N64 emulation: better than the real thing

Racketboy has a great article showing off some of the capabilities of the modern N64 emulator. If your machine is fast enough, most of the available emulators will really give you a noticeable resolution boost and better looking anti-aliased models. Using the Rice Video plugin with the Project64 emulator, you can even swap out the textures for some games with user-created texture packs.

I still use the real hardware (is the N64 considered “retro” now?), so before seeing this, I hadn’t even considered emulation for this platform. That all changed when I saw the Mario64 mod shown above. The selection of available emulators is impressive, and there are open source emulators available for just about every platform. I’m currently playing a game under Mupen64 on my iMac and it’s pretty flawless. My only wish is that all computers came, by default, with a nice joystick like they did back in the 80s.

Enhance N64 Graphics With Emulation Plugins & Texture Packs – Link
Project64 Emulator – Link
Rice Video Plugin – Link
Mupen64 Emulator (cross-platform, open source) – Link

3 Responses to N64 emulation: better than the real thing

Max on March 12th, 2008 at 8:25 am said:

I too had never considered running a N64 emulator (I mean the real thing isn’t “that” old.) I had this project booked marked for a while now and it appears to finally be time to build it… http://www.raphnet.net/electronique/gc_n64_usb/index_en.php

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Chris Napoli on March 13th, 2008 at 1:22 am said:

For Mac OS X, I recommend SixtyForce developed by Gerrit Goosen:

http://www.sixtyforce.com/

He is actively updating the project, and it runs native on Intel Macs, unlike Mupen64.

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ChrisNapoli on March 13th, 2008 at 4:40 pm said:

I made a mistake in my first post: Mupen64 is a Universal Binary, so it does run natively on Intel Macs.

But it still doesn’t appear to be updated since 2005, and is very buggy.

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