Why Does N64 Emulation Suck

Published on 20 Jul 2026

We’re gonna put Nintendo Switch Online aside for this one, because I’ve went on record about that specifically more than enough times. I want to instead talk about unofficial N64 emulation.

Terrible Drivers

This is one reason that I believe affects the majority of people trying N64 emulation.

Graphical issues and slowdowns are still being huge for some. I’ve also done some tech support for 64DD emulation, which has some extra complicated problems to deal with because of some accuracy requirements for some games, but mainly, I retain that a lot of people I talked to have, quite frankly, terrible laptops, and that I cannot solve their problems at all.

However, I refuse to think that really bad PCs can’t run N64 emulation well enough, when worse stuff like Raspberry Pis could. But turns out the major issue is actually dumber: When you buy a cheap PC laptop these days, the default drivers don’t support OpenGL or Vulkan very well. This literally singles out the majority of the graphics plugins to a single, extremely outdated choice.

It was most likely fine 20 years ago when the standards were kind of clear cut, but as N64 emulation advanced, so did PCs, but also, so did cost-cutting measures. It’s a thing that became actually worse over time. We should blame how companies are just being shit about it… there are drivers that could solve this, except when I looked into it, one of the requirements was to disable driver signature checks, and I simply refuse to let people disable security features for better emulation.

So the only thing left is for people to finally look into DirectX… which barely anyone did.

And in my opinion, this needs to be solved as soon as possible.

Graphic Plugins

And that’s kind of the problem: Graphic plugins suck. But not because of the plugin system, it does make things more complex for the users but nothing that’s unsolvable.

Jabo’s Direct3D plugin is still the only DirectX based plugin. Then there’s Glide64 and GLideN64 (yes both are very different plugins). GLideN64 is such a low bar for good N64 graphics emulation… because it does work if it works, but if you have bad OpenGL support as explained above, you’re fucked. You have to set back to outdated plugins.

The only future for lower end systems that I know of is RT64, which is currently being used in N64 recompiled ports to great reception. And it’s doing a lot of stuff that hasn’t been done before on N64 emulation. But it’s not ready for emulation use yet, and it’s managed by very few people around.

Not Enough People

And the biggest problem: Not many people are working on N64 emulation.

Although there has been a bit of an advance about that lately, but for the most part, not many do, and progress is slow as a result. I also think there’s a lack of experts on certain fields that would greatly improve N64 emulation as a whole.

There has been a bit of a N64 renaissance through decompilations and recompilations… but those don’t actually help N64 emulation as much as you think. I even dare say it’s a unnecessarily complex way to solve problems since it’s a per game thing, and it is given a lot of attention because N64 emulation sucks for most people.

So this is kind of a call to action: If you are interested to make N64 emulation better, please actually try. If you have an expertise in current graphics APIs and reverse engineering, do it. This needs it. I don’t believe this is sane to recompile every N64 game.

I do not believe that emulation is an outdated way of things, and I believe it’s still the most future proof thing we’ve made. I don’t dislike decompilations and recompilations, I love them and I am trying to do one, but I think it’s a different job, and not a final solution. (Don’t get me started on the AI based shit going on. You do this shit out of love for the games, not because you want it.) And if you’re interested in doing some funny graphics emulation stuff for lower end PCs: please look into Mario Artist. Especially Polygon Studio. They do some funny things.

Good N64 Emulation Exists

But I want to put some light on Nintendo 64 emulation: good N64 emulation exists if you have the hardware to run it.

You can use Ares, which is the most accurate N64 emulator so far, and if you need something a bit more performant, you can use angrylion-rdp-plus or parallel-rdp graphics plugin on Project64 and mupen64plus, which basically offers the same quality of graphics emulation as Ares. Some of the UI have been improved to some extent, like both of them can have a good input setup UI on Project64 3.0 and mupen64plus through RMG.

You can basically find the best choices on 64dd.org, I also include Project64 with the best plugins included, RMG also does the same thing.

And at absolute worst… as painful as it sounds, you can use the official Nintendo 64 emulator on Switch 1/2. It still works for the most part.