Support NeoGAF

[Harlock]

Cool video about the tricks used to reach fast N64 emulation with PCs from 1999.

 

[Spukc]

great YT channel

 

[Jack Videogames]

Fuuuck, UltraHLE. They made me think 100% speed emulation was what I should expect at all times. I never understood why those emus that came after were slower, until today.

 

[Birdo]

This blew my mind in '99. I remember playing Mario 64 on my old Packard Bell CRT and never wanting to go back to the real hardware.

 

[Rodolink]

Yo got it suggested by YouTube isn't it?

I watched the other day too, nice vid. Made me remember how shitty the internet speed was at the time, downloading music from ares at 1mb per hour xD

 

[Harlock]

Fuuuck, UltraHLE. They made me think 100% speed emulation was what I should expect at all times. I never understood why those emus that came after were slower, until today.

By what I understand, UltraHLE did a custom optimization for each game, using Windows commands to not have to emulate part of N64, making it faster. But with limited game compatibility.

 

[The Elite]

Isn't N64 emulation still not that great though?

 

[SantaC]

I still remember the day I booted up Zelda OoT on my PC, and my father said: oh so this game came out for PC now?

 

[Dural]

There needs to be a video on the two programmers, crazy to think that two people that were so influential are unknown.

 

[H4ze]

Love that stuff, will watch later, thanks OP.

 

[stranno]

There needs to be a video on the two programmers, crazy to think that two people that were so influential are unknown.

They just dissapeared after UltraHLE 1.0. There were a lot of controversy because they promised a new version over an entire year and never released it.

Fuuuck, UltraHLE. They made me think 100% speed emulation was what I should expect at all times. I never understood why those emus that came after were slower, until today.

UltraHLE is basically the emulator with less emulation of all time, thats why it is so fast. Nintendo 64 was the perfect machine for High Level Emulation since most code is written in C, eliminating the need for a perfect CPU emulation. And, on top of that, UltraHLE skips tons of things, thats why only 31 games were playable, when there were 250+ dumps at the time. Meanwhile, a modern emulator can emulate the entire library of Nintendo 64.

That would be impossible in early machines since they are rely heavily on assembler code.

By what I understand, UltraHLE did a custom optimization for each game, using Windows commands to not have to emulate part of N64, making it faster. But with limited game compatibility.

In UltraHLE, devs converted the Reality Signal Processor display/sound lists to C code, studying and debugging them. Thats why the compatibility was so low, its not a matter of per-game tweaking, lots of games shared the same lists.

 

[SLoWMoTIoN]

Isn't N64 emulation still not that great though?

lol eshop joke goes here

 

[nkarafo]

Isn't N64 emulation still not that great though?

It's not "user friendly". Meaning there isn't a single emulator that will play anything without any configuration by the user. But if you use a combination of the recent Mupen64plus_next core and ParaLLEl+Angrylion you pretty much cover 100% of N64 games with very few bugs. You will need a very fast CPU for angrylion though.