Kerr Avon wrote on 2025-11-03, 16:43:

But you will need to find the N64 rom of the U (NTSC) version of Duke Nukem: Zero Hour yourself

No, no you won't.

You'll have to dump it from your own cartridge. AFAICT, even if you own it, and download an 100% data-identical copy from somewhere other than the cart, you're breaking the law. (Not that anyone not watching you downloading could tell, but still.)

elszgensa wrote on 2025-11-04, 06:28:

Kerr Avon wrote on 2025-11-03, 16:43:

But you will need to find the N64 rom of the U (NTSC) version of Duke Nukem: Zero Hour yourself

No, no you won't.

You'll have to dump it from your own cartridge. AFAICT, even if you own it, and download an 100% data-identical copy from somewhere other than the cart, you're breaking the law. (Not that anyone not watching you downloading could tell, but still.)

Oh yes, the law concerning game roms does change from country to country, and no doubt finding and downloading a certain rom is illegal in some countries. I am in the UK, and I don't know what specifically the law is regarding downloading roms for personal use of games that you do legally already own (and if the law actually worked anymore in the UK then I'd imagine that it's practitioner's would prefer to try to stop the rising crime/murderer/knife crime rate than bother about game roms, but yes it's still a valid point, of course). I honestly believe that it's morally acceptable to download a rom file of a game you already legally own (as in you bought an original game disc/cartridge/cassette/etc), though the law might well differ here.

Actually, I've just realised, my own believe might not 100% apply in this particular case. My Nintendo 64 is PAL (I am in England), so my Duke Nukem: Zero Hour cartridge is also PAL. Erm, but this PC port of the game will only work with the NTSC version of the game, so I downloaded the NTSC rom of the game, which must surely be different in some way, code-wise, from the PAL version (if they were identical, then there wouldn't be two version (PAL and NTSC), just one game rom for both regions). So it's a little more complicated than I thought!

Still, Duke Nukem: Zero Hour on the PC! That is still brilliant.

Unless one falls into my lap, I have officially run out of reasons to justify acquiring a secondhand N64. Most of my interested titles not ported to PC made it to Xbox, and while there are a handful of exclusives remaining they are not all that worthwhile (I find The World is Not Enough more fitting and balanced on PlayStation; Turok Rage Wars is not worth what fixed carts go for these days nor is the one exclusive mission in Worms Armageddon). Duke Nukem 64 was source-ported years ago, making Zero Hour the last holdout.

But I will keep thinking on it as I am wont to do. The LucasArts games by Factor 5 were made for N64 with something of that special touch lost in their transition to (or, for Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, gained from) PC. At the end of the day N64 was first in a continuing line of Nintendo systems bolstered by their exclusive games rather than technical strengths, but on the other hand what keeps original consoles going is that N64 remains one of the tougher systems to emulate right (which I believe is what spurred the whole N64 Recompiled effort in the first place).

BaronSFel001 wrote on 2025-11-05, 16:20:

Unless one falls into my lap, I have officially run out of reasons to justify acquiring a secondhand N64. Most of my interested titles not ported to PC made it to Xbox, and while there are a handful of exclusives remaining they are not all that worthwhile (I find The World is Not Enough more fitting and balanced on PlayStation; Turok Rage Wars is not worth what fixed carts go for these days nor is the one exclusive mission in Worms Armageddon). Duke Nukem 64 was source-ported years ago, making Zero Hour the last holdout.

But I will keep thinking on it as I am wont to do. The LucasArts games by Factor 5 were made for N64 with something of that special touch lost in their transition to (or, for Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, gained from) PC. At the end of the day N64 was first in a continuing line of Nintendo systems bolstered by their exclusive games rather than technical strengths, but on the other hand what keeps original consoles going is that N64 remains one of the tougher systems to emulate right (which I believe is what spurred the whole N64 Recompiled effort in the first place).

An original Nintendo 64 nowadays isn't always 'ready to go', depending on your television. If you have a CRT TV, then the N64's video output will look as good as it always did, of course (which is till only 320 x 200 on 1996 technology, with some games going up to 640 x480, so 'good' is relative), otherwise you will need either a modern TV with very good support for these resolutions and frame-rates (and if such a TV does exist, then I've never seen one), or you need either a video upscaler device, or the N64 needs to be hard-modded to support HDMI output. And, for technical reasons, to get the best video quality, you have to have a HDMI mod that connects directly to the N64's motherboard, because an upscaler or HDMI mod/etc that plugs into the N64's video output socket doesn't give nearly as good quality as a direct to the motherboard connection. As a result, top quality HDMI from an N64 requires an expensive and hard to find (and hard to solder, to a non-expert) mod that many N64 fans (myself included) never managed to track down. I used a RetroTINK-2X Pro, which was great but of course limited because it plugs into the N64's video out socket, but when Analogue announced the pre-orders for their N64 clone console, the Analogue 3D, earlier this year, I pre-ordered one so I could finally have an N64 with top quality HDMI output (there had been an earlier N64 clone console by a different company, I can't remember the name, but I never bothered with it because by all accounts the quality of the HDMI output was mediocre at best, but Analogue have made some fantastic products, so...). And the Analogue 4K is going to support various features that a real N64 can't, such as snapshot save and loading, inbuilt Gameshark cheats, etc).

On the minus side, Analogue have several times now delayed the console's release. Still, as long as it turns out to be as good as we're hoping, and it outlasts me (statistically I have another two decades or so on this mortal coil) then I'm not bothered about the release delays.

It's also the case that older consoles are 'losing' some of their popular exclusives, and not only because these old games get re-released as digital downloads on newer consoles, but also because these can sometimes get fan-ported or fan remade. And often the newer versions can be superior to the old, either technically (higher screen resolution, higher frame-rate, more definable controls, etc) and/or feature-wise (such as support enhanced graphical texture packs, or supporting loadable fan-modded levels, weapon packs, etc). The PC port of Perfect Dark is a great example of that (except that it doesn't have a fan-updated graphics pack, at least not yet):

PC port of Perfect Dark: https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/perfect_dark

PC port with a ton of added levels: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EnDmK-RnYEOh … KuWsMOuQ3A/view

And yes, N64 emulation has traditionally been less than great. There were various plug-ins available for the emulators to improve the quality of emulation of various games, but it was finicky, and always less than ideal. Recently, with emulators like Ares, it is much better, but still not 100% (or at least not when I last read up on it). The N64 was a complex machine, and not fully (or at least not fully well) documented, and it did at times seem like emulator authors were happy to just get their emulators running the N64's more popular games. Plus Nintendo encouraged the authors of N64 games to use a pre-existing library of software routines to address the hardware (because apparently Nintendo originally intended the N64's future successor console to be fully compatible with N64 games), and in this case especially, they weren't too forthcoming in releasing details of how to access and use the N64's hardware directly. Some companies like Rare and Factor 5 put the hard work and experimentation into it, and their games were amongst the technically most impressive games on the system, and also amongst the hardest to then emulare.