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VIDEO: Why is Nintendo 64 emulation still a broken mess in 2025? (www.youtube.com)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Not only that. Emulators must often ”cheat” to achieve high speeds. This means emulators doesn’t try to achieve a 1:1 replication of what’s happening inside the hardware, but something that’s gives close enough results and better tailored for modern hardware.

The reason why N64 is particularly difficult is because each game must be optimized individually (due to the heavy reliance on microcode). The emulator must replicate the hardware at a much lower level for an accurate emulation of all games. Emulator developers can apply optimizations on each individual game, but it’s incredibly time consuming to do so for every game in the N64 library.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

And that's the reason MVG is telling other devs: stop using those cheats, if the sceen is going progress they have start using low level standards.