Playing Retro Emulators on the Nintendo 64

The Nintendo 64 launched in 1996 is a powerful piece of hardware that's capable of many impressive things. One of those is playing old retro games via emulation. The N64 is capable of emulating the NES, Super NES, Game Boy Color and much more. In today's video we take a closer look at retro emulation running on the N64. For a system that launched in 1996 the results here may surprise you!

Links:

TimeStamps:

00:00 - 00:57 - Intro
00:58 - 02:30 - Emulation on the N64. How does it work?
02:31 - 04:24 - NES Emulation
04:25 - 07:17 - SNES Emulation
07:18 - 09:13 - SCUMMVM
09:14 - 11:59 - Game Boy/ Game Boy Color Emulation
12:00 - 12:57 - ZX Spectrum Emulation
12:58 - 14:08 - MAME
14:09 - 15:06 - MSX Emulation
15:07 - 16:02 - Conclusion
16:03 - 16:23 - Outro

Social Media Links :

#N64 #Retro #Emulation

[connerowenn]

Emulators… on a Nintendo 64?? What type of sorcery is that lmao

[MusicFromAnotherTime]

I still have a disc filled with hundreds of ROMs that work on my Dreamcast that I bought from a very shady man at my local flea market like 20 years ago.

[NUCLEARARMAMENT]

Yuji Naka (Sonic's creator) wrote a Famicom/NES emulator for the Sega Genesis back in 1991, to solidify the effect of the "Sega Does What Nintendon't) motto of the day.

[SynSash]

There was an NES emulator for PSX in the early 2000s written by Allan Blomquist and distributed on the Gamebase forum of which he was a member. I was a huge fan of it and eagerly awaited releases. It was called IMBNES (It might be NES) and had excellent compatibility, especially toward the end. If I remember right it's claim to fame was it was written from scratch in PSX assembly rather than porting a PC emulator which made it very efficient. Maybe It would a worthy topic for a future video, I believe it can be found on the internet archives.

[Toothily]

Remember the GB Tower in Pokémon Stadium? It was artificially locked to only boot Pokémon ROMs, but it was an proper emulator running on the N64, back in 1999.

[Stormkyleis]

When I asked Santa for a "good Nintendo 64 emulator, " I didn't mean it like this

[BlackHoleForge]

Still loving the OG XBMC. It paved the way for modern programs like Pluto or Tubi.

[SVTBansheeman]

I think it's pretty cool that you are the person who helped make the SNES emulator I used to use on my modded original Xbox.

[emmettturner]

Neon64 predates flash carts. I suggested that HCS add support for loading Neon64 via GameShark Pro parallel port on the Dextrose forums… and he did, opening it up to people without dev/backup hardware. :)

Back in the ‘90s there was an official N64 port on the SNES9x homepage. It was way too slow to be considered playable but I loaded it anyway and slogged through *literal minutes* to start the first level of Super Mario World just to say I had done it. :)

There were a few Game Boy emulators but the first one I recall for N64 was a Presence of Mind coding competition demoscene entry from Snake and McBane (N64 scener aliases). It didn’t have audio but it DID do two Game Boys at once textured to different sides of a spinning cube. It also had the Simpson’s characters they take their aliases from textured onto other sides of the same cube.

[BrianBates]

Back in 2004 I remember finding an NES emulator online for the N64 (Neon64). Back then it only supported NROM games (mapper 0) so I played Donkey Kong on it. Flash carts didn't exist back then so the method for launching the emulator was to use an N64 GameShark bundled with Mario 64 and connected to a PC via the parallel port on the back of the GameShark. You would load the emulator and rom into a certain memory space using GSCC2k2, set another value or use a GameShark code, and when you selected any of the Save Games in Mario 64 it would jump to the emulator instead of your save game. I thought it was really neat but considered it more of a novelty then. I'm really happy to see that while I wasn't looking things took off and got better!

[MoonSarito]

There's something so incredible about seeing emulators being run on old consoles at a time when a lot of people didn't even know what emulators were.

This made me wonder if there isn't some way to play NES or Atari 2600 games on the SNES or Sega Genesis.

[kristianTV]

Didn't Goldeneye (or one of Rare's games of that era) have a ZX Spectrum emu shipped buried in the cartridge code? They pretty much started out on the Spectrum as ACG/Ultimate (barring some forays into arcade titles) so quite fitting.

EDIT: Just got to that part. At least my memory works!

[GeomancerHT]

I remember emulating A Link to the Past on an ancient computer on a command line DOS emulator, it din't have sound but it looked gorgeous, pretty sure it didn't work enough to complete the game, and I remember the struggle of making that happen, going to a cyber coffee and downloading the roms and the emus and trying again and again... until ZSNES a decade later.

[juegajuanluna]

For me it was my Andriod Tablet back then. I was able to emulate my DS Library. Great times

[fungo]

The NES is so easy to emulate that even a 33 MHz 486 can run it fullspeed in Nesticle. ZSNES also apparently runs fullspeed on a Pentium 1.

[ChaosGenerator]

I've gotta say that the N64 is emulating things way better here than I have even seen on the Playstation 2.

[AluVixapede]

I remember people calling the OG Xbox a Loss Leader, because it was "basically a small computer in a box", which isn't wrong exactly. I think I missed out, I should have gotten one at the time lol. -- Also, Scummvm on the 64 sounds really fun!

[SShambler]

I'm not going to lie, I finished Zelda Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 on Project64. And I was blowed away, to the point that I had to buy those games, just to take guilt away. Still to this day, rather play Zelda Totk on my PC, even owning switch and copy of the game, just because better performance, that this game definitely deserves.

[darthtripedacus]

Game boy advance was my first console based emulation. Master system, game gear, Nes. It was sweet

[SRC]

I think the Dreamcast with beats of rage