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?
Kaze Emanuar recently found an extra megabyte of RAM thanks to every byte secretly being nine bits.
The N64 is just fucking weird.
And yet: games were emulated very cleanly back in the 1990s. From Corn to UltraHLE, people realized that Nintendo’s compiler recommendations were boring, and most games used the same GPU code. So you could run Mario 64 on a Pentium II by firing up a MIPS implementation (like the PSX emulators everyone already had) and spotting the “draw triangle here” calls.