What does it mean to add 64DD to Nintendo Classics?

Published on 05 Oct 2025

The topic of Satellaview and 64DD came back a bunch of times after the announcement of Virtual Boy - Nintendo Classics, and I wish to have this kind of positivity. I intend to talk about Virtual Boy Nintendo Classics around when it’s out as I definitely will take a look and provide some kind of review and the options about it in February.

I will talk about 64DD first because Satellaview is honestly a whole other can of worms to talk about, 64DD is pretty simple in comparison. If you wanna know about 64DD, honestly a look at Wikipedia will do just fine, so I will just assume that you know from there.

Edits

Preface

Just in case for people who don’t know: I have worked on preservation and emulation of 64DD. While my initial work of 64DD emulation was initially based on Happy-yppaH’s work of it in MAME, my familiarity with the hardware still went to a point where my implementation of 64DD emulation in Project64, mupen64plus and Ares diverged a lot to the point of being unrecognizable to the first original 64DD emulation implementation. Ares is by far the best and most accurate implementation of it I’ve done, using newer tests I’ve made for the occasion and more. I have also done the translation and technical work behind the translation of the Mario Artist suite.

So I feel at least particularly well placed to talk about what it means on a technical level to do it.

64DD emulation basics

Just to keep it to the basics: 64DD is just a high capacity magnetic floppy disk drive with a clock that keeps the date and time for the Nintendo 64 system, with an arbitrary requirement to use the Expansion Pak to justify the additional RAM. Any thought that it makes the Nintendo 64 system more powerful is completely false, it’s just an alternative storage to the cartridges.

But it has one major trick up its sleeve: while the load times are slower than a cartridge’s ROM (but still faster than a CD), it makes up for it by having a large amount of storage for cheaper, and one that contains a large rewritable save area, up to 38 MB of save data compared to the measly maximum 128 KB that cartridges could provide (something that I don’t see a lot of people talk about when they just sum up 64DD as having 64MB games). On top of that, the 64DD itself contains a ROM in it that contains the boot screen to launch 64DD titles, which itself contains a set of sounds and fonts that the games can use as much as the developers want. You can also use both a cartridge, AND the 64DD at the same time, like with F-Zero X with the F-Zero X EXPANSION KIT disk addon for the original cartridge.

I won’t go into details on the history of it, but on a technical level, the work that needs to be done to emulate the 64DD is the following:

These are the main hurdles, but now let’s talk about what it means for the official Nintendo 64 emulator on Switch to do it.

History of official 64DD emulation

As a reminder, the N64 emulator for Switch is based on the Wii U Virtual Console one, unlike the other Nintendo emulators on the service, it’s developed by iQue, and I’ve already said enough about why I don’t like it before, and if you don’t know what I think about it, I can say it in simple words: It sucks. The stick emulation, the input lag, the forced HD emulation, the aliasing, the lack of modifications of games to avoid problems when the games run better than intended, and especially the terrible decisions that went into the graphics emulation, I have a lot to go through, but I’ve said enough.

To go back to the topic at hand, when it comes to emulating 64DD, some of the things I mentioned to do it should be already done because… the emulator is supposed to already manage 64DD to some extent. In a bizarre surprise, since 2014 on Wii U Virtual Console, the N64 emulator had some of the basics of 64DD emulation already implemented. In fact, you can even have the 64DD boot screen running on it! And it’s not an accident, getting the retail 64DD boot ROM to run is an important step, because it is not like a standard N64 game ROM, it runs with its own rules!

But as much as getting that part to work, while it does emulate some of the clock functions, most importantly, the disk drive itself is not emulated. iQue had some kind of configuration file for running Sim City 64 which was accidentally included in many of the N64 VC releases, but the 64DD emulation is clearly not anywhere far enough to make it fully functional.

The emulator has code to actually manage every case of 64DD setups at its basics, but since the disk drive is not emulated, it’s just not functional, but it at least gives the idea that Nintendo or iQue had serious intentions of emulating it at one point. But then the Switch came, and this 64DD emulation code was actually left inside untouched from 2014 inside Super Mario 3D All-Star’s Super Mario 64 and Nintendo 64 - Nintendo Switch Online, but with one twist to it: They added code to recognize the fanmade hacks of those 64DD games to function as cartridge ROM. I’ve actually mentioned that in one of my posts before, and I have shown the evidence there. I won’t bore you with the evidence (it’s technical), but fact of the matter is, ever since I spoke about it on Twitter back then, almost all of the 64DD code was stripped out of the emulator in January 2022, and hasn’t been seen again since, believe me, I check every single update just in case.

…so what does that mean? Did Nintendo abandon 64DD emulation because of me?
Honestly, I doubt it. This code is most likely still present in the emulator’s source code, just removed to be seen at compile time for the public. It’s just that they probably don’t want to see me look at it if they ever make changes to it.

How to emulate 64DD officially

Emulating 64DD is no real joke, but I expect iQue’s N64 emulator to still manage it to some extent, but I seriously wonder if the developers looked at the 64DD master disk image file format and did not understand it. And honestly, when you look at it out of context, that format is a pure mess. It is hard to explain in simpler terms, but 64DD disks have different kinds of formatting, and it’s like the formatting has different rules all the time, and especially, it’s not what the 64DD disk drive hardware understands. Even I have a ton of trouble properly documenting it in a way that can be understood by other programmers, it’s how confusing it is!

I did actually figure out how to deal with the official master 64DD disk file format eventually, but I don’t know if the iQue developers did. But honestly, they might not have to figure it out, they could also just hack each 64DD game to dodge the problem entirely, they have an entire framework for that, since the N64 emulator supports scripting, and they should have the source code of the 64DD software driver to help them out immensely, if fans can dodge around the problems, so could they!

It’s hard to believe for a bunch of people, but I actually believe that iQue is good at reverse engineering N64 games, since they have to deal with third party games, they have to also look at these games without their source code, so, surely, they can hack 64DD games as well. If I was responsible for it, I do have some ideas of my own, like also skipping the 64DD boot screen by instantly loading the disk’s code in memory, and also provide a menu (or automatically) for swapping disks at the places where the game asks to swap it, particularly for Mario Artist and Doshin The Giant, and block save states and rewind when it happens.

When online is involved though, expect some wait time before launching a 64DD game. On doing online for home console games, what happens is that the save of the host is shared with other players so everyone can start with the same save, but since we’re talking about a save of 38 MB at most, while it is not a particularly sized file, if the internet connections are slow, particularly on the upload speed of the host, you have to expect some kind of wait time for it to be sent to every player. That’s your warning.

There were also some talks about if the 64DD games would be on their own application, honestly, maybe that could happen, but I don’t feel like it’s worth doing it that way, the 64DD is just an addon to the Nintendo 64, it does not require a major rework of the emulator that wouldn’t also help emulation of regular N64 games anyway. I think those games should just be part of the regular Nintendo 64 app.

How to emulate 64DD games

So I spoke about emulating the 64DD, but honestly, the games are also problems of their own!

After all, all 64DD has:

Out of all of them, only 5 or 6 might be doable without rights issues, it’s a lot less games than Virtual Boy even got, but that is not necessarily a reason to not do them. I believe the Nintendo Museum made Nintendo think about these things more, and in all fairness to them: 64DD actually got some attention there, it appears more than once, it’s not ignored!

But there are other more technical problems: Mario Artist actually makes wild uses of the Nintendo 64’s GPU in such non standard ways that it could cause problems to the emulator if they didn’t care about accuracy and framebuffer emulation, but I think the main problem out of them is Polygon Studio. This one is highly non standard and its 3D modeler and painter could be hard to emulate if the graphics emulation cannot deal with things in bulk properly.

There’s also how Paint Studio can do multiplayer, and honestly I would actually preconize a hack on how to handle the switch between a controller and the N64 Mouse. Oh yeah, just so you people know: Most N64 games only looks what is plugged to the controller ports at boot, and assumes it never changes from there. Some games actually bother to look more after that, but most of the time, they don’t. While for the rest of the Mario Artist titles, you could just have a controller and a mouse plugged seperately, Paint Studio is the one that has 4 player drawing, so I would actually want that to be supported the best. It should be easy to do, but I haven’t checked super hard about it in long term uses of such a hack.

Sim City 64 can be particularly laggy, but not impossible, but Japan Pro Golf Tour 64 can have serious emulation problems when it comes to the calculation of aiming as I’ve seen before, and the Doshin The Giant “extension” (which I won’t fully name because it’s long) contains FMVs, which can be harder to deal with on 64DD. F-Zero X Expansion Kit shouldn’t be much of a problem in comparison.

Randnet is the internet service provider of the 64DD (you had to pay a subscription and you got the 64DD, games and internet service), which honestly is not worth reproducing. An outdated internet browser would be a major security risk with an emulator that allows recompilation in real time, and Mario Artist Communication Kit, which is a disk title that contains access to a Mario Artist sharing service, would be honestly useless in this day and age, if not for the sample creations it comes with, which I do think is worth keeping around, possibly we could include all of them already usable as a swappable disk, with maybe even some creations from the Randnet users from back then maybe, but I don’t think they got the rights for that, or if they still have those lying around anyway.

When it comes to translating those games: Translating Mario Artist is in my opinion not very complicated, I’ve done it myself, and on emulators like that, if the goal is just to care about the translation to work, then there’s a lot that’s possible that we can just “hack” around just to have full control over the text and graphics in a satisfying way, possibly multi language even. Translating F-Zero X Expansion Kit in english seems also largely possible in major part to at least redo the menu graphics by just taking them from the US version of the game (oh yeah, the original N64 game actually includes assets for that), though there are still a lot of text for the track editor. Doing it for games like Sim City 64 and Doshin The Giant 1 though would require more work.

But unfortunately, the official english translation to Sin & Punishment is just the original japanese ROM with a texture pack, and they didn’t even remove the japanese subtitles, so I don’t think that they would bother that much beyond the bare minimum. But I still think Mario Artist and F-Zero X Expansion Kit are worth the translation work.

Would Nintendo care?

You tell me. As much as some F-Zero X Expansion Kit music got added to Nintendo Music (but the track editor and machine editor music are missing for some reason, and even the unused song from the Nintendo Sound Selection disc), that 64DD did get actual attention at the Nintendo Museum in a way that doesn’t seem particularly disrespectful (there’s even a mural about creative games, and both Mario Paint and Mario Artist are there), the state of the Nintendo 64 emulator does not really go well with me.

While it did have real improvements since launch, there’s still problems and I honestly would want them to redo the graphics emulation entirely to be modernized, there’s no reason to be stuck in the old ways of N64 emulation of 10+ years ago.

And while all 64DD games are Japan only, and that some of them are still very much playable without a translation, I can still see people being bothered if games like Mario Artist are not translated to English to some extent, considering the amount of power of the creative tools that they offer. F-Zero X Expansion Kit while being the easiest to support for gamers as is, its reliance on the original F-Zero X could also maybe be a problem if it relies on the save of the original. Would they also try to support the US version of F-Zero X for it? I have no real certainty about that, but it’s not necessarily small work.

There is also the argument where failures are considered not worth doing any work for, which I don’t necessarily agree with. Super Famicom and Game Boy Nintendo Power exclusives can still be rereleased (and has been) because they’re still acting just like regular SFC and GB ROMs, there’s no additional work required to make them work, and Nintendo doesn’t miss an opportunity to mention the japanese Nintendo Power service in details of the games.
Virtual Boy was considered a failure by all metrics including by Nintendo themselves, yet here’s them actually making an emulator of their own, and on top of that, a full on Virtual Boy accessory reproduction.
I seriously think the Nintendo Museum made Nintendo rethink about their history, it seems rather indeniable at this point, but the 64DD still requires that it should work on their subpar N64 emulator, and I have no idea if Nintendo thinks it’s really worth doing it because of this technical debt, and if it’s worth fixing that problem to them.

It’s really hard to say, but personally, I’m not super positive about it happening, and if it happens, it probably won’t be for a while yet.