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?

  • umbrellaEnglish
    2·
    20 hours ago

    why is its reliance on microcode making it so difficult? i tought this was the case across the board?

    • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      4·
      10 hours ago

      According to: https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Nintendo_64_emulators

      One of the biggest hurdles to emulating the Nintendo 64 was the Reality Display Processor (RDP), which used a custom design that had to be fine-tuned to get higher performance out of the system using microcode. To emulate the RDP accurately, one would have to execute said microcode the way the RDP did, which differed from the PC graphics cards of the day. To complicate matters further, API standards available on PCs two decades ago were nowhere near as flexible as they’re today. If you wanted to make an accurate GPU-accelerated RDP plugin in 2003, you simply couldn’t with the APIs of the time (OpenGL 1.x and Direct3D 9).

      Accurate low-level emulation would only come to the GPU in 2020 when a new version of the Mupen64Plus-based ParaLLEl libretro core was released containing a rewritten RDP plugin using compute shaders in Vulkan.