Category:N64

Fifth-generation console, and Nintendo's first serious foray into 3D graphics.

Emulation is a very long way from the cycle accurate emulators that exist for SNES and NES. The vast majority of its games can be emulated decently, and with better quality and performance than actual N64 hardware can, but several games require trade-offs between quality, performance, accuracy, and convenience, and with so many uncurated emulators, versions of emulators, plugins and plugin versions, and confusing settings, the experience of making these trade-offs can be overwhelming, and isn't helped by widespread outdated information on Internet message boards.

At this point, I can only recommend RetroArch as an emulator, with the Mupen64Plus core. Project 64 is more compatible, but as of late has been plagued with nagware. Both use a combination of HLE and LLE, which allows much higher image quality than the N64 originally allowed. Where the N64 rendered at 320x240, with a sloppy texture filtering algorithm that blurred already low-resolution textures, emulation allows rendering at arbitrary resolutions, with conventional filtering that generally improves the look. By setting the aspect ratio to "16:9 adjusted," you can force aspect ratio correction for widescreen displays, and many games behave quite well with this enabled, with peripheral geometry appearing even on games that were only designed for 4:3 screens. Running Nintendo 64 games at 4K resolution and modern texture filtering isn't an authentic look, but is crisper, cleaner, and more detailed than the authentic look could ever hope to be. This can, however, introduce some artifacts in certain games and certain scenes. Bilinear filtering may be set to a 3-point mode, which reduces these artifacts at the expense of making the textures blurrier again. It can be made to further look more authentic by lowering the internal resolution, which may be desirable for games with heavy usage of 2D elements.

Some games, especially those by Rare, use frame buffer effects. Retroarch with Mupen64 can emulate these, but this is a CPU-expensive option. Project64's default plugin, as of version 2.3, does not fully emulate them, so these effects may be glitchy or missing. The GlideN64 plugin can enable more complete frame buffer emulation, at a significant cost to processing power. There are even some plugins that aim for pixel accuracy, which provide the most authentic look of all, but due to their nature they will always look just as blurry and low-resolution as the N64 did, and presently these plugins are too slow to be practical for playing games.

More detail on the state of Nintendo 64 emulation may be read at EmuGen Wiki.

Official Nintendo emulation of N64 games exists through Virtual Console, but lags far behind the unofficial options both in terms of accuracy and quality, and is unlikely to improve. None of Rare's titles except Donkey Kong 64 are available for it. Many of Rare's N64 titles are available for XBLA and XBox One's Rare Replay Collection, which is missing Diddy Kong Racing, GoldenEye 007, Donkey Kong 64, and Mickey's Speedway USA, but is otherwise complete.