First post, by Kerr Avon
My favourite console is the N64, rven after all these years, mainly because of Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, which to me are still the two best first person shooters ever made (I'm loving Halo 4 at the moment, and I thought that Dishonoured was mostly very good, except too easy, too short, and the ending seems to be very abrupt, but even after twelve years nothing even comes close to Perfect Dark, if you ask me).
Anyway, periodically I try N64 emulation so that I can use the game hacks such as Goldeneye X (http://www.moddb.com/mods/goldeneye-x), other Goldeneye and Perfect Dark hacks (http://www.shootersforever.com/forums_message … oards/index.php) and the Super Mario 64 hacks (http://www.romhacking.net/?page=hacks&genre=& … =&hacksearch=Go), and I'm always frustrated by how flaky N64 emulation is, so I finally gave in and bought an Everdrive 64 (http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthre … rive-64-English) and it's utterly fantastic; it not only allows me to play all PAL N64 games on my PAL N64 by loading the game ROM files from an SD Card (I've got an 8GB card, which fits all of the games on), but it also allows me to play NTSC and JAP games on the N64, plus ROM hacks (it doesn't know, or care, if a file is a commercial game, a modifed commercial game, or an amateur-written homebrew progam). The problem is, I still can't play the Super Mario 64 hacks, annoying.
The (few) other game hacks I've tried all work great (Goldeneye X is brilliant!), but it turns out that the Super Mario 64 hacks won't work on any real N64 at all, as their code crashes real N64s, but doesn't crash N64 emulators, and the hacks were made using a program that was only tested on emulators. Meaning that unless someone updates the SM64 editor program and recompiles all of the SM64 hacks, then the only way to play them is on an emulator.
But no matter what I try, I can't get an N64 emulator to run to my satisfaction. Even when I get seemingly perfect emulation of an N64 game (or at least the best emulation I can get by juggling the plugins), I still see glitches or (worse) the odd slowdown or speed-glitching. But why is N64 emulation still so far from perfect? I mean, fourteen years ago UltraHLE amazed us all by emulating Super Mario 64, Goldeneye, and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. On the PCs of the day (i.e. around a Pentium 1 233MHz for most people). But now, nearly a decade and a half later, with PCs much more powerful, we still haven't got near-perfect, or at leats very good, N64 emulation.
I emulate a variety of 8 and 16 bit machines, and they are all more or less perfect. Granted an N64 is more complicated than a SNES or Atari ST, you'd think (well, I did) that by now N64 emulators would be as good and as automatic (as in not needing configuring of the sound and graphics for each seperate game by the user) as SNES or ST emulators were five years ten years ago.
So how do other people here feel about N64 emulation? Do you think it's OK, good enough, disappointing, or whatever? And do you, like me, still use a real N64 (and so forgo the advantages of emulation, such as snapshot save and loading at any time, higher resolutions, on-line play, etc) because you feel emulation is still too inferior to the real thing to be enjoyed.