Nintendo used to be GOOD at N64 Emulation..what happened? | MVG

Nintendo have developed internal N64 emulation solutions since 2002, and in the past they have usually been of a high standard, but somewhere along the way, things have declined. In this episode we take a closer look at the history and what went wrong.

Social Media Links :

#Nintendo #N64 #Emulation

[TVsMrNeil]

1:16 It appears that you have Gamecube and Wii VC footage reversed in all of your screen captures. Gamecube footage is easily identified by the red and green button colors at the top right of the screen.

[Supersayainpikmin]

Fun Fact: Playing Wii VC games in the Wii U's Wii mode has less input lag than actual Wii U VC releases, even ones of the same game.

[immortallix]

When you have access to your own source code, documentation, and possibly devs who worked on the hardware, and you're legally able to access and utilize those resources, and you still can't outdo some hobbyists who have to try and reverse engineer these consoles, that is extremely pathetic.

[MrMario]

I'm not sure how widespread it was, but the community took the GameCube's N64 emulator and successfully got other games running in it as well. Trying it out with Mario Kart 64 was a pretty fun experience!

In regards to NSO: Between the fog issues in Ocarina of Time, input lag, and most shockingly (to me) the Controller Pak issues I'm absolutely shocked it made it out of QA in the state we have it now. Others here have mentioned Stephen leaving, and that's incredibly concerning if a single person leaving the company can result in this much of a downgrade this quickly.

[santoyo]

What I can’t believe is that Nintendo, despite having the documentation of their own hardware, isn’t able to make a decent emulator. The emulation community gets better Results using reverse enginery.

[skilarbabcock]

A little correction, the black filter removal doesn't require romhacking. You only need to edit the configuration file for the emulator.

[williammackay-murphy]

It’s upsetting how the company that’s the most anal about stopping emulation offers the worst options for playing their games

[daskampffredchen]

A company that knows all of the internals of their hardware should be able to make a better emulator

[hgbugalou]

This is why I still do all my old school gaming on my PC. The communities passion will always surpass any given company.

[SargeantMario]

Still terrified of the thought of how Majora's Mask will be like on the NSO, if Ocarina of Time is anything to go by.

[GiuseppeGaetanoSabatelli]

Internally developed emulation should always be good. They literally have access to the internal hardware, rom calls, APIs, etc.
Microsoft offering top tier emulation of x86 Xbox on PPC Xbox 360, and back again to the Xbone, enhancing with 4K, and then to the Series X/S with Auto HDR, etc.
Sony offering perfect PS1 emulation on the PSP almost day 1. Offering extremely powerful PS2 emulation on the SoftCompat PS3 even given how hard PS2 emulation was AND how hard PS3 development was.
But they have all the documentation, all the patents, all the specifications. Nintendo not being able to emulate N64 perfectly is actually a joke.

[oldoldmeme]

I remember how exciting it was to hear Iwata say that the Wii was backwards compatible with every Nintendo console "and more" back during its reveal. The very concept of playing old games on a new console was utterly magical to me, and the way Nintendo handled it back then was just, well, good. Yeah, emulation quality wasn't absolutely phenomenal, but this was a console meant for CRT TV's, this stuff was more forgivable back then.

[TheNegronomicon]

Amazing how the departure of one person really made things worse. Whoever took over probably didn't care as much or didn't have enough knowledge in emulation to make it work.

[rowanunderwood]

Advice: you can use the "slo-motion" feature on a smart phone to track input lag. Bonus: connected to a CRT you can actually count the frames of lag by advancing frame by frame in your video and checking were the scanline is :)

[DarkBowser]

They also released Zelda: Collector's Edition for GameCube which had Ocarina of Time on it, and went through the trouble of adding Majora's Mask, which was tough to emulate, onto it along with the first two Zelda games. Granted, Majora did not perform all that amazingly because of how technically difficult it was to emulate due to the Expansion Pak. But it says as much when you start playing the game.

But it was still really good for what it was, and they even had a custom PAL 60Hz version of Majora in Europe if I recall, and a Japanese version that combined the new features of the US/Europe versions with the unique qualities of the Japanese version (JP version has 3 files, no owl saves, US/EU has 2 files with owl saves--and so does the Japanese GC Majora version, for example). They spared no effort in trying to make it as playable as possible, but the game does crash from time to time. If you disable the Rumble Feature, it happens far less often, though.

Suffice it to say, they did not spare any effort back in the GC and Wii days to ensure the games were playable and ran as well as they could muster given the hardware.

[fordxbgtfalcon]

I already canceled my Switch expansion pack service because if the poor emulation. Just waiting on my refund now. It was kind of a pain to get them to even offer me a refund. But luckily one of the Nintendo reps I talked to on the phone said even he was disappointed with what Nintendo did with the online and that’s why he worked with me so well.

[firisrozley]

Seems like Nintendo is going the way of GameFreak, getting lazier & greedier with every modern iteration.

[EastyyBlogspot]

Feels like every console they start from scratch all over again....if they carried over the virtual console from wii would have a amazing collection of stuff by now....but nope start from scratch and drip feeding

[faustianblur]

Majora's Mask was also available on the GameCube in the Legend of Zelda Collector's Edition promo disc. The compilation included Ocarina of Time, the two NES Zelda games and a demo of Wind Waker.

[overlordalfredo]

It could be understandable that they used a "generic" emulator for N64 if they made a lot of games available from the start.
It there were 100+ games in that service I could see using an approach for easy switching between titles in overarching navigation VS individual emulation per game.

But they started the service with less than 10 (16 if they include the rest they showed) games!!!

That's basically the worst of both worlds...