Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports to add proper ray tracing, ultrawide, high FPS, and more

Demonstration of Zelda: Majora's Mask running in Ultrawide through current Emulation techniques vs through native PC Recompilation.
Demonstration of Zelda: Majora's Mask running in Ultrawide through current Emulation techniques vs through native PC Recompilation. (Image credit: Nerrel on YouTube)

Despite its 1996 release, the Nintendo 64's original hardware and games have both remained relatively hot-button in enthusiast circles here into 2024. Now, the next frontier of high-end N64 gameplay may be through recompiled PC ports instead of emulation, courtesy of Mr-Wiseguy on GitHub. Wiseguy is responsible for the release of both N64Recomp and Zelda64Recomp, a project that ports The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask to PC with N64Recomp's graphical and QoL improvements, as screenshotted above and highlighted by YouTuber Nerrel below.

So, what makes crazy graphical improvements like real ray-tracing, uncapped FPS, and proper ultrawide support possible for N64 games? If you've been in the Nintendo 64 enthusiast scene for a long time, you may recall the waves made when a completely decompiled Super Mario 64 PC Port dropped in 2020 and allowed for features like real ray-tracing, full model replacements, and so on. It still gets mods to this day.

Recompiled ports aren't quite the same as decompiled ports like the SM64 PC port in this context, but both will run natively on PC and thus be able to truly maximize performance and effect accuracy to the original hardware while still providing the PC-expected enhancements that come with emulation.  N64Recomp is basically the best of both worlds, and since manually decompiling N64 games takes years of labor from one or more people, a tool to more efficiently recompile them into a quickly playable-on-PC state is a godsend for preservationists everywhere.

A tool like this also ensures that old classics that aren't currently receiving the attention of big mainstream hits remain playable well into the future in an ideal state. A Twitter post by Dario, who makes the RT64 plugin leveraged by N64Recomp and some N64 emulators, highlights this.

Even as we speak, advancements like this aren't the only huge boons we're seeing for fans of the Nintendo 64's library or even original hardware. The open-source SummerCart64 recently dropped and is basically the definitive flash cart for the old console since it also implements full 64DD support. Several real hardware-compatible homebrew N64 games and ROM hacks also keep releasing, including highlights like the 30-fighter Smash Remix and Mario 64 engine rewrite, Peach's Fury.

Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

  • ezst036
    I support this.

    Just to stick it to Nintendo. Right in their eyeball.
    Reply
  • LabRat 891
    NGL, 2160p 120+hz Ray Traced GoldenEye sounds interesting.

    ...and yes. Nintendo will hate this. Which, means I love it.


    Reply
  • Giroro
    So this method of emulation seems to do upfront what I assumed every other emulator was already doing in real time.
    Maybe that's because I exclusively code in Assembly and C?

    So now I'm just scratching my head wondering what the other emulators are actually doing, and why.
    I was also confused when I found out people spending 2 years to manually decompile an N64 game. It's just find and replace to decompile machine code into Assembly. You could write a script to do that in half a day... So what are these people actually doing?
    Reply
  • TheyCallMeContra
    Giroro said:
    So this method of emulation seems to do upfront what I assumed every other emulator was already doing in real time.
    Maybe that's because I exclusively code in Assembly and C?

    So now I'm just scratching my head wondering what the other emulators are actually doing, and why.
    I was also confused when I found out people spending 2 years to manually decompile an N64 game. It's just find and replace to decompile machine code into Assembly. You could write a script to do that in half a day... So what are these people actually doing?

    Emulators have to emulate the hardware before the software even becomes a considering factor. Emulators haven't been out here recompiling game code in real time, no.
    Reply
  • SirStephenH
    Nintendo lawsuit in 3, 2, 1... 😞
    Reply
  • KitsuneKas
    TheyCallMeContra said:
    Emulators have to emulate the hardware before the software even becomes a considering factor. Emulators haven't been out here recompiling game code in real time, no.
    Actually JIT recompiling is exactly what a lot of emulators do, because it's much, much faster than hardware emulation.

    The difference between what this project is doing and what emulators do is that all the recompiling is done up front before runtime so there's no overhead when running, meaning the hardware demands are significantly lower.
    Reply
  • nimbulan
    Giroro said:
    So this method of emulation seems to do upfront what I assumed every other emulator was already doing in real time.
    Maybe that's because I exclusively code in Assembly and C?

    So now I'm just scratching my head wondering what the other emulators are actually doing, and why.
    I was also confused when I found out people spending 2 years to manually decompile an N64 game. It's just find and replace to decompile machine code into Assembly. You could write a script to do that in half a day... So what are these people actually doing?
    The whole point of decompiling is to be able to port the game over to different hardware/software. In order to do that, they need to make the code readable so that it can be modified, which requires exhaustive painstaking editing. That's why it takes so long.

    This new tool is basically automating that process with a universal frontend that handles real-time graphics API translation, vs the manual ports which generally mod modern graphics APIs into the game.
    Reply
  • oofdragon
    It sucks to live in capitalism. Imagine a world without proprietary consoles and etc, you just have a universal console hardware called PC and every game designed to run on it is open source from the start.
    Reply
  • Thunder64
    oofdragon said:
    It sucks to live in capitalism. Imagine a world without proprietary consoles and etc, you just have a universal console hardware called PC and every game designed to run on it is open source from the start.

    Without capitalism you wouldn't be able to say how awful it is on the internet.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    LabRat 891 said:
    ...and yes. Nintendo will hate this. Which, means I love it.
    Nintendo will love this to easily add n64 games to the switch, heck this opens up the way to a n64mini.
    But they will also hunt this down, probably, if there is a legal opening for them to do so.
    oofdragon said:
    It sucks to live in capitalism. Imagine a world without proprietary consoles and etc, you just have a universal console hardware called PC and every game designed to run on it is open source from the start.
    Yeah have a look at itch.io , that would be the average level of quality you would get from that sort of games.
    Reply