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?
Back in 2015 I used the emulator “1964” to play some MarioKart64 and it ran well on a very weak computer, fwiw.
Do you remember if you had the black screen in this track?
It’s a classical issue in n64 emulators.
Or in perfect dark when the camspy didn’t work with a black screen thus being hard locked out of the game pretty early in
Maybe it is a similar issue: framebuffer emulation.
It looks different than I remember. Usually it was just a black screen.
How about the Kirby64 HUD?
The video says that emulation has always worked better on popular games. But if you try to emulate a less popular game, you will run into major issues. This is because the emulation must be tweaked for each game specifically due to how N64 hardware works.
Especially Nintendo’s own games. Mario 64, Mario kart, etc, were usually the first to be emulated correctly.
I’ve never been able to play though Goemon’s Great Adventure on emulation. It always hits a game-breaking crash :/
Oddly enough this is the game I was trying to get to work a handful of years ago when I last gave N64 emulation a shot so I could play it with a friend. Ended up realizing the N64 emulation scene just wasn’t there yet. Guess it’s time to give it another go.
Where is the crash? I have it playing via the official N64 app on my modded Switch, but haven’t gotten very far. Wondering if the issue still exists there.
Turtle Island, it’s like world 4 or so. Hopefully it’s been updated, I haven’t tried again for probably 8 years