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?
FPGA mimics hardware 1:1 without overhead, which is why it works well. This is talking about software emulation, which has to use lots of shortcuts to make it fast enough (for most machines). The N64 has a weird architecture though that makes it difficult to find shortcuts that work well.
People tend to overstate FPGAs. They are designed as software in a funny programming language and then “burned in” to hardware. They can and do have inaccuracies and bugs.
In the long run, real hardware is going to disappear through the attrition of time, so we do need this stuff for the sake of preservation. But people tend to put it on a pedestal without really understanding it.
Even hypervisors can have software bugs - running GBA games on the ARM9 core in the DSi is possible and even closer to “actual hardware” than a FPGA, but there are still weird side cases and glitches that only happen on this setup rather than actual GBA hardware.
FPGAs aren’t some magical hardware clone that bypasses software issues.
That depends on the accuracy of the core on the FPGA.
Your comparison of GBA on dsi is kinda like saying “my dos games didn’t work well on my windows 2000 computer” same cpu sure, but OS and hardware ‘locations’ aren’t necessarily the same.
Or in other words, FPGAs aren’t miracle hardware clones and depend on the quality of their programming. Exactly as I said, got it.
Which is why I mentioned it’s an hypervisor, not running as if it were natively supported. It’s more analogous to original hardware than a FPGA, though. Your analogy to DOS and Windows 2000 however shows you really do not understand how GBA2Runner or FPGAs work in general.
Your comment is got any point or it’s just these two incoherent sentences?
Wow you’re unnecessarily aggressive and oppositional. Who hurt you today?
FPGAs can absolutely be used to provide cycle accurate hardware replacements. The fact that they guarantee realtime execution of instructions also makes it easier to achieve cycle-accurate execution than can be achieved with emulation.
I’m not claiming FPGAs are a magic bullet, but when it comes to offering a retro gaming experience they offer a number of advantages for accuracy that is incredibly difficult to achieve with emulation, and with input latency far closer to the original experience than an emulator can offer.
Edit: Oh, and since you crapped on my parable, educate yourself with a Google search for “ntvdm”
And the sky is bright blue. Who said otherwise?
Good thing my comment never claimed software emulation is easier then. Do if you are trying to “correct” somebody, I can do the same: FPGAs are still emulation.
Then your comment isn’t relevant, because the only thing my comment ever said is to be careful with the marketing and comments claiming FPGAs are instantly accurate and perfect hardware clones.
Thanks ChatGPT
FPGAs are emulation. Also, given an arbitrarily powerful CPU, there’s always a way to perfectly recreate the same result in software. It just obviously isn’t practical for complex systems.
I did some FPGA programming in school, so I totally get it. The hardware is really amazing, but the janky proprietary development toolchains not so much. Plus, Verilog is kind of a pain in the ass.