The same applies to the PS1 and PS2. In fact, they're more similar. I'm not sure that there's too many places that the built-in PS1 emulator on the PS2 slim could use high-level emulation outside of the BIOs.

[juststatedtheobvious]

Both the SNES and the PS2 are insanely complicated, and difficult to develop for.

How the hell did anyone...? How did they even get the idea to try?

Anyone who doesn't appreciate this miracle, should read the famous article on why BSNES uses over 3ghz to run SNES games accurately.

[davidoli]

This is awesome! I love to see older consoles running emulators. Please make another video like this but with the PS1! It can emulate NES quite well with an emulator called imbNES

[Vegeta-]

I emulate N64 games on my Sega Genesis mini quite well. So far i played Mario 64, banjoo kazooie, Duke Nukem and James Bond. I'll try other games

[returnofmerenguespersempre]

N64 is notoriously difficult to emulate thanks to obscurely complicated architecture.
Well done effort still!

[johnbillings]

I'm genuinely surprised at how "well" the N64 emulation was. If you remember early N64 emulation on limited PC hardware then you know why.

[RicardoRamosRetrocomputacao]

The problem is not that the emulator is too complex for the ps2 cpu. Emulators for Snes started to appear in 1997, and even ran on 486dx2 processors. Emulators for n64 appeared in 1999, and it was possible to run at full speed on a Pentium 2 400mhz.

Both on ps2 and og xbox the problem is lack of optimization, due to programmers not having the necessary experience on the platform. The og xbox for example, is at least 3x faster than the minimum requirement for the n64 emulator, and even then it cannot run n64 with 64mb of native ram. The xbox has 64mb free, while pcs with windows have 64mb but a good part is allocated for running the operating system and drivers

Creating an emulator requires that the programmer has deep knowledge of both platforms, host and guest. In addition, it is impossible to create an accurate emulator on old platforms, so numerous speed hacks are mandatory, but most of the time they do not harm the emulation.

[kingj]

I wanna see a speed runner complete M64 on ps2

[bpcgos]

What also awesome is PS1 game run on dreamcast with Bleem back in the day... I also once tried Sega Master System emulation on Ps1, the sound is glitchy, but the game plays fine

[PJE]

Looks like that glitched Ridge Racer is just having the issue of rendering near polygons in wireframe. An interesting way of misbehaving. I wonder how it would look like if a hypothetical setting in the emulator to force filled polygons was enabled.

[JohnnyWednesday]

"I don't think the Dreamcast ever saw an emulator that ran games this well" - then you've forgotten Bleem :)

[TheStuffMade]

Interest, I guess it's more "let's see if it's possible" than expecting anyone to actually use their old PS2 for emulation.

[RTJ]

incredible

reminds me of the classic video "let's play san fransisco rush" from 2009

[j]

> a recipe that is stripped away of copyrighted properties

This is actually incorrect. The decompiled Mario 64 is derived from direct decompilation of the original ROMs and can be compiled into an *exact* copy of the ROMs (provided you have the assets), so it's still very much a derivative work of the original. It is *most likely* illegal, but that'd depend on the courts and how they'd judge whether this would fall under e.g. fair use.

[fattomandeibu]

I know it's probably unobtainium by now, but I use a Gameshark and flip top to play PSX games on PS2.

First you boot the Gameshark, swap the game CD in via flip top and you're off.