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?
The first time I played ocarina of time, it was on a k6-2/450 with a voodo3-3000. It ran well enough that I considered it on par with a real N64. Edit: this would have been 2002/2003.
i just didn’t want to say 25 years ago and have someone ‘um akshuly’ me about when emulation started getting viable.
To be fair, I was using ultrahle, which was a very high level emulator targeting mario64 and specifically needing a GLIDE-supporting card. It did well enough on ocarina as (my understanding is that) it used the same graphics engine as Mario64 and therefore the same function calls… but there were many other games that wouldn’t run at all.