Why is Nintendo 64 emulation still a broken mess in 2025 ?

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? Let's discuss in today's episode.

Links/Sources/Credits:

Chapters:

00:00:00 - N64 Emulation History
00:07:00 - What can be done?
00:11:23 - Conclusion

Social Media Links :

#N64 #Emulation

[KazeN]

An an n64 creator, I just hope the people either stick to JUST ONE old broken emulator (pj64 1.6) so you can make sure your games work on there. Or only advance to accurate emulators such as ares... but even with something like ares i had to go out of my way to make code modifications to make sure my game boots on there as well. (and some super rare n64 bugs seem to happen more commonly on ares due to very minor timing differences)

[OhKayEl]

The N64 emulation has been so bad for so long people have jumped straight to making native PC ports 🤣

[kered]

It's kind of crazy that we have nearly perfect Gamecube and Wii emulation, but N64 emulation is still so challenging.

[Zye]

Im hearing a lot about how emulation doesn't work but not about WHY the N64 is so hard to emulate.

[DerekTurtleRoe]

Project64 contributor here.

Just so everybody knows, we are working on removing a lot of hacks from the core as well increasing the accuracy of the core. There are currently a handful of contributors and a lot of them have full time jobs and family. I don't, but I've been very busy lately.

Having said that, a lot of progress was made on the CPU, RSP, and the ROM database in 2024. I've also been working on updating dependencies and we are trying to get the core working on Android and eventually Linux as well. I've already ported the build system to CMake, we just need to rebuild the UI and it should compile on Linux. It plays all games now, and most homebrew and test ROMs work. We put a lot of effort into Project64 last year, and I'll be putting just as much effort into it this year (if not more).

I also contributed to several other N64 emulators last year, and I've been working on my awesome emulators list, so some of my busy days have been my fault for sure. But it has been a great year with a lot of progress in N64 emulation.

Side note: proper testing of Daedalus is on my list of things to tackle at some point. 😄

[BenLiuChungHin]

Not sure if people old enough to remember the original N64 emulator (UltraHLE) that caused a massive storm since it was released in the early days of N64 and was basically doing on-the-fly calls to 3DFx's GLIDE (and then modded later to work with the full OpenGL set). This was considered revolutionary considering the emulator was released in 1999 while the N64 was released in 1997. Considering the PC standards back then was literally a Pentium 2/3 and 3DFX was still the standard, they did such an excellent job of emulating this.
Super surprised that 26 years later, we "still don't have it right" with hardware that is 100x more powerful than back then.

[boazplays]

I tried playing Majoras Mask many years ago in Project64. I got horribly stuck somewhere and couldn't figure out how to progress. So I set it down and played Ocarina of Time instead... but also got completely stuck in the Deku Tree. Turns out that the climbable vines texture wasn't rendering and I had no idea I was supposed to climb up (apparently blank) walls.

[SpamNapkin]

A few years ago I decided to play Pokemon Snap on an emulator because I was feeling nostalgic and hadn't played it in over 20 years. But when Professor Oak graded my performance he couldn't detect a single Pokemon in ANY of the pictures I took, even when they were right in the center of the frame. Occasionally he'd spot one but it was really hit or miss. My first thought was "Damn, this game is way harder than I remember." and it got to the point that I seriously believed this game that I remembered being really chill and easy was actually insanely hard and I repressed the memory because it was too traumatic.

Turns out it was a glitch exclusive to the emulator I was using. When I played the Wii Virtual Console version through Dolphin it ran perfectly. But I was seriously pulling my hair out.

[SFStransit]

The community: why doesn’t n64 emulation work

The same community: *creating the 10th new emulator* just create an emulator for each game!

[RoccocoVs]

Emulating Super Mario 64 in 1999 was a time

[ShadowTasos]

The main issue with N64 emulation on the Switch is the fucking insane input lag. I thought I was going crazy, there's no way the games are that laggy, so I actually plugged in my N64 just to check and holy shit it's insane how bad the input lag is on the Switch. If you have never played N64 games before you might think that's just how games were back then, they were laggy, but no it was actually the other way around - controls are SO snappy on the N64, that when you go on to play them again on the Switch you're like WTF.

[tylerdurden]

9:33 To be fair, lots of N64 games (especially Goldeneye) do not run at 60fps on the actual console. Goldeneye couldn't even maintain 30 natively.

[GoodMomo]

So happy that a large content creator has mentioned there are issues with the NSO version of FZero X. If anyone is wondering what they are, the game basically runs at a higher framerate than the original (IIRC, the original was something like 59.5 fps) so the CPU is always trying to catch up which causes the constant framedrops you see on NSO.

[sytsma.justin]

I remember emulating N64 games as a teenager 20+ years ago and wondered why some of the games became unplayable (particularly Paper Mario).Still shocking all these years later that it hasn't fully been solved. I've settled on getting a flash cart for my N64 on a CRT :)

[Gwinnmusic]

I remember watching one of your videos where you talked about all the consoles and their securities/piracy, and I was shocked to learn that Mario64 was almost immediately "cracked", as in they developed a whole new emulator that could run on contemporary PCs and emulate the game successfully. My first though was that it was impressive af, but my second thought was that "oh wait, this might have some negative impacts on today's emulation, right? since they usually tend to build upon already existing stuff, not creating something new from scratch) and ohhh gosh, I hate that I was right about this.

It is VERY interesting to see though that N64 "emulation" went into the recompiling route, but at the same time it can be a very interesting future for homebrew/fangame making that I'm genuinely very excited about.

[MofoMan]

Zilmar is still working on Project64, and I believe he and his team are focusing very hard on accuracy. I don't know exactly where they are in their roadmap but it's always interesting to see what they're doing.

[ogto]

n64 is a sore spot but i'm still hoping for greater leaps in saturn emulation. a lot more quality forgotten games collecting dust on that console...

[mcbpete]

9:15 Thank you so much for mentioning Ares! Over the years I've gone from UltraHLE -> Project64 -> Mupen64Plus -> Simple64 -> RMG. I felt I was finally 99% there with RMG with a *lot* of per-game tweaking and careful use of multiple reshade shaders, then I tried Ares last night and instantly was launched back to my brother's N64 setup in the late 90s. Flawless framerate, instant setup, and a selection of pre-configured shaders to make it look anywhere from our 14'' bedroom TV using RF from '97 to a perfectly calibrated PVM

[ArmandoDoval]

Interestingly, the MiSTer's N64 core handles KazeEmanuar's recent Return To Yoshi's Island demo just fine, and if you follow Kaze you know he's pushing the N64 to its limits.

Robert developed the core based on the behavior of commercial games, and it seems libdragon makes some odd choices that commercial games don't, like leave the RSP running all the time with an idle loop instead of letting it sleep.

[MediaMunkee]

Something I bemoan all the time is that because the microphone adapter for Hey You Pikachu was a separate piece of hardware, nobody's emulated it yet and that game might remain unplayable past the title screen on emulators forever. It wasn't a _great_ game but it's one of the few to embrace more of the 'digital pet' aspects of Pokemon and it had a surprising amount of little trophies and hidden items to uncover if you spent long enough with it.