If you’ve been around the PlayStation Vita hacking scene, then you’d know that one of the most requested pieces of homebrew is a functional Nintendo 64 emulator. While creating this was considered difficult due to various reasons including the implementation of GPU acceleration, it was never considered to be fully impossible and now, things seem to be moving pretty quickly in the direction of this becoming a reality!
Rinnegatamante demonstrates quick progress in emulating the Nintendo 64 on Vita
Mario wasn’t looking too hot at mid-day but by the evening, he was being rendered pretty well! (GMT+2 times – images from linked tweets)
News surrounding recent developments about Nintendo 64 emulation on the PlayStation Vita started dropping on Friday when Rinnegatamante tweeted out that he’d been able to boot Super Mario 64 on the Vita thanks to initial DaedalusX64 porting work by scene veteran Xerpi. This tweet showed a pretty horrendous Mario face being rendered but less than 5 hours later, a good deal of progress was done on the video rendering side which resulted in Mario’s face being displayed properly and Zelda OOT’s intro looking somewhat well.
Moving forward around 24 hours, Rinnegatamante went on to state that Super Mario 64’s main menu was able to run at full-speed, without any glitches and with perfect audio thanks to implementing synchronous audio code that’s much more efficient than that found in the PSP version. Later on, it was also revealed that MasterFeizz managed to get DaedalusX64 running on the New 3DS with some pretty promising results in Super Mario 64 and was able to find PSP-only code that was glitching the vitaGL renderer thus greatly improving graphics rendering.
Can I play N64 games right now? What’s next?
As things currently stand, the PlayStation Vita port of DaedalusX64 (the emulator which made limited N64 emulation on the PSP possible) isn’t able to provide a playable experience in commercial games that have been tested which include:
- Super Mario 64
![PSVita News: Rinnegatamante making huge leaps in emulating the Nintendo 64 on the console with assistance from xerpi & masterfeizz - Games will become playable once dynarec is implemented!]()
Despite promising news, most commercial games will require a dynarec before they’re actually playable unless you enjoy slideshows
- Mario Kart 64
- Zelda Ocarina Of Time
- Super Smash Bros 64
- This title is running the best out of these 4 as it’s doing around 30FPS with audio enabled
- A video demonstrating DaedalusX64’s current state on the PSVita is linked below
However, things may change on this front if a dynarec (dynamic recompiler) gets implemented since the emulator is currently running in Interpreted mode so that means you can’t play Nintendo 64 games on your PSVita right now but there’s a good deal of hope that it’ll indeed become possible some day.
On other fronts, Rinnegatamante has stated that support for multiple controllers is planned for the PlayStation Vita and TheFlow has stated on the VitaNuova Discord that it’s now possible to use the PSP’s MIPS processor found inside the PSVita in native homebrew which may prompt some interesting developments further down the line.
Conclusion
While this news about N64 emulation on the Vita is undoubtedly exciting, it’s important to state that asking for ETAs is totally futile and will only risk your Twitter account being banned by the person you’re bugging. As a result, you should simply be patient for any new developments and if you want to be on the bleeding edge, you may join the VitaNuova Discord channel!
Rinnegatamante’s Twitter (further updates): https://twitter.com/Rinnegatamante/
Rinnegatamante’s Patreon (donations): https://www.patreon.com/Rinnegatamante
VitaNuova Discord Channel Invite: https://discord.gg/PyCaBx9
The post PSVita News: Rinnegatamante making huge leaps in emulating the Nintendo 64 on the console with assistance from xerpi & masterfeizz – Games will become playable once dynarec is implemented! appeared first on Wololo.net.