1:16 It appears that you have Gamecube and Wii VC footage reversed in all of your screen captures. Gamecube footage is easily identified by the red and green button colors at the top right of the screen.
I'm not sure how widespread it was, but the community took the GameCube's N64 emulator and successfully got other games running in it as well. Trying it out with Mario Kart 64 was a pretty fun experience! In regards to NSO: Between the fog issues in Ocarina of Time, input lag, and most shockingly (to me) the Controller Pak issues I'm absolutely shocked it made it out of QA in the state we have it now. Others here have mentioned Stephen leaving, and that's incredibly concerning if a single person leaving the company can result in this much of a downgrade this quickly.
First off thanks for sharing this on twitter - I'm the person who made the original info dumped thread MVG linked lol. We sort of sat on the knowledge who Stephen was for a long time and seeing NSO sort of pissed me off and just late night info dumped... I didn't expect this to blow up. :) Although people within the OoT modding / speedrunning community have directly spoken to Stephen, we've never really sought to pry into how involved he was, how many people he managed, etc... As a dev, if my manager were to quit tomorrow my team would be extremely lost without him due to that level of experience not being present and essentially, double, or triple the work on things he would have normally done to be spent on these tasks... I don't know how relied upon Stephen was, no one does, but the approach they took (tailored emulation) over the encompassing solution they have now seems to have been his team's decision. The team that make the N64 emulator now is not NST (and I believe Luigi blood has said it is also not NERD, but IQUE who made the n64 emu while NERD made the GC emu in 3DAS) may not have that level of expertise with the hardware he and the rest of NST did. Tailored emulation is also far more expensive than the encompassing route... it was probably cost effective management decisions that made the change... IMO, what should have been done, is convert the WiiVC library (21 titles is a lot to throw away, especially when you drip feed releases... IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN WITH NSO LOL, and what they have right now is even running poorly)... Clean it up to be more portable and easily able to be modified with further injections if they wanted to do so... but, well, I've never seen the source of it and none of us have... so who knows what was the right call at the end.
When you have access to your own source code, documentation, and possibly devs who worked on the hardware, and you're legally able to access and utilize those resources, and you still can't outdo some hobbyists who have to try and reverse engineer these consoles, that is extremely pathetic.
I think it is also an issue of time and money. Enthusiasts have years to work on and tweak an emulator. If it doesn't work right, it's okay, it'll get there eventually. Stuff like this have far less room for error in consumers eyes and less time to make it work right. Still a bad on Nintendo, though.
@@RippahRooJizah They still can use open source emulators legally, it's just corporate ego, they can't admit that the third party solutions are better.
@@ChristopherGray00 I can't see it as merely corporate ego, moreso likely just trying to avoid having too many unofficial collaborators and legal issues. Yes, I know you said they can use open sourced emulators. I cannot see a way that it wouldn't lead to at least some sort of legal issue.
@@RippahRooJizah Firstly, " just trying to avoid having too many unofficial collaborators " isn't really a good reason, we know for a fact that both mupen64 and paralle are very stable emulators and have been for years, there would be no extra work needed, these are fully functioning emulators out of the box. Secondly, the with the GPLv2 license, (which most emu's use) a company can use the software for their commercial purposes as much as they want, the only catch is they have to redistribute any modifications they may make. MIT is an even more liberal license, allowing a company to both use the code and keep their modifications private. There would be no legal issues with that, the licenses are made to allow individuals and companies to use the code.
@@ChristopherGray00 Nintendo is generally more insular, which is why I think they want to avoid having too many unofficial collaborators. Also a bit of the "we didn't make it" mindset, recently seen with how certain japanese fighting games either refuse to use rollback netcode or use an iffy version of it. And, no, I still feel there will still be legal issue. I'm not saying I think you are wrong. I'm saying I don't trust Nintendo to not bring up legal matters. There's also the fact that if those are emulators on the Switch (I never looked into Switch hacking, specifically), then all the more reason Nintendo wouldn't use them since they have taken an active stance against console modding.
Advice: you can use the "slo-motion" feature on a smart phone to track input lag. Bonus: connected to a CRT you can actually count the frames of lag by advancing frame by frame in your video and checking were the scanline is :)
@@DigitalicaEG It's not. It's on all VC games on Wii U and it IS intentional the DS emulator for it has a configuration called brightness and it's set to 80 in all games. Hackers STILL haven't figured out how to remove the filter from GBA games.
Meanwhile I've been playing Metroid Dread @ 4K 60FPS. F*ck Nintendo. I had a modded Switch with 0 pirated software and they banned my console. I never even played online. So I sold that and have been emulating the games I wanted to play ever since. They lost revenue from me over their BS. Best part about not releasing the "Switch Pro" is BOTW2 will likely be perfectly playable via PC with higher framerates and resolutions within the first week of release.
@@charlesevenstad wow, thanks to you people we have Nintendo locking down their consoles and spending time and $$$ on DRM. Yeah BOTW2 might run on your emulator perfectly but will they even make a BOTW3 if people can just steal it? Answer: Nope!
@@androskris they spend $0 on DRM. It's all console exclusive. Their problem is creating weak consoles (the WiiU being the first capable of FHD) that are easy to exploit and even easier to emulate sure to their hardware being so low spec in relation to the hardware requirements to emulate it. They rely on art style while creating bottom-of-the-barrell tech. It's corner cutting in my opinion and they never learn. Their anti- consumer attitude is what fucked them here. I tried playing by their rules. All I wanted was to not have to carry my hand carts everywhere I went (truck driver), so I installed CFW and installed them in my SD card. Nintendo did this. They can kiss my ass!
Not so - the programming community knows more about the N64 than Nintendo do. Do you know how many engineers were involved in the N64? over two decades ago? You think they all still work at Nintendo and have spent every day studying the N64? no. Nintendo might have the design files for the chips - but it would take years of work to infer something from those designs by looking at them - that can't be inferred by just prodding at an N64 with probes - which people have already done.
Need only look at the difficult to emulate PS2 running almost 99% playable on the extremely hard to program for PS3 on the SoftCompat models. Or having a perfect PS1 emulator on PSP day 0. Or Microsoft supporting hundreds of Xbox games on 360, 360 games on Xbone, bridging x86 to PPC and back again, upscaling to 1080p and 4K, increasing framerates, and adding HDR.
@@JohnnyWednesday Nintendo has all the patents, internal dev hardware/software, hardware specs, technical breakdowns, trade secrets, rom call disassembly, etc. They're incompetent.
@@GiuseppeGaetanoSabatelli - Oh I agree with you - but the point is? that there are only a dozen or so people working on these switch emulators - right? and even though the N64 is old? becoming familiar enough with the design of the chips? still takes years and years - even when those chips were designed? nobody understood the entire chip fully - not on their own - it was a whole team that knew different parts. So just because Nintendo have the patents, the chip designs, the source code? it doesn't mean that the people assigned to work on it - can suddenly become masters of the N64. It would take YEARS of study to know the N64 as well as the original designers - and those original designers? have long since forgotten the details.
I remember how exciting it was to hear Iwata say that the Wii was backwards compatible with every Nintendo console "and more" back during its reveal. The very concept of playing old games on a new console was utterly magical to me, and the way Nintendo handled it back then was just, well, good. Yeah, emulation quality wasn't absolutely phenomenal, but this was a console meant for CRT TV's, this stuff was more forgivable back then.
Its just funny to me that the N64 was only around 10 years old in 2006. Now the wii u is almost 10 years old, it's just crazy to think about that since the N64 felt retro after only 10 years.
Yeah, exactly. Like in 2005 you had to have all your old consoles out before the Wii, and the Xbox 360 and PS3 worked best on HDTVs But the Wii? So many old games rereleased, you could play GameCube and you didn't need a special tv
They managed that by partnering with IBM to put custom PowerPC chips in all of their consoles, The GameCube has a custom single-core IBM "Gekko" CPU clocked at 485 MHz, the Wii has a custom single-core IBM PowerPC "Broadway" CPU clocked at 729 MHz, and the Wii U has a custom triple-core IBM PowerPC "Espresso" CPU clocked at 1.243 GHz. P.S. Clock speed isn't everything. The Xbox 360's CPU is a custom triple-core IBM PowerPC "Xenon" CPU clocked at 3.2 GHz and yet the WiiU CPU is around 50% more powerful than the Xbox 360's CPU in benchmarks and real-world testing.
@@tf_d do you have source that proves that wii u cpu is 50% stronger then xbox 360? I'm pretty sure the reason why nearly every single multi platform game that was ported to wii u, ran worse then x360 was because of wii u's weak cpu. I think Metro light devs said that when they tried to port their game to wii u
Easier to speed run on (save-states), ease to save at any point in time for convenience sake, Higher resolution/graphical options, faster load times, free mods, ect...the list goes on. Superior experience all around.
It's a novelty alright but for me that's as far as it goes - a novelty. My problem with playing games via emulators, especially when I have a sizeable library, is the thought process of playing a rom, and after 5 mins thinking "okay what else can I play?", and doing the same thing with the next game. The choice of games gets in the way. That's why I just default to as official as possible.
@@GB.Gaming Same with me kinda, along with fun mods I support ethical emulation for the sake of preservation. Too many games now cannot be played due to legacy technology and said technology dying from old age.
What I can’t believe is that Nintendo, despite having the documentation of their own hardware, isn’t able to make a decent emulator. The emulation community gets better Results using reverse enginery.
It's because they don't really care. Nintendo wants to push their new releases and probably re-releases their back catalog begrudgingly due to demand, so they phone it in. They obviously didn't always have this attitude though since the original Wii's virtual console was so well done, and is still one of the best ways to play N64 games.
I think the amount of people passionate and capable of building accurate emulators are quite small. Almost no game company develops their own anymore but instead heavily borrows from what is available or even has people working on the internal emulator that worked on a public one. Maybe Microsoft is one exception but they are a software giant with that capacity and knowledge to do so.
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Nintendo 64 emulation is dififcult by the way they desing the CPU memory bus and the RCP programming via an awful microcode
@ of course Nintendo has the documentation, the source code to both the chip and the libraries/"OS" that ran on it, the tools, and most importantly, their own previous emulators for it. Even if they had somehow lost it, it has been leaked online, and there's no way Nintendo didn't have people download the leaks (if only to know the contents), although they would never admit to this. My guess is that the problems are partially because this is their first ARM-based N64 emulator, so they probably at least rewrote large portions of the emulator or wrote from scratch)
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@@undefinednan7096 Let's settle this: ArtX were founded by the same team who designed the N64's RCP, the GX GPU was a derivative of the RCP, so the GX GPU has the RCP inside, that´s why GC and Wii can do run N64 games flawlessly, is not software emulation it's using OG N64 graphics hardware... in some degree. WiiU GPU doesn't use the GX GPU in WiiU mode and the Switch doesn't have the chip, tht's the reason of your observartions, Nintendo never has been good in N64 emulation it was just the same N64 hardware in GC and Wii. Also Nintendo doesn't have the documentation of the RCP, that belongs to Silicon Graphics, ,thats one of the reasons they broke up. Thete is not OS in N64 just microcodes, high leven tools but only SGI had the knowlegde of their chip innards.
I already canceled my Switch expansion pack service because if the poor emulation. Just waiting on my refund now. It was kind of a pain to get them to even offer me a refund. But luckily one of the Nintendo reps I talked to on the phone said even he was disappointed with what Nintendo did with the online and that’s why he worked with me so well.
I have a similar story. First agent read the script-line "this is a nonrefundable service" and I just politely said "Can we streamline this to the next level of agent or manager please?" She very happily said "absolutely." Agent 2 was clearly a huge Nintendo fan who had yet to get the service, and when I told her my problems with it, she was clearly bummed about it. After sharing some fun stories about Nintendo, she offered me my refund. Sadly, it's just eShop credit, but still - better than nothing, and I'm glad to have sent the message "You need to try harder, Nintendo" even if it goes mostly unheard. Took like an hour - their phone lines were BUSY.
Internally developed emulation should always be good. They literally have access to the internal hardware, rom calls, APIs, etc. Microsoft offering top tier emulation of x86 Xbox on PPC Xbox 360, and back again to the Xbone, enhancing with 4K, and then to the Series X/S with Auto HDR, etc. Sony offering perfect PS1 emulation on the PSP almost day 1. Offering extremely powerful PS2 emulation on the SoftCompat PS3 even given how hard PS2 emulation was AND how hard PS3 development was. But they have all the documentation, all the patents, all the specifications. Nintendo not being able to emulate N64 perfectly is actually a joke.
Well I mean there is no way they can emulate the n64 perfectly with the hardware power they have, I’m guessing some parts of the system would have to be emulated using HLE. High quality emulation on the other hand, absolutely
Makes me wonder if Microsoft is second guessing putting Banjo Kazooie on NSO after seeing the response. lol I've played Conker and Banjo on Rare Replay and they were top notch.
Official emulation is almost universally terrible, the best results have always come from other means. Both original Xbox on 360 and PS2 on PS3 emulation had pretty poor compatibility. 360 games running on Xbone don't run under an emulator but use a mixture of static recompilation, partial emulation and original hardware. The PSP CPU was able to run PS1 games natively, so only the GPU was being emulated. It's very easy to overstate the advantages internal emulator developers have, but for something like the N64 there is probably already more useful information on the internet gleaned from reverse engineering than you'd get from the official schematics and manuals.
Microsoft have a long history of game API design and compatibility from PC that both gave them the institutional knowledge of how to design forward compatible APIs for earlier consoles and backwards compatible engineering for newer ones. Not to mention, they have an in-house virtual machine, Hyper-V, that they could probably get a lot of expertise from for the cross-architecture issues. Sony has TVs and Spider-Man.
I've been telling folks to have those save states ready when the time comes. Majora's Mask is one of those games that literally can't afford to deal with emulation hiccups or else you'll lose all the progress you've made since starting Day 1.
They also released Zelda: Collector's Edition for GameCube which had Ocarina of Time on it, and went through the trouble of adding Majora's Mask, which was tough to emulate, onto it along with the first two Zelda games. Granted, Majora did not perform all that amazingly because of how technically difficult it was to emulate due to the Expansion Pak. But it says as much when you start playing the game. But it was still really good for what it was, and they even had a custom PAL 60Hz version of Majora in Europe if I recall, and a Japanese version that combined the new features of the US/Europe versions with the unique qualities of the Japanese version (JP version has 3 files, no owl saves, US/EU has 2 files with owl saves--and so does the Japanese GC Majora version, for example). They spared no effort in trying to make it as playable as possible, but the game does crash from time to time. If you disable the Rumble Feature, it happens far less often, though. Suffice it to say, they did not spare any effort back in the GC and Wii days to ensure the games were playable and ran as well as they could muster given the hardware.
I did have fun with Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask playing around with Action Replay on GC back then. It was much fun to have a really fast running or giant Link... 😂
As someone who owns a copy of that game I'm happy Nintendo has completely bungled this. If they keep screwing up I'll be able to retire when I finally decide to sell it.
Emulating the expansion pak is actually pretty easy. The expansion pak is just more RAM. They literally just have to double a number in the source code and the expansion pak is emulated.
Feels like every console they start from scratch all over again....if they carried over the virtual console from wii would have a amazing collection of stuff by now....but nope start from scratch and drip feeding
It's incredibly frustrating considering Xbox has continually expanded backwards compatibility console after console while Nintendo wipes the slate clean everytime so it's not like it's impossible.
The emulator for N64 games on the Wii was made to take advantage of the Wii hardware architecture. You can't just port that emulator over to the Switch, it wouldn't work. The emulators Nintendo uses now are hardware agnostic.
@@soulripper31 How did they essentially port the VC from Wii to WiiU then, was the hardware just that similar? (I mean, it literally had a Wii Mode so I'm assuming yes?)
This isn't new. They've been sending their -fans- customers legal nastygrams for about a decade. Sometimes for stuff that they actually could make a court case against, and sometimes for things they know they can't but that the recipient either doesn't know about or is too scared or financially unable to fight.
Technically, Nintendo owns 40% of Gamefreak. They don't (they own that percentage of the Pokémon IP), but when was the last time you saw Gamefreak popcorn something that wasn't a Pokémon game?
I wish they did something like they did with the 3DS version of OoT. Full port, with a little remastering. 3DS version is my favorite way to play OoT right now.
@@snakeface5652 If Nintendo did that, we’d know by now. Grezzo on the other hand would have to hand over all of that. Plus the expectations of what I assume will be bigger and better graphics?
Majora's Mask was also available on the GameCube in the Legend of Zelda Collector's Edition promo disc. The compilation included Ocarina of Time, the two NES Zelda games and a demo of Wind Waker.
Its important to remember as well though that the Legend of Zelda Collector's Edition promo disc is not the same as the Ocarina of Time + Master Quest disc.
I have the collector's edition disc, it was how I was able to grow up on those N64 games despite being a few years too young at the time to play them on original hardware
It could be understandable that they used a "generic" emulator for N64 if they made a lot of games available from the start. It there were 100+ games in that service I could see using an approach for easy switching between titles in overarching navigation VS individual emulation per game. But they started the service with less than 10 (16 if they include the rest they showed) games!!! That's basically the worst of both worlds...
I was thinking the same thing. Using a generic emulator must mean they can just put the whole library on there immediately, right? They probably release them slowly to test and make sure nothing is completely broken, but also so people will continue to pay (since they want to wait for something to come out)
@@aquid3622 393 licensed games according to Wikipedia. So probably a few more ~400. That's quite decent actually for a console without digital/download games!
@@adrenaliner91 It was name as Genesis in every country in the continent but Brazil (where it was called Megadrive) , indeed. Oh, yeah, and the short term is MD, now that I think of lol.
@@johnjohnson6142 Nah, they'll always be able to hold enough audience. They'll have to diversify some more into the entertainment industry but Nintendo's theme park shows they plan to go head to head with Disney.
@@johnjohnson6142 nintendo has enough money to survive 10 wii us in a row, even more now with the switch being as successful as it is, i find it really hard to believe they're gonna crash and burn next generation. They'll just keep doing what they do and people will keep buying it because they make great games, simple as that. Basically the inverse of the competition which is why said competition can afford to put their games on pc, they either know the hardware will sell itself even with no games (sony) or they see their console as part of a bigger ecosystem and it not outselling others is not an issue (microsoft)
I've learned that as these companies grow older, they are hiring executives that have shrouded their entire lives in business. These executives of recent times have no idea how gamers feel and what we want. They only care about profits and making the company "grow" financially. Its sad and atrocious. We could be getting great remasters of older games. We could be getting GREAT new games. But all we've been getting is sub-par performance in every corner.
It's not a new thing. Nintendo has always had little or no regard for both its employees and customers. There are books about it, such as I've that was given away free with "Edge" magazine about 20 years or so ago.
@@primalconvoy I think Nintendo has a little bit of a worse thing to fear. The Japanese Business mindset. It tops American Capitalistic Businessman in damn near every way because they stick so hard to "You will enjoy our product, as we intended it. No more, No less." Nintendo has a long way to go before they end up ACTUALLY being competitive to Microsoft and Sony.
@@primalconvoy At least Sony and Microsoft are willing to bend to the consumer in SOME degree. Nintendo is just screwed. Hence why the last Nintendo console I have bought is the Wii.
@@3v068 100 million Switches sold says otherwise, regardless of how we feel about Nintendo. In fact, none of the big 3 are even really competing in a traditional sense anymore. Sony is probably the only one attempting to compete traditionally - following the same model they've been following since the PS1. But Ninty and Microsoft now have their own unique models that play to their strengths so that they don't need to compete pound-for-pound with PS in order to succeed. Microsoft is integrating Xbox into their Windows business, has GamePass, and are now using their financial muscle to simply buy out third-party studios. Nintendo is stepping up their handheld tech (4 years and we *only now* have a viable competitor in the Steam Deck), has their powerhouse franchises, and I suspect is prepping for a big push into the film industry if the Mario movie succeeds.
@@scaryhobbit211 the point I was literally making is going over your head. We are caring more about sales and numbers, than the actual quality of what we are getting. Which is sub par. Way to miss the point. Here's the answer in a clear and concise point.
The fact that they were lazy enough to release it in this state to begin with, gives me no faith that they are going to fix it later. If they cared, then they would have cared to release a quality emulator on the first version. What they've released now feels like a beta. The worst part is that people seem to be buying it.
@@peterkiss1204 they can't actually get emulators shut down lol, there is legal precedent to the contrary. Which is why they c&d rom sites and fan games instead
Nintendo only cares about emulation when it means people are playing their oldest games without paying them FULL 2021 RETAIL or a SUBSCRIPTION for them.
I find it difficult to believe that a person can make or break a team like that, especially that NERD are really good at emulation in general. The DS emulator on Wii U is kind of a miracle. What this tells me is that they weren’t given enough time for the game-specific optimizations to meet a holiday deadline.
Emulators are among the hardest things you can program and are nearly always (initially) coded by one person. Of course one person can make a huge difference - because most programmers have no experience with emulators. you can't be "good AT emulation" - somebody who had written an N64 emulator is no more qualified to write one for a Playstation than a good programmer that has never written an emulator at all.
Sometimes one particularly talented lead can make all the difference between mediocre and stellar. If that person's contributions are later abandoned, then things regress instead of progress.
If you'd work as a software developer you'd be used to it. I've seen a single dev be more productive than entire teams of devs that were better paid and "better educated" several times.
This was so interesting. I had that original Gamecube version of "Ocarina" when it was first released and I always just assumed it was a fantastic port. Never knew it was emulation.
I used to at least respect Nintendo for their games even if I disliked everything else they did. Now they can't even give their own games the proper respect they deserve. I recently watched a 2019 interview of M2, which is a company that mostly works on porting old games to new platforms, and it's crazy how much more effort they put in. The M2 folks are people who truly care about preserving old games, ensuring everything runs exactly like how it would when it was first released. Then, on top of that, they add a ton of cool new stuff to give the games new life. These are people who want to make these old games fun for people from all generations. Meanwhile, Nintendo can't even be bothered to put in a tiny fraction of the effort M2 does. On top of charging you an absurd price and all of their anti-consumer practices.
You'll eventually buy the 50th remake of a Zelda game from 10+ years ago for the Nintendo Butto, which is a cardboard butt plug which makes use of the HD rumble of the Switch.
M2 actually worked for nintendo to create the Wii U Gba Emulator, which also ended up being by far the best looking emulation on Wii U. Everything looked so good and crisp and you had so much customization.
It's fascinating how I want to agree with people on this being an issue but then I see comments that go basically like "they always do bad thing X" (thing X being bad was really objective) "and bad thing Y all the time" (they did it *once*) "and they do all of it to make their customers angry and because they are lazy and evil and..." (continues to personalize a fcking company). Like, guys, I wish I could agree with you put please, for Christ's sake, develop argumentation skills that don't sound like you are talking to a toddler.
Slight tangent that seems to be missing in the video, there was a second N64 game emulated on Gamecube; Majora's Mask was available on the Zelda Collector's Edition promo disc
Hello MVG, Starfox 64 on the Wii VC had a decent amount of wrong texture colors and missing transparency. it wasnt AS flawless as you thought. these were fixed on the Wii U VC :)
I’m sure dozens of people have mentioned this, but there was a Zelda special edition GameCube SKU that came with a disc including emulated versions of Zelda 1&2, OOT and MM.
It’s The only Time I Ever played Wind Waker even though it was a 20 Minute demo. I’m actually considering buying wind Waker HD For the Wii U Because of that demo. I played it over and over and over again man. In fact I’m gonna go look for Wind Waker HD Right now!
@@Higgs_Stranded it’s worth getting wwhd. I’m considering getting it despite owing two copies on gc (ww is the first game that taught me region locking, got sent an American version by mistake from an online shop).
I'm hoping it gets patched, but I'm not holding my breath. As things stand, I'm not buying the service. I need to see some actual support, like fixing the emulator and providing more content, as the SNES and NES libraries don't exactly show those systems in the best light. Also, I feel like the Genesis was a weird choice. There are tons of ways to play those games already. Why not Saturn (which we've seen working on Switch) or Dreamcast? Those systems and libraries are sort of stranded, and having a legal way to play Panzer Dragoon 2 and Saga without having to pay $500 for a copy would be amazing.
If you look though the room..collection won't get better. Alot of those 3rd party companies are now Microsoft and on Xbox the other half are games not worth bringing out in any language. Konami Capcom rare the collections they put out mean that the original roms will not be released for free. Usually or how it seems to me. I could be wrong but Nintendo hasn't been winning points with me.
@@findantu That's the issue. Retro games are having a resurgence, so nobody wants to license them, they'd rather put them in a collection and cut the middle man as much as they can, which is why every SNES release is weird third-string stuff and not Chrono Trigger or Castlevania 4. Part of what makes this frustrating is that Nintendo has said that the exorbitant price comes from licensing fees, and that has to be coming primarily from the Genesis collection because Nintendo obviously doesn't own *anything* on that platform. An N64 collection can still be pretty strong without much licensing because Nintendo mostly carried that platform on their own, so licensing for it doesn't need to cost a ton. This further begs the question: Why Genesis? I'm not saying it's a bad system, it's great, but those games are SO available, and Saturn and Dreamcast aren't. I'll take Space Channel 5 or Panzer Dragoon Saga or Nights Into Dreams over a ninth way to play the same 30 Genesis games that Sega's been trotting out for over a decade.
@@gargonovich the N64 games that matter can easily be resumed to Nintendo and RARE, as Microsoft now owns RARE, Nintendo itself probably can only release half of the good stuff.
@@gargonovich 1. Sega's a god of poor business decisions. Anyone who's a frequent watcher of Wha Happun? can tell you that. 2. There's a rumor going around that Nintendo may be planning to put GoldenEye 007 on the NSO EP based on that game being made Germany-legal one year ahead of when its banning would automatically end and Nintendo's European eShop having its server in Germany. The James Bond license would likely be a MINT.
“Ocarina of time on the GameCube kinda flew under the radar and wasn’t well known” Yeah no, it was very well known at that time, but then if you are also not aware of Zelda Collector’s Edition on the GameCube which was released just after OOT Master Quest and featured both OOT and Majora’s Mask emulated on the GameCube, you would have known these two GC releases were VERY well known and beloved by many. For some of us who couldn’t afford both an N64 and a GC or never got an N64 as kids, OOT and MM emulated on the GameCube were how we first got to enjoy those classics.
@@adurna3579 I expected better and more thorough coverage here. MVG here completely ignored an important step in the evolution of official N64 emulation by Nintendo.
Thank you for explaining the differences between how each console emulated the games and how the Wii got it so right in comparison to the other ones All I found until then was just "Nintendo bad look screenshot" I don't get why they don't use the same system as the Wii and port it to the Switch ... Maybe it's because of disk space and having 1 emulator per rom makes each game bigger, so having every game added to the catalog predownloaded with it's custom emulator would take a lot of storage if they add a lot like the 50+ NES / SNES games I really hope they're gonna fix it, they seem to listen a bit more to the players now
From what I can tell, it's a matter of profitability. I heard rumours that there were game companies that were interested in putting out more games for the VC service back in the day, who eventually got stonewalled by Nintendo as they said the games weren't making them enough money to be worth putting them up on VC. And if this is the case, I can see why. Costs of licensing various companies games are already a financial drain that Nintendo apparently WEREN'T making back by selling the games as one-time purchases (hence why they switched to a subscription service, guaranteed money there). If you then add to that that all these games have a custom emulator written for them, necessitating a coder to sit and meticulously figure out a way to emulate each and every game, getting paid money doing work on one game at a time so they can really only sell that one game he's working on at a time... like, you see how that quickly becomes a financial sinkhole that's not making them any money. Hence, on paper, a "one size fits all" emulator who just generally copies the way a regular N64 runs, and whom you can just slap any old ROM into and get it to work, seems like a much better proposition since it allows them to put out games way faster! No need to sit around and wait for each and every one game to get its brand own emulator written for it, much less works, much lower costs! Except, well. As can be plainly seen, that "one size fits all"-means that each games quirks and individual needs are overlooked in favor of just getting them up and running, which means problems. Lots of them. One can only hope they'll go back and fix the individual games issues, but one wonders if they'll bother when they made the decisions they made so they WOULDN'T have to get bogged down with individual games quirks and foibles. We shall simply have to see, I guess...
Now it makes sense why the Wii VC games run so well. I still have my Softmodded Wii next to my switch, and I play both to this day. Thanks for making this video, this whole n64 emulation situation makes sense now.
If you do that, can you port iso files from a computer to a Wii? I never had many games on it, and I don't want to have it there just getting dust It has been doing that for years, but you know
My thoughts are that the GB, GBC and GBA were ready to go but didn't warrant a price change so they rushed the unoptimized N64 emulator to warrant the price change. Just my two cents.
@@dandastardly2792 They want those games to be Multiplayer Compatible for NSO, as the previous emulation attempts were restricted to Single Player only.
They have and own the source code to the n64 and they still can't put out a good emulator. You think they would have this figured out after the Wii U VC but nope.
The Wii VC port of Majora’s Mask does crash sometimes though, which is rage inducing. I had a play session where I beat the first dungeon and did plenty of other side content on one 3 day cycle and the game crashed and I had to do everything over again. It was at that point I just quit the game.
@@RealKaiserRyu i know about that, but speedrunners put hundreds if not thousands of hours into grinding the game. To play the game that much and crash only a few to several times means that it can't be that frequent.
@@epicstacker413 I remember specially that people (before the 3DS remake came out) complained that every official version of Majora’s Mask besides the original N64 version had crashing issues. It was discussed on the UA-cam channel Zelda Dungeon, which is a old school Zelda channel that has been around since 07. After the 3DS remake of Ocarina came out, they discussed a possible 3DS remake of Mask and talked about the issue.
@@RealKaiserRyu I’ve also been playing the Wii vc version of majoras mask lately. I haven’t crashed at all could you be talking about the GameCube version which apparently crashes alot
Majora's Mask was also available on the GameCube, there was another promotional disk with Zelda 1, Zelda 2, OoT and MM's for Nintendo of Europe members only. If you owned a GameCube, you could play all Zelda titles ever released until Twilight Princess on that system (excluding Philips CDI's). You could even play a link to the past and the GB zelda's with the rare GBA accesories you could plugin to your GameCube.
This was Zelda: Collector's Edition But it wasn't Europe exclusive - it came out everywhere, just in different ways. In Europe it was originally a bonus disc with Mario Kart: Double Dash limited edition consoles, but was later made available via Club Nintendo for 4,500 stars points. Japan also had it in the catalogue. In the UK you could also get it from Nintendo if you sent them proof of purchase of certain games, and Australia and the US had similar schemes. In the US it was also bundled with the console for a time.
Looks like you swapped the GameCube and Wii VC labels in the side by side comparisons. The GCN version recolors the button graphics from green and blue to red and green but that one's labeled as Wii VC
Let's not forget the controls, too. The Wind Waker button layout (basically what GC OoT used) could easily be adapted to the switch controllers, but instead they went with a weird button combo just to use C-right. I geniunely wonder how much testing went into this. Surely someone would have noticed how awkward it is?
2:02 - I got this version and at the time I was so freaking blown away that the entirety of one of my favorite games of all time was on there... I had emulated SNES for a long while by this point... but for some reason it seemed so cool at the time. I was also one of the people that was not the biggest fan of Wind Waker... It wasn't until I get it on WiiU that I realized I didn't even finish half the game back then.
They aren't really falling off though are they? What ever games they do put out turn out to be some of the best games of the year its just their efforts with NSO that is a bit lackluster
@@ThatNormalBunny That's sorta the problem though, The Switch doesn't feel that special like other Nintendo consoles. You wouldn't really lose much of any of the experience if you played the games on something else.
@@Optim121 Nope, both Sony and Microsoft have already surpassed them since 8th gen started. There's a reason they're still fighting to improve technology while the N stopped giving a shit about it since 2000s.
What happened is they stopped caring and got greedy. Mupen64plus with a rom on a computer / android tv should not be better than what nintento officially put out.
The gamecube version is the one I grew up with and it was almost the perfect version, the only thing I noticed was missing was the lens flare when looking at the sun
Whatever way you look at it, Nintendo has delivered a sub-par product here. I think it mostly boils down to an unwillingness to either embrace the open source efforts that exist, or put in the required resources to build a good emulator themselves. This was definitely not the case in the GameCube / Wii era.
In all the fuss about Nintendo's emulation, I forgot about Rare Replay's N64 emulator! You're right- much better emulation, plus they even went the extra mile with Jet Force Gemini's controls by patching in a modern control scheme. And this isn't just remapping the buttons in the emulator, such that it can be replicated on PC. There's something a little more complex going on there. Oh, and we haven't even been taking into account that a game like Conker's Bad Fur Day is way harder to emulate accurately and smoothly than Ocarina of Time is.
Nintendo also had another emulation promotion on the GameCube (at least here in the UK), you registered codes that came on a cardboard insert, you registered them to your account and when you had enough points they mailed you the disk, it had the both of the NES versions of Zelda, a demo for Link to the Past (which had just launched on GBA) and Ocarina/Majora's mask.
Not N64 emulation, but something I find unfortunate about the Wii U's Virtual Console in general is that it never loads up a game from the start, it always loads up from a save state (aside from the first time you play it, or if you nuke your save data for that game entirely). You can reset a game, but one unforeseen circumstance of this is that some games only feature things on a fresh load (most notably, the how-to-draw animation at the beginning of Kirby's Adventure; resetting Kirby's Adventure goes immediately to the title screen, skipping the animation entirely). Might be a bit of a nitpick, but still, it's a bit of a shame that the WiiU makes it so difficult to let you have the option to just load up a game from the start, as you would do if you were playing the game on a native system. Save states are a nice convenience, but not everyone wants to use them (especially for games that originally had saving, and perhaps even passwords, in the first place).
They have all possible information about N64 as they want, they are the makers, the should be able to create a emulator that work with all their catalog and does it well, like original hardware or better with upscaling. Not being able to do all of that shows two things how little effort usually put in and hoy much effort the community did with PC emulators that are necessary for best preservation of software
I heard that when it comes to the official N64 games emulation it doesn’t emulate the controller stick very well and makes it too sensitive and makes aiming in OOT very hard than it’s supposed to be.
That's because the official N64 emulator doesn't take into account the dead zone of the analog stick on the N64. Modern analog controllers have hundreds of levels of sensitivity. The N64 only has 8.
This is true, and combined with the fact that you’re stuck with airplane controls, it makes aiming the damn bow so difficult. I originally played these games on the N64 when I was a little kid, but damn, the 3DS really spoils you with the fact that you’re not forced into inverted camera controls, the more functional analog stick sensitivity, AND the added motion controls. I was miraculously able to hunt down all ten big poes for the 4th empty bottle on the Switch emulation… but now I’m scared of getting to the horseback archery with the gerudos. Haha.
What went wrong? Well for starters instead of working with/hiring the members of the home brew community who have done great work with emulating Nintendo attacked said community and thus lost the chance to take advantage of the home brew devs experience.
Greed happened. Nintendo knows fans will buy any crap they put out, as long as it has the Nintendo label on it. Why put effort, or care, if people will buy it regardless?
@@ozero00rockon So what you're suggesting if I'm not mistaken, the talent has been diminishing over the years, and Nintendo is too cheap to replace with new qualified talent? That seems to go hand to hand with greed imho, cutting corners with budget to produce lower quality products is still pretty greedy. Consumers expect top notch quality products from Nintendo, they have a reputation maintain.
@@joeschmoe4698 To make a long absolute explanation short, yes. The long absolute explanation, their focuses are on other things and emulation is, I assume, tricky to them. Unless they hire experienced developers, I sincerely doubt they’ll make games like they used to. That is unless, somehow Nintendo bites the snake and goes through with it anyway for bigger and better. I doubt that honestly.
It's morally right to emulate their new games too. I played BOTW at 4K, 60 FPS on PC, without a single issue, the entire game. The only person who lost out was Nintedo, it's a real shame for them, but oh well!
@@TummyTimeTimmy I mean, Nintendo did nothing wrong with Botw, you can easily find a copy, 60€ yeah, the hardware sucks, yeah, but it's not the same as emulating 20 year old games xd
Great video! A nice insight, I really think that the NSO's current state is unacceptable. I noticed you didn't mention the Gamecube promotional Zelda collection, that had Zelda I, Zelda II, Ocarina of Time, and Majora's Mask. Majora's Mask in particular was noted for having quite some problems, speculated to be due to the original needing the Expansion Pack
I'm surprised you didn't mention the other Gamecube game that used the N64 emulator, being the Legend of Zelda collector's edition. It had both Ocarina of Time and Majora's mask on it and both of them ran great.
one of the issues that plague nintendo emulations is that you cant transfer your game from one platform to another. imagine if you purchased your games on steam, and every 5 years you had to buy again in order to keep playing it... i can understand the hardware is different and the emulator have to be rewriten each gen, but i can also understand why people are frustrated.
and now it's even worse because you never get to purchase the games at all. you only get limited access to them. for $50 you could buy 5 Wii VC N64 games and be able to play them forever as long as your console didn't crap out (and even then i'm pretty sure you can back them up to SD cards to make them playable on other WIis without even hacking it). That was only like 10 years after a lot of those games came out, too. Now if you pay $50 and can't afford to pay it again next year, you're SOL and your games are gone.
You can say the same thing for Sony on PS3 PSN Digital service... The fact Sony NEVER transferred any of those digital versions of arcade ports, PS1/PS2 digital ports to PS4 / PS5 store is a big loss. As for PS3 digital games, thats understandable since the games run on different architecture .
I mean, to be fair, thats the reason they don't even have a VC anymore, because they knew they'd eventually not be able to keep selling the same games to us every generation, so they had to either make it possible to transfer all your games over from one system to the next, which would ensure they never sell another VC game ever again, or, they make it so that you can NEVER own a VC game and instead you have to eternally rent a bunch of them. This way, they'll never stop making money off of VC games, and the fanboys will cry out "you should be happy, entitled POS".
This video is overlooking that Majora's Mask on Gamecube tended to crash a lot. Especially combining that with the Save system led to lots of progress loss and frustration.
Not a *lot*, but yeah, I remember losing probably an hour of progress from that once. I'm not even sure that it happened again, but just knowing that it _could_ happen made the game more stressful than it needed to be. The save system was so much more bearable when I replayed the game on Project 64, as I could save as often as I needed to. (Of course, it didn't crash there, but that extra security is nice.)
Yeah, I have the base tier of NSO and quite frankly I only got that for Tetris 99 and a few other games. The cheap nes and snes emulation was simply a nice bonus, not a selling point. Somehow Nintendo went full alzheimers mode and forgot that people wanted a usable online service first and foremost.
“Nintendo cares about emulation, they have for a while now.” I think Nintendo cares about money and they know their fans are suckers for playing old games, me included. If they cared about emulation they wouldn’t crap out this service like this. The whole take away I had from the video was they don’t care. Mario 64 and Sunshine running 30 FPS on the all stars Collection supports this.
@@sceerane8662 it's a shame. Now you don't even own the titles, either. I'm sure there is a petition to bring back the VC but if its lazy then what's the point now.
Modders have done it, right? I don’t understand how it works but I remember digital foundry talking about how it was a shame Vicarious Visions didn’t use “graphical interpolation” on Diablo 2 to run the classic graphics at full speed and that game is designed around 25 frames a second.
@@X2011racer Both have been modded to run at 60fps. Super Mario 64 is complicated, and I think the solution was to use graphical interpolation only (so the graphics render at 60fps, but much of the game is actually running at 30fps in the background). Nothing is broken, as far as I know, though a few elements animate at 30fps. Super Mario Sunshine is less complicated to run at 60fps, as the engine was already built for it, but there are a few issues, like some bosses moving too quickly. Also, I have to admit, there's no way Nintendo could have pulled it off without doing a full port of the game. GameCube emulation on Switch is already a feat, but GameCube at 2x performance is just unattainable.
While this video is mostly correct, based on personal experiences, the Master Quest disc, along with the Zelda Collector's Edition is pretty well known due to Master Quest being a replacement for what was coming to the N64 Disk Drive, or at least, what It was supposed to be as it seems they just ended up cutting even more content they planned for that project. Also, in Collectors Edition, you do have also Majora's running on the same emulator :D Basically, the TLDR is, when Stephen left, they lost their emulation captain, and without a captain, all hell broke loose... and that's what we have today with NSO.
You want to pay $60 a pop for "native" N64 games with few/no improvements over the original games? (Well, it worked for Skyward Sword, so I guess anything is possible).
@@aisback1990 And this has to do with their pricing, quality of the port how? I'm sure Skyward Sword didn't take much effort to port either, and they asked $60.
I'll tell ya what happened. Nintendo knows they have a fanbase of mindless drones who will happily buy any broken half assed shit they throw on the wall. So rather than take the time to make sure the online service is up to par, and put the effort into making the emulation service respectable, they half assed it. Because they know people will just buy it anyways. And that folks, is why we see what we see. Stop empowering, and encouraging this company, speak with your wallet.
So everyone is talking about the N64 emulation, but do you know enough to comment on the quality of the Genesis emulation? I've seen literally zero coverage on it, and since I never played with the Sega Genesis before, I don't actually know if the games are being emulated well or not.
@@Drilbit And you could run N64 games pretty flawlessly on the Wii, but Nintendo still managed to screw that up. Just because it can be done well doesn't mean Nintendo *did* do it well.
@@gondoravalon7540 Nintendo just put N64 and Genesis games on the Switch, but everyone only talks about the flaws in the N64 emulation they're using. I want to know if the Genesis emulation they're using as part of the same service is perfect, bad, or just good enough, but all anyone talks about is the N64 games on the Switch.
While not as apparent, there was another version of Ocarina of Time on Gamecube. A few Gamecube console bundles came with the Zelda Collectors Edition, which came with Zelda 1, Zelda 2, OoT, Majora's Mask, and a demo of Wind Waker. I believe that these versions of OoT and MM used this same emulator.
What happened ? Nintendo has been doing the bare minimum for years, I understand the switch is a success but it feels like they need a shake up of management
It's interesting to me how, before NSO came out with the gamaes, people had been talking for years about how poor the emulation was on the Gamecube versions. And now that NSO N64 stuff is out, suddenly people are looking back and saying, "Oh yeah the Gamecube emulation was fantastic." Just a weird shift.
I always wondered who worked on the GameCube port, for the Ocarina of Time collection. It felt, and played so smooth. Graphics, audio, and visuals. Kept the game intact. How is this missable 20 years later? Hopefully the technical issues are looked into, and resolved soon
@@DeanStuff That's just nonsense, the expansion pak is just more RAM. Literally all they need to do to emulate that is to double a number in the source code. They are probably just going to trickle games out over time like they always have.
1:16 It appears that you have Gamecube and Wii VC footage reversed in all of your screen captures. Gamecube footage is easily identified by the red and green button colors at the top right of the screen.
Yeah, funny thing is he got it right with the single showcases of oot. Very odd.
Mistakes were made...
good catch, thanks
I noticed it too, though I've experienced this game with the Zelda collector's edition rather than OOT+MQ
yeah congrats no one fucking cares lol, rest of the video was correctly oriented
Fun Fact: Playing Wii VC games in the Wii U's Wii mode has less input lag than actual Wii U VC releases, even ones of the same game.
Plus, if you have the WiiU hooked up to a CRT whilst doing this, there's even less input lag.
More power doesnt mean anything if it isnt used
@@oktyabrinagadon4956 do u paly black ops
@@oktyabrinagadon4956 No guys. 0/10
And to think they had the cheek to charge extra money to play those games in a worse fashion on a console that was literally already playing them
I'm not sure how widespread it was, but the community took the GameCube's N64 emulator and successfully got other games running in it as well. Trying it out with Mario Kart 64 was a pretty fun experience!
In regards to NSO: Between the fog issues in Ocarina of Time, input lag, and most shockingly (to me) the Controller Pak issues I'm absolutely shocked it made it out of QA in the state we have it now. Others here have mentioned Stephen leaving, and that's incredibly concerning if a single person leaving the company can result in this much of a downgrade this quickly.
He may have left but maybe he's the person working on the 3DS emulator we've been waiting for for so long?
First off thanks for sharing this on twitter - I'm the person who made the original info dumped thread MVG linked lol. We sort of sat on the knowledge who Stephen was for a long time and seeing NSO sort of pissed me off and just late night info dumped... I didn't expect this to blow up. :)
Although people within the OoT modding / speedrunning community have directly spoken to Stephen, we've never really sought to pry into how involved he was, how many people he managed, etc... As a dev, if my manager were to quit tomorrow my team would be extremely lost without him due to that level of experience not being present and essentially, double, or triple the work on things he would have normally done to be spent on these tasks... I don't know how relied upon Stephen was, no one does, but the approach they took (tailored emulation) over the encompassing solution they have now seems to have been his team's decision. The team that make the N64 emulator now is not NST (and I believe Luigi blood has said it is also not NERD, but IQUE who made the n64 emu while NERD made the GC emu in 3DAS) may not have that level of expertise with the hardware he and the rest of NST did. Tailored emulation is also far more expensive than the encompassing route... it was probably cost effective management decisions that made the change...
IMO, what should have been done, is convert the WiiVC library (21 titles is a lot to throw away, especially when you drip feed releases... IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN WITH NSO LOL, and what they have right now is even running poorly)... Clean it up to be more portable and easily able to be modified with further injections if they wanted to do so... but, well, I've never seen the source of it and none of us have... so who knows what was the right call at the end.
@@Monokai how do we know you are actually that person an you're not just trying to take credit for someone elses work?
@@Monokai very interesting. I appreciate the level of background and insight this provides.
@@rawrwata5289 give me a twitter handle to @ to I guess is the only way... lol
When you have access to your own source code, documentation, and possibly devs who worked on the hardware, and you're legally able to access and utilize those resources, and you still can't outdo some hobbyists who have to try and reverse engineer these consoles, that is extremely pathetic.
I think it is also an issue of time and money.
Enthusiasts have years to work on and tweak an emulator. If it doesn't work right, it's okay, it'll get there eventually.
Stuff like this have far less room for error in consumers eyes and less time to make it work right.
Still a bad on Nintendo, though.
@@RippahRooJizah They still can use open source emulators legally, it's just corporate ego, they can't admit that the third party solutions are better.
@@ChristopherGray00 I can't see it as merely corporate ego, moreso likely just trying to avoid having too many unofficial collaborators and legal issues.
Yes, I know you said they can use open sourced emulators. I cannot see a way that it wouldn't lead to at least some sort of legal issue.
@@RippahRooJizah
Firstly, " just trying to avoid having too many unofficial collaborators " isn't really a good reason, we know for a fact that both mupen64 and paralle are very stable emulators and have been for years, there would be no extra work needed, these are fully functioning emulators out of the box.
Secondly, the with the GPLv2 license, (which most emu's use) a company can use the software for their commercial purposes as much as they want, the only catch is they have to redistribute any modifications they may make.
MIT is an even more liberal license, allowing a company to both use the code and keep their modifications private.
There would be no legal issues with that, the licenses are made to allow individuals and companies to use the code.
@@ChristopherGray00 Nintendo is generally more insular, which is why I think they want to avoid having too many unofficial collaborators. Also a bit of the "we didn't make it" mindset, recently seen with how certain japanese fighting games either refuse to use rollback netcode or use an iffy version of it.
And, no, I still feel there will still be legal issue. I'm not saying I think you are wrong. I'm saying I don't trust Nintendo to not bring up legal matters.
There's also the fact that if those are emulators on the Switch (I never looked into Switch hacking, specifically), then all the more reason Nintendo wouldn't use them since they have taken an active stance against console modding.
Advice: you can use the "slo-motion" feature on a smart phone to track input lag. Bonus: connected to a CRT you can actually count the frames of lag by advancing frame by frame in your video and checking were the scanline is :)
A little correction, the black filter removal doesn't require romhacking. You only need to edit the configuration file for the emulator.
I think he meant you need to hack a Wii U to even make that change
Do you know why did they add the black filter in the first place?
@@DigitalicaEG to prevent seizures
@@joewarrior619 seriously? Why n64 games specifically?
@@DigitalicaEG It's not. It's on all VC games on Wii U and it IS intentional the DS emulator for it has a configuration called brightness and it's set to 80 in all games. Hackers STILL haven't figured out how to remove the filter from GBA games.
It’s upsetting how the company that’s the most anal about stopping emulation offers the worst options for playing their games
Meanwhile I've been playing Metroid Dread @ 4K 60FPS. F*ck Nintendo. I had a modded Switch with 0 pirated software and they banned my console. I never even played online. So I sold that and have been emulating the games I wanted to play ever since. They lost revenue from me over their BS. Best part about not releasing the "Switch Pro" is BOTW2 will likely be perfectly playable via PC with higher framerates and resolutions within the first week of release.
@@charlesevenstad wow, thanks to you people we have Nintendo locking down their consoles and spending time and $$$ on DRM. Yeah BOTW2 might run on your emulator perfectly but will they even make a BOTW3 if people can just steal it? Answer: Nope!
@@androskris Nintendo doesnt really care about people pirating Breath of the Wild. They still getting money from elsewhere
@Rafael Emidio these people will literally die for Nintendo if it means one less pirate is blocked from emulating their games lol
@@androskris they spend $0 on DRM. It's all console exclusive. Their problem is creating weak consoles (the WiiU being the first capable of FHD) that are easy to exploit and even easier to emulate sure to their hardware being so low spec in relation to the hardware requirements to emulate it. They rely on art style while creating bottom-of-the-barrell tech. It's corner cutting in my opinion and they never learn. Their anti- consumer attitude is what fucked them here. I tried playing by their rules. All I wanted was to not have to carry my hand carts everywhere I went (truck driver), so I installed CFW and installed them in my SD card. Nintendo did this. They can kiss my ass!
A company that knows all of the internals of their hardware should be able to make a better emulator
Not so - the programming community knows more about the N64 than Nintendo do. Do you know how many engineers were involved in the N64? over two decades ago?
You think they all still work at Nintendo and have spent every day studying the N64? no.
Nintendo might have the design files for the chips - but it would take years of work to infer something from those designs by looking at them - that can't be inferred by just prodding at an N64 with probes - which people have already done.
Need only look at the difficult to emulate PS2 running almost 99% playable on the extremely hard to program for PS3 on the SoftCompat models. Or having a perfect PS1 emulator on PSP day 0.
Or Microsoft supporting hundreds of Xbox games on 360, 360 games on Xbone, bridging x86 to PPC and back again, upscaling to 1080p and 4K, increasing framerates, and adding HDR.
@@JohnnyWednesday Nintendo has all the patents, internal dev hardware/software, hardware specs, technical breakdowns, trade secrets, rom call disassembly, etc.
They're incompetent.
True but I'm guessing everyone who worked on the hardware and software for 64 is long gone
@@GiuseppeGaetanoSabatelli - Oh I agree with you - but the point is? that there are only a dozen or so people working on these switch emulators - right? and even though the N64 is old? becoming familiar enough with the design of the chips? still takes years and years - even when those chips were designed? nobody understood the entire chip fully - not on their own - it was a whole team that knew different parts.
So just because Nintendo have the patents, the chip designs, the source code? it doesn't mean that the people assigned to work on it - can suddenly become masters of the N64. It would take YEARS of study to know the N64 as well as the original designers - and those original designers? have long since forgotten the details.
I remember how exciting it was to hear Iwata say that the Wii was backwards compatible with every Nintendo console "and more" back during its reveal. The very concept of playing old games on a new console was utterly magical to me, and the way Nintendo handled it back then was just, well, good. Yeah, emulation quality wasn't absolutely phenomenal, but this was a console meant for CRT TV's, this stuff was more forgivable back then.
Its just funny to me that the N64 was only around 10 years old in 2006. Now the wii u is almost 10 years old, it's just crazy to think about that since the N64 felt retro after only 10 years.
Yeah, exactly. Like in 2005 you had to have all your old consoles out before the Wii, and the Xbox 360 and PS3 worked best on HDTVs
But the Wii? So many old games rereleased, you could play GameCube and you didn't need a special tv
They managed that by partnering with IBM to put custom PowerPC chips in all of their consoles, The GameCube has a custom single-core IBM "Gekko" CPU clocked at 485 MHz, the Wii has a custom single-core IBM PowerPC "Broadway" CPU clocked at 729 MHz, and the Wii U has a custom triple-core IBM PowerPC "Espresso" CPU clocked at 1.243 GHz.
P.S. Clock speed isn't everything. The Xbox 360's CPU is a custom triple-core IBM PowerPC "Xenon" CPU clocked at 3.2 GHz and yet the WiiU CPU is around 50% more powerful than the Xbox 360's CPU in benchmarks and real-world testing.
It was actually pretty phenomenal, not sure what you mean
@@tf_d do you have source that proves that wii u cpu is 50% stronger then xbox 360? I'm pretty sure the reason why nearly every single multi platform game that was ported to wii u, ran worse then x360 was because of wii u's weak cpu. I think Metro light devs said that when they tried to port their game to wii u
This is why I still do all my old school gaming on my PC. The communities passion will always surpass any given company.
Easier to speed run on (save-states), ease to save at any point in time for convenience sake, Higher resolution/graphical options, faster load times, free mods, ect...the list goes on. Superior experience all around.
It's a novelty alright but for me that's as far as it goes - a novelty.
My problem with playing games via emulators, especially when I have a sizeable library, is the thought process of playing a rom, and after 5 mins thinking "okay what else can I play?", and doing the same thing with the next game.
The choice of games gets in the way. That's why I just default to as official as possible.
@@GB.Gaming do you not have to decide what game you want to play on official hardware lmao
@@GB.Gaming Same with me kinda, along with fun mods I support ethical emulation for the sake of preservation. Too many games now cannot be played due to legacy technology and said technology dying from old age.
@@thiefrules Clearly you didn't understand what I said
What I can’t believe is that Nintendo, despite having the documentation of their own hardware, isn’t able to make a decent emulator. The emulation community gets better Results using reverse enginery.
It's because they don't really care. Nintendo wants to push their new releases and probably re-releases their back catalog begrudgingly due to demand, so they phone it in. They obviously didn't always have this attitude though since the original Wii's virtual console was so well done, and is still one of the best ways to play N64 games.
I think the amount of people passionate and capable of building accurate emulators are quite small. Almost no game company develops their own anymore but instead heavily borrows from what is available or even has people working on the internal emulator that worked on a public one. Maybe Microsoft is one exception but they are a software giant with that capacity and knowledge to do so.
Nintendo 64 emulation is dififcult by the way they desing the CPU memory bus and the RCP programming via an awful microcode
@ of course Nintendo has the documentation, the source code to both the chip and the libraries/"OS" that ran on it, the tools, and most importantly, their own previous emulators for it. Even if they had somehow lost it, it has been leaked online, and there's no way Nintendo didn't have people download the leaks (if only to know the contents), although they would never admit to this. My guess is that the problems are partially because this is their first ARM-based N64 emulator, so they probably at least rewrote large portions of the emulator or wrote from scratch)
@@undefinednan7096 Let's settle this: ArtX were founded by the same team who designed the N64's RCP, the GX GPU was a derivative of the RCP, so the GX GPU has the RCP inside, that´s why GC and Wii can do run N64 games flawlessly, is not software emulation it's using OG N64 graphics hardware... in some degree. WiiU GPU doesn't use the GX GPU in WiiU mode and the Switch doesn't have the chip, tht's the reason of your observartions, Nintendo never has been good in N64 emulation it was just the same N64 hardware in GC and Wii. Also Nintendo doesn't have the documentation of the RCP, that belongs to Silicon Graphics, ,thats one of the reasons they broke up. Thete is not OS in N64 just microcodes, high leven tools but only SGI had the knowlegde of their chip innards.
I already canceled my Switch expansion pack service because if the poor emulation. Just waiting on my refund now. It was kind of a pain to get them to even offer me a refund. But luckily one of the Nintendo reps I talked to on the phone said even he was disappointed with what Nintendo did with the online and that’s why he worked with me so well.
inb4 he gets fired
F for that Nintendo rep.
You know things are bad when even someone inside Nintendo isn't proud of the Expansion Pack.
I have a similar story. First agent read the script-line "this is a nonrefundable service" and I just politely said "Can we streamline this to the next level of agent or manager please?" She very happily said "absolutely." Agent 2 was clearly a huge Nintendo fan who had yet to get the service, and when I told her my problems with it, she was clearly bummed about it. After sharing some fun stories about Nintendo, she offered me my refund. Sadly, it's just eShop credit, but still - better than nothing, and I'm glad to have sent the message "You need to try harder, Nintendo" even if it goes mostly unheard.
Took like an hour - their phone lines were BUSY.
That rep is the real MVP
Internally developed emulation should always be good. They literally have access to the internal hardware, rom calls, APIs, etc.
Microsoft offering top tier emulation of x86 Xbox on PPC Xbox 360, and back again to the Xbone, enhancing with 4K, and then to the Series X/S with Auto HDR, etc.
Sony offering perfect PS1 emulation on the PSP almost day 1. Offering extremely powerful PS2 emulation on the SoftCompat PS3 even given how hard PS2 emulation was AND how hard PS3 development was.
But they have all the documentation, all the patents, all the specifications. Nintendo not being able to emulate N64 perfectly is actually a joke.
Well I mean there is no way they can emulate the n64 perfectly with the hardware power they have, I’m guessing some parts of the system would have to be emulated using HLE. High quality emulation on the other hand, absolutely
@Code Turtle Because the ps4 and the ps5 are an the same x86 architecture.
Makes me wonder if Microsoft is second guessing putting Banjo Kazooie on NSO after seeing the response. lol I've played Conker and Banjo on Rare Replay and they were top notch.
Official emulation is almost universally terrible, the best results have always come from other means. Both original Xbox on 360 and PS2 on PS3 emulation had pretty poor compatibility. 360 games running on Xbone don't run under an emulator but use a mixture of static recompilation, partial emulation and original hardware. The PSP CPU was able to run PS1 games natively, so only the GPU was being emulated.
It's very easy to overstate the advantages internal emulator developers have, but for something like the N64 there is probably already more useful information on the internet gleaned from reverse engineering than you'd get from the official schematics and manuals.
Microsoft have a long history of game API design and compatibility from PC that both gave them the institutional knowledge of how to design forward compatible APIs for earlier consoles and backwards compatible engineering for newer ones. Not to mention, they have an in-house virtual machine, Hyper-V, that they could probably get a lot of expertise from for the cross-architecture issues.
Sony has TVs and Spider-Man.
Still terrified of the thought of how Majora's Mask will be like on the NSO, if Ocarina of Time is anything to go by.
Keep your expectations low. 😑
"This game requires the N64 RAM expansion to play. Please power down your console and replace the Jumper Pak to continue."
@@jaguar4120 Oh don’t worry I’ll definitely have my expectations low
I've been telling folks to have those save states ready when the time comes. Majora's Mask is one of those games that literally can't afford to deal with emulation hiccups or else you'll lose all the progress you've made since starting Day 1.
Just buy it on the 3ds
They also released Zelda: Collector's Edition for GameCube which had Ocarina of Time on it, and went through the trouble of adding Majora's Mask, which was tough to emulate, onto it along with the first two Zelda games. Granted, Majora did not perform all that amazingly because of how technically difficult it was to emulate due to the Expansion Pak. But it says as much when you start playing the game.
But it was still really good for what it was, and they even had a custom PAL 60Hz version of Majora in Europe if I recall, and a Japanese version that combined the new features of the US/Europe versions with the unique qualities of the Japanese version (JP version has 3 files, no owl saves, US/EU has 2 files with owl saves--and so does the Japanese GC Majora version, for example). They spared no effort in trying to make it as playable as possible, but the game does crash from time to time. If you disable the Rumble Feature, it happens far less often, though.
Suffice it to say, they did not spare any effort back in the GC and Wii days to ensure the games were playable and ran as well as they could muster given the hardware.
I did have fun with Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask playing around with Action Replay on GC back then. It was much fun to have a really fast running or giant Link... 😂
As someone who owns a copy of that game I'm happy Nintendo has completely bungled this.
If they keep screwing up I'll be able to retire when I finally decide to sell it.
I’m lucky to own it too!
That's the version I own.
Emulating the expansion pak is actually pretty easy. The expansion pak is just more RAM. They literally just have to double a number in the source code and the expansion pak is emulated.
Feels like every console they start from scratch all over again....if they carried over the virtual console from wii would have a amazing collection of stuff by now....but nope start from scratch and drip feeding
It's incredibly frustrating considering Xbox has continually expanded backwards compatibility console after console while Nintendo wipes the slate clean everytime so it's not like it's impossible.
The emulator for N64 games on the Wii was made to take advantage of the Wii hardware architecture. You can't just port that emulator over to the Switch, it wouldn't work. The emulators Nintendo uses now are hardware agnostic.
@@soulripper31 How did they essentially port the VC from Wii to WiiU then, was the hardware just that similar? (I mean, it literally had a Wii Mode so I'm assuming yes?)
@@soulripper31 The Wii U had the Wii Hardware on board. They had a buffer to sort it out for porting to other systems more easily.
@@oldoldmeme Wii And Wii U were both based on IBM Power PC, so atleast in that regard, they were quite similar. Switch is based on ARM architecture.
Seems like Nintendo is going the way of GameFreak, getting lazier & greedier with every modern iteration.
Think we are way past "going", they made it clear that they are going to milk everything for $$$
Pretty much every gaming company has been doing this for the past decade.
This isn't new. They've been sending their -fans- customers legal nastygrams for about a decade. Sometimes for stuff that they actually could make a court case against, and sometimes for things they know they can't but that the recipient either doesn't know about or is too scared or financially unable to fight.
Technically, Nintendo owns 40% of Gamefreak. They don't (they own that percentage of the Pokémon IP), but when was the last time you saw Gamefreak popcorn something that wasn't a Pokémon game?
Shouldn't be shocked, corporations are not your friends.
I wish they did something like they did with the 3DS version of OoT. Full port, with a little remastering. 3DS version is my favorite way to play OoT right now.
That’d cost a little more money than just $50 to $80 bucks. Grezzo developed the remasters.
@@ozero00rockon For consumers it is at least a one time purchase rather than an online subscription, if they just fully release the game.
@@snakeface5652 If Nintendo did that, we’d know by now. Grezzo on the other hand would have to hand over all of that. Plus the expectations of what I assume will be bigger and better graphics?
@@ozero00rockon$80 for a full HD Ocarina of Time with gyroscope aiming and Master Quest included is worth it.
@@nicksrandomreviews If Nintendo knew what to do, sure. What development team would handle it though?
Majora's Mask was also available on the GameCube in the Legend of Zelda Collector's Edition promo disc. The compilation included Ocarina of Time, the two NES Zelda games and a demo of Wind Waker.
Its important to remember as well though that the Legend of Zelda Collector's Edition promo disc is not the same as the Ocarina of Time + Master Quest disc.
I have the collector's edition disc, it was how I was able to grow up on those N64 games despite being a few years too young at the time to play them on original hardware
Majora's Mask had a warning about sound glitches
Animal Crossing had NES games
I have both of them and played the collectors edition a lot
It could be understandable that they used a "generic" emulator for N64 if they made a lot of games available from the start.
It there were 100+ games in that service I could see using an approach for easy switching between titles in overarching navigation VS individual emulation per game.
But they started the service with less than 10 (16 if they include the rest they showed) games!!!
That's basically the worst of both worlds...
I was thinking the same thing. Using a generic emulator must mean they can just put the whole library on there immediately, right?
They probably release them slowly to test and make sure nothing is completely broken, but also so people will continue to pay (since they want to wait for something to come out)
@@Beam3178 well no there are still licenses which need to be taken into account but at leadt all their own games could have been released at once.
I mean, there's only about 250 N64 games
@@aquid3622 393 licensed games according to Wikipedia.
So probably a few more ~400. That's quite decent actually for a console without digital/download games!
@@overlordalfredo that's in total, including regional exclusives, and including third party games
I still use my Wii in 2021 to play N64, SNES, NES, and MD games. The emulation is solid and it looks great on a CRT or through an upscaler.
MG games?
@@cashnelson2306 Megadrive (Sega Genesis in the Americas)
MD is the short term I think. MG sounds confusing xD
@@Akirapoet oh and wasn't that only in the USA? The rest of the continent had Mega Drive I think. Brazil sure did or have to this day probably xD
@@adrenaliner91 It was name as Genesis in every country in the continent but Brazil (where it was called Megadrive) , indeed.
Oh, yeah, and the short term is MD, now that I think of lol.
Nintendo got comfortable with their success so they are putting in minimal effort.
always.
they know their fans aint gonna complain and if they do they'll continue, and stop entirely with the next generation.
@@inxine 50/50 they crash and burn next generation, or they play it safe and start getting choked out by the competition
Yeah, probrably. Apparently They will have to go through another Wii U crisis to learn again.
@@johnjohnson6142 Nah, they'll always be able to hold enough audience. They'll have to diversify some more into the entertainment industry but Nintendo's theme park shows they plan to go head to head with Disney.
@@johnjohnson6142 nintendo has enough money to survive 10 wii us in a row, even more now with the switch being as successful as it is, i find it really hard to believe they're gonna crash and burn next generation. They'll just keep doing what they do and people will keep buying it because they make great games, simple as that. Basically the inverse of the competition which is why said competition can afford to put their games on pc, they either know the hardware will sell itself even with no games (sony) or they see their console as part of a bigger ecosystem and it not outselling others is not an issue (microsoft)
I've learned that as these companies grow older, they are hiring executives that have shrouded their entire lives in business. These executives of recent times have no idea how gamers feel and what we want. They only care about profits and making the company "grow" financially. Its sad and atrocious. We could be getting great remasters of older games. We could be getting GREAT new games. But all we've been getting is sub-par performance in every corner.
It's not a new thing. Nintendo has always had little or no regard for both its employees and customers. There are books about it, such as I've that was given away free with "Edge" magazine about 20 years or so ago.
@@primalconvoy I think Nintendo has a little bit of a worse thing to fear. The Japanese Business mindset. It tops American Capitalistic Businessman in damn near every way because they stick so hard to "You will enjoy our product, as we intended it. No more, No less."
Nintendo has a long way to go before they end up ACTUALLY being competitive to Microsoft and Sony.
@@primalconvoy At least Sony and Microsoft are willing to bend to the consumer in SOME degree. Nintendo is just screwed. Hence why the last Nintendo console I have bought is the Wii.
@@3v068 100 million Switches sold says otherwise, regardless of how we feel about Nintendo.
In fact, none of the big 3 are even really competing in a traditional sense anymore.
Sony is probably the only one attempting to compete traditionally - following the same model they've been following since the PS1.
But Ninty and Microsoft now have their own unique models that play to their strengths so that they don't need to compete pound-for-pound with PS in order to succeed.
Microsoft is integrating Xbox into their Windows business, has GamePass, and are now using their financial muscle to simply buy out third-party studios.
Nintendo is stepping up their handheld tech (4 years and we *only now* have a viable competitor in the Steam Deck), has their powerhouse franchises, and I suspect is prepping for a big push into the film industry if the Mario movie succeeds.
@@scaryhobbit211 the point I was literally making is going over your head. We are caring more about sales and numbers, than the actual quality of what we are getting. Which is sub par.
Way to miss the point. Here's the answer in a clear and concise point.
What a pity. I'm just going to look forward to emulating these the way they deserve on the Steam Deck.
Or just any device that can handle them
Or an Xbox lmao
All device can handle these games nowadays, even a shitty old Android phone :)
@@Fermin-hw5pd you mean a hacked switch?
@@gosucab944 Nah? Can you get OoT on the Switch outside Online?
The fact that they were lazy enough to release it in this state to begin with, gives me no faith that they are going to fix it later. If they cared, then they would have cared to release a quality emulator on the first version. What they've released now feels like a beta. The worst part is that people seem to be buying it.
so they ditch working emulator and use their own emulator, yep sound like what Nintendo usually do to me.
They ditched *their own* working emulator and developed a new one
@@chrono0097 more like they ditched 21 individual emulators in favor of 1.
@@hassam363 Can't really blame them when you put it like that
"Nintendo cares for emulation" for only about 50 games in its entire library, and that's pretty much it
They care about emulation pretty much. They just care more about shutting down 3rd party emulators than making their own properly.
@@peterkiss1204 they can't actually get emulators shut down lol, there is legal precedent to the contrary. Which is why they c&d rom sites and fan games instead
Nintendo only cares about emulation when it means people are playing their oldest games without paying them FULL 2021 RETAIL or a SUBSCRIPTION for them.
@@peterkiss1204 no, you're all wrong, they just care about money.
“waaahhhh mistaw nintendo won’t give me enough gaaaaames”
I find it difficult to believe that a person can make or break a team like that, especially that NERD are really good at emulation in general. The DS emulator on Wii U is kind of a miracle. What this tells me is that they weren’t given enough time for the game-specific optimizations to meet a holiday deadline.
If there is one thing that Knight Rider taught me as a kid, it is that "one man can make a difference."
Emulators are among the hardest things you can program and are nearly always (initially) coded by one person. Of course one person can make a huge difference - because most programmers have no experience with emulators. you can't be "good AT emulation" - somebody who had written an N64 emulator is no more qualified to write one for a Playstation than a good programmer that has never written an emulator at all.
Sometimes one particularly talented lead can make all the difference between mediocre and stellar. If that person's contributions are later abandoned, then things regress instead of progress.
If you'd work as a software developer you'd be used to it.
I've seen a single dev be more productive than entire teams of devs that were better paid and "better educated" several times.
When management replace a star lead with a dud, or worse an a-hole. A project team can fall apart.
This was so interesting. I had that original Gamecube version of "Ocarina" when it was first released and I always just assumed it was a fantastic port. Never knew it was emulation.
It was lesser known at the time, but you could also get the Zelda promo disc by subscribing to a year of Nintendo Power
That's how I got mine. I remember it clearly. What a great deal that was. I think it was $19.95 to renew.
@@Alexvander10 Not even 20€, just look at the prices nowadays xd
lets go brandon!
I used to at least respect Nintendo for their games even if I disliked everything else they did. Now they can't even give their own games the proper respect they deserve.
I recently watched a 2019 interview of M2, which is a company that mostly works on porting old games to new platforms, and it's crazy how much more effort they put in. The M2 folks are people who truly care about preserving old games, ensuring everything runs exactly like how it would when it was first released. Then, on top of that, they add a ton of cool new stuff to give the games new life. These are people who want to make these old games fun for people from all generations.
Meanwhile, Nintendo can't even be bothered to put in a tiny fraction of the effort M2 does. On top of charging you an absurd price and all of their anti-consumer practices.
M2 do it out of passion
Nintendo do it for scamming people
You'll eventually buy the 50th remake of a Zelda game from 10+ years ago for the Nintendo Butto, which is a cardboard butt plug which makes use of the HD rumble of the Switch.
M2 actually worked for nintendo to create the Wii U Gba Emulator, which also ended up being by far the best looking emulation on Wii U. Everything looked so good and crisp and you had so much customization.
M2 is amazing at what they do.
It's fascinating how I want to agree with people on this being an issue but then I see comments that go basically like "they always do bad thing X" (thing X being bad was really objective) "and bad thing Y all the time" (they did it *once*) "and they do all of it to make their customers angry and because they are lazy and evil and..." (continues to personalize a fcking company).
Like, guys, I wish I could agree with you put please, for Christ's sake, develop argumentation skills that don't sound like you are talking to a toddler.
I'll just wait for the decomp (or the source leak) to eventually crap out a native PC build.
I'm with you but even after the decomp ist finished, it'll take a while until a PC build is released. Looking forward to mods/hacks though.
???????
Just use already existing and far better emulators
@@KenBladehart Why not just emulate a girlfriend
OoT has a pc port. It is called Ship of Harakin(SoH) and it needs a pal 1.2 or pal MQ rom. I dont know much as im not into zelda.
Slight tangent that seems to be missing in the video, there was a second N64 game emulated on Gamecube; Majora's Mask was available on the Zelda Collector's Edition promo disc
Yeah, I got that one with Mario Kart: Double Dash when I bought the system.
Hello MVG, Starfox 64 on the Wii VC had a decent amount of wrong texture colors and missing transparency. it wasnt AS flawless as you thought.
these were fixed on the Wii U VC :)
I’m sure dozens of people have mentioned this, but there was a Zelda special edition GameCube SKU that came with a disc including emulated versions of Zelda 1&2, OOT and MM.
The collectors edition. That was the first thing I won in a official Nintendo magazine way back then.
It’s The only Time I Ever played Wind Waker even though it was a 20 Minute demo. I’m actually considering buying wind Waker HD For the Wii U Because of that demo. I played it over and over and over again man. In fact I’m gonna go look for Wind Waker HD Right now!
@@Higgs_Stranded it’s worth getting wwhd. I’m considering getting it despite owing two copies on gc (ww is the first game that taught me region locking, got sent an American version by mistake from an online shop).
I'm hoping it gets patched, but I'm not holding my breath. As things stand, I'm not buying the service. I need to see some actual support, like fixing the emulator and providing more content, as the SNES and NES libraries don't exactly show those systems in the best light.
Also, I feel like the Genesis was a weird choice. There are tons of ways to play those games already. Why not Saturn (which we've seen working on Switch) or Dreamcast? Those systems and libraries are sort of stranded, and having a legal way to play Panzer Dragoon 2 and Saga without having to pay $500 for a copy would be amazing.
If you look though the room..collection won't get better.
Alot of those 3rd party companies are now Microsoft and on Xbox the other half are games not worth bringing out in any language.
Konami Capcom rare the collections they put out mean that the original roms will not be released for free.
Usually or how it seems to me.
I could be wrong but Nintendo hasn't been winning points with me.
@@findantu That's the issue. Retro games are having a resurgence, so nobody wants to license them, they'd rather put them in a collection and cut the middle man as much as they can, which is why every SNES release is weird third-string stuff and not Chrono Trigger or Castlevania 4.
Part of what makes this frustrating is that Nintendo has said that the exorbitant price comes from licensing fees, and that has to be coming primarily from the Genesis collection because Nintendo obviously doesn't own *anything* on that platform. An N64 collection can still be pretty strong without much licensing because Nintendo mostly carried that platform on their own, so licensing for it doesn't need to cost a ton. This further begs the question: Why Genesis? I'm not saying it's a bad system, it's great, but those games are SO available, and Saturn and Dreamcast aren't. I'll take Space Channel 5 or Panzer Dragoon Saga or Nights Into Dreams over a ninth way to play the same 30 Genesis games that Sega's been trotting out for over a decade.
@@gargonovich the N64 games that matter can easily be resumed to Nintendo and RARE, as Microsoft now owns RARE, Nintendo itself probably can only release half of the good stuff.
@@gargonovich 1. Sega's a god of poor business decisions. Anyone who's a frequent watcher of Wha Happun? can tell you that.
2. There's a rumor going around that Nintendo may be planning to put GoldenEye 007 on the NSO EP based on that game being made Germany-legal one year ahead of when its banning would automatically end and Nintendo's European eShop having its server in Germany. The James Bond license would likely be a MINT.
@@CarbonRollerCaco I mean, not sure how it's a poor business decision. Trite, sure, but not necessarily poor.
N64 is from 1996 and we still love it, Golden Eye 007 in 4 player multiplayer mode with friends was an amazing experience back then
“Ocarina of time on the GameCube kinda flew under the radar and wasn’t well known”
Yeah no, it was very well known at that time, but then if you are also not aware of Zelda Collector’s Edition on the GameCube which was released just after OOT Master Quest and featured both OOT and Majora’s Mask emulated on the GameCube, you would have known these two GC releases were VERY well known and beloved by many. For some of us who couldn’t afford both an N64 and a GC or never got an N64 as kids, OOT and MM emulated on the GameCube were how we first got to enjoy those classics.
Why you get so touchy?
@@adurna3579 I expected better and more thorough coverage here. MVG here completely ignored an important step in the evolution of official N64 emulation by Nintendo.
@@adurna3579MVG is a loser
Thank you for explaining the differences between how each console emulated the games and how the Wii got it so right in comparison to the other ones
All I found until then was just "Nintendo bad look screenshot"
I don't get why they don't use the same system as the Wii and port it to the Switch ... Maybe it's because of disk space and having 1 emulator per rom makes each game bigger, so having every game added to the catalog predownloaded with it's custom emulator would take a lot of storage if they add a lot like the 50+ NES / SNES games
I really hope they're gonna fix it, they seem to listen a bit more to the players now
From what I can tell, it's a matter of profitability.
I heard rumours that there were game companies that were interested in putting out more games for the VC service back in the day, who eventually got stonewalled by Nintendo as they said the games weren't making them enough money to be worth putting them up on VC. And if this is the case, I can see why.
Costs of licensing various companies games are already a financial drain that Nintendo apparently WEREN'T making back by selling the games as one-time purchases (hence why they switched to a subscription service, guaranteed money there). If you then add to that that all these games have a custom emulator written for them, necessitating a coder to sit and meticulously figure out a way to emulate each and every game, getting paid money doing work on one game at a time so they can really only sell that one game he's working on at a time... like, you see how that quickly becomes a financial sinkhole that's not making them any money. Hence, on paper, a "one size fits all" emulator who just generally copies the way a regular N64 runs, and whom you can just slap any old ROM into and get it to work, seems like a much better proposition since it allows them to put out games way faster! No need to sit around and wait for each and every one game to get its brand own emulator written for it, much less works, much lower costs!
Except, well. As can be plainly seen, that "one size fits all"-means that each games quirks and individual needs are overlooked in favor of just getting them up and running, which means problems. Lots of them. One can only hope they'll go back and fix the individual games issues, but one wonders if they'll bother when they made the decisions they made so they WOULDN'T have to get bogged down with individual games quirks and foibles. We shall simply have to see, I guess...
I think it also as to with differences in architecture since the previous consoles used similar architecture, but the switch used an entirely new one.
Now it makes sense why the Wii VC games run so well. I still have my Softmodded Wii next to my switch, and I play both to this day.
Thanks for making this video, this whole n64 emulation situation makes sense now.
If you do that, can you port iso files from a computer to a Wii? I never had many games on it, and I don't want to have it there just getting dust
It has been doing that for years, but you know
My thoughts are that the GB, GBC and GBA were ready to go but didn't warrant a price change so they rushed the unoptimized N64 emulator to warrant the price change. Just my two cents.
Why haven't they released Gameboy games?
They should have added them at the same time. It would have at least SOMEWHAT justified the price hike.
@@dandastardly2792 They want those games to be Multiplayer Compatible for NSO, as the previous emulation attempts were restricted to Single Player only.
They have and own the source code to the n64 and they still can't put out a good emulator. You think they would have this figured out after the Wii U VC but nope.
Maybe Rare has the source code all along, which may explain the emulation in Rare Replay.
The Wii VC port of Majora’s Mask does crash sometimes though, which is rage inducing. I had a play session where I beat the first dungeon and did plenty of other side content on one 3 day cycle and the game crashed and I had to do everything over again. It was at that point I just quit the game.
Isn't the crashes extremely rare though? I've been playing MM on the wiiVC for a bit now and have made it to Stone Tower. Havn't crashed yet.
@@epicstacker413 no, because they are some clips of speedrunners getting crashes on VC.
@@RealKaiserRyu i know about that, but speedrunners put hundreds if not thousands of hours into grinding the game. To play the game that much and crash only a few to several times means that it can't be that frequent.
@@epicstacker413 I remember specially that people (before the 3DS remake came out) complained that every official version of Majora’s Mask besides the original N64 version had crashing issues. It was discussed on the UA-cam channel Zelda Dungeon, which is a old school Zelda channel that has been around since 07. After the 3DS remake of Ocarina came out, they discussed a possible 3DS remake of Mask and talked about the issue.
@@RealKaiserRyu I’ve also been playing the Wii vc version of majoras mask lately. I haven’t crashed at all could you be talking about the GameCube version which apparently crashes alot
Majora's Mask was also available on the GameCube, there was another promotional disk with Zelda 1, Zelda 2, OoT and MM's for Nintendo of Europe members only.
If you owned a GameCube, you could play all Zelda titles ever released until Twilight Princess on that system (excluding Philips CDI's). You could even play a link to the past and the GB zelda's with the rare GBA accesories you could plugin to your GameCube.
Majora's Mask on Gamecube was notoriously bad in terms of lag and random crashes though.
@@KingWafl same happens on Project64 on some roms
This was Zelda: Collector's Edition
But it wasn't Europe exclusive - it came out everywhere, just in different ways. In Europe it was originally a bonus disc with Mario Kart: Double Dash limited edition consoles, but was later made available via Club Nintendo for 4,500 stars points. Japan also had it in the catalogue. In the UK you could also get it from Nintendo if you sent them proof of purchase of certain games, and Australia and the US had similar schemes. In the US it was also bundled with the console for a time.
For a half a second I thought you said 'Legend of Zelda, Toilet Princess"... LOL
Hahahaha
@Oktyabrina Gadon *Right on cue.*
Looks like you swapped the GameCube and Wii VC labels in the side by side comparisons. The GCN version recolors the button graphics from green and blue to red and green but that one's labeled as Wii VC
Next video from MVG will be 'Battle of the N64 Emulators: PS2 vs Switch'
Let's not forget the controls, too. The Wind Waker button layout (basically what GC OoT used) could easily be adapted to the switch controllers, but instead they went with a weird button combo just to use C-right. I geniunely wonder how much testing went into this. Surely someone would have noticed how awkward it is?
2:02 - I got this version and at the time I was so freaking blown away that the entirety of one of my favorite games of all time was on there... I had emulated SNES for a long while by this point... but for some reason it seemed so cool at the time. I was also one of the people that was not the biggest fan of Wind Waker... It wasn't until I get it on WiiU that I realized I didn't even finish half the game back then.
It's pretty sad to see Nintendo falling off in terms of polish in their products.
They aren't really falling off though are they? What ever games they do put out turn out to be some of the best games of the year its just their efforts with NSO that is a bit lackluster
@@ThatNormalBunny That's sorta the problem though, The Switch doesn't feel that special like other Nintendo consoles. You wouldn't really lose much of any of the experience if you played the games on something else.
Lol what? They still have the best polish in the industry.
@@Optim121 Nope, both Sony and Microsoft have already surpassed them since 8th gen started. There's a reason they're still fighting to improve technology while the N stopped giving a shit about it since 2000s.
@@opengamestutorialesopinion4688 you think Sony and Microsoft games have more polish than Nintendo? Hard disagree.
What happened is they stopped caring and got greedy. Mupen64plus with a rom on a computer / android tv should not be better than what nintento officially put out.
Nintedo always been greedy, its just that they kept it in check better
It is truly sad that Nintendo had choose to do things the hard way.
Nintendo has always been incompetent
@@basshead. If that was true, either most of their competition has either done a lot worse or they should've been bankrupt years ago.
@@killertruth186 Fanboys and fangirls keep them alive. It's the same with Apple.
Poor quality products and they don't care about they customers at all(terrible warranty service).
Most Nintendo games are basically Indie games but they still ask full price for them.
The gamecube version is the one I grew up with and it was almost the perfect version, the only thing I noticed was missing was the lens flare when looking at the sun
Whatever way you look at it, Nintendo has delivered a sub-par product here. I think it mostly boils down to an unwillingness to either embrace the open source efforts that exist, or put in the required resources to build a good emulator themselves. This was definitely not the case in the GameCube / Wii era.
Nintendo cuts corners any chance they get that's why n64 online is the way it is - minimal effort with a shinny polish
Yeah and as long as people keep giving them money the more they will take the piss
The N64 emulation on Xbox consoles (Rare Replay or the dev mode emulation) is leagues better
In all the fuss about Nintendo's emulation, I forgot about Rare Replay's N64 emulator!
You're right- much better emulation, plus they even went the extra mile with Jet Force Gemini's controls by patching in a modern control scheme.
And this isn't just remapping the buttons in the emulator, such that it can be replicated on PC. There's something a little more complex going on there.
Oh, and we haven't even been taking into account that a game like Conker's Bad Fur Day is way harder to emulate accurately and smoothly than Ocarina of Time is.
Majora's Mask had some game breaking bugs on the GameCube Zelda collection.
No Ads in this video ? So here is my Thumb Up !
Great job you deserve it.
Nintendo also had another emulation promotion on the GameCube (at least here in the UK), you registered codes that came on a cardboard insert, you registered them to your account and when you had enough points they mailed you the disk, it had the both of the NES versions of Zelda, a demo for Link to the Past (which had just launched on GBA) and Ocarina/Majora's mask.
We lost Iwata, that's what changed. RIP Satoru Iwata, one of the best software developers and a gamer at heart.
Lol. He was a businessman like the rest. He wasn't your friend.
@@crystalwater505 I mean he was also an excellent software engineer before taking an administrative role.
Mistakes were made
¡Hola, MVG! Me encantan tus videos y análisis. Saludos desde Argentina. Excelente canal.
7:46 I see what you did there, very nice timing 😆
Not N64 emulation, but something I find unfortunate about the Wii U's Virtual Console in general is that it never loads up a game from the start, it always loads up from a save state (aside from the first time you play it, or if you nuke your save data for that game entirely). You can reset a game, but one unforeseen circumstance of this is that some games only feature things on a fresh load (most notably, the how-to-draw animation at the beginning of Kirby's Adventure; resetting Kirby's Adventure goes immediately to the title screen, skipping the animation entirely). Might be a bit of a nitpick, but still, it's a bit of a shame that the WiiU makes it so difficult to let you have the option to just load up a game from the start, as you would do if you were playing the game on a native system. Save states are a nice convenience, but not everyone wants to use them (especially for games that originally had saving, and perhaps even passwords, in the first place).
They have all possible information about N64 as they want, they are the makers, the should be able to create a emulator that work with all their catalog and does it well, like original hardware or better with upscaling.
Not being able to do all of that shows two things how little effort usually put in and hoy much effort the community did with PC emulators that are necessary for best preservation of software
I heard that when it comes to the official N64 games emulation it doesn’t emulate the controller stick very well and makes it too sensitive and makes aiming in OOT very hard than it’s supposed to be.
That's because the official N64 emulator doesn't take into account the dead zone of the analog stick on the N64. Modern analog controllers have hundreds of levels of sensitivity. The N64 only has 8.
This is true, and combined with the fact that you’re stuck with airplane controls, it makes aiming the damn bow so difficult. I originally played these games on the N64 when I was a little kid, but damn, the 3DS really spoils you with the fact that you’re not forced into inverted camera controls, the more functional analog stick sensitivity, AND the added motion controls. I was miraculously able to hunt down all ten big poes for the 4th empty bottle on the Switch emulation… but now I’m scared of getting to the horseback archery with the gerudos. Haha.
What went wrong? Well for starters instead of working with/hiring the members of the home brew community who have done great work with emulating Nintendo attacked said community and thus lost the chance to take advantage of the home brew devs experience.
No no, Nintendont do what Sega does
I can't get over the MEGACHAD beard
Please keep it
As always, great and informative video! You deserve more subs, my dude.
Greed happened. Nintendo knows fans will buy any crap they put out, as long as it has the Nintendo label on it. Why put effort, or care, if people will buy it regardless?
The gist of it, the programmers and developers are no longer there anymore. This was probably handled by a small team of developers.
@@ozero00rockon So what you're suggesting if I'm not mistaken, the talent has been diminishing over the years, and Nintendo is too cheap to replace with new qualified talent? That seems to go hand to hand with greed imho, cutting corners with budget to produce lower quality products is still pretty greedy. Consumers expect top notch quality products from Nintendo, they have a reputation maintain.
@@joeschmoe4698 To make a long absolute explanation short, yes. The long absolute explanation, their focuses are on other things and emulation is, I assume, tricky to them. Unless they hire experienced developers, I sincerely doubt they’ll make games like they used to. That is unless, somehow Nintendo bites the snake and goes through with it anyway for bigger and better. I doubt that honestly.
After a long day chilling with an MVG video is just what i need
Remember - it's morally right to emulate their older games
not even that, there's just nothing wrong with it period. Especially for games nobody is selling anymore
It's morally right to emulate their new games too. I played BOTW at 4K, 60 FPS on PC, without a single issue, the entire game. The only person who lost out was Nintedo, it's a real shame for them, but oh well!
*all their games
@@soxar64 They're not going to lost revenue on them anyway.
@@TummyTimeTimmy I mean, Nintendo did nothing wrong with Botw, you can easily find a copy, 60€ yeah, the hardware sucks, yeah, but it's not the same as emulating 20 year old games xd
Makes me wonder how homebrew n64 emulators deal with specific issues in games, good video!
Great video! A nice insight, I really think that the NSO's current state is unacceptable.
I noticed you didn't mention the Gamecube promotional Zelda collection, that had Zelda I, Zelda II, Ocarina of Time, and Majora's Mask. Majora's Mask in particular was noted for having quite some problems, speculated to be due to the original needing the Expansion Pack
What would be nice is a 1 to 1 comparison between Mario 64 running on an "open" emulator on a hacked switch and this port!
"Ocariner of time" -Mr. Krabs, probably
5 seconds ago? That's a 1st for me
The Collectors disc with OOT/MM on GameCube was really good. I barely remember any issues at all with them. It had the NES games as well. Great times.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the other Gamecube game that used the N64 emulator, being the Legend of Zelda collector's edition. It had both Ocarina of Time and Majora's mask on it and both of them ran great.
Majora’s Mask came with caveats, though. There’s even a warning prior to booting MM up that irregularities may occur during gameplay.
They need a GameCube emulator to run the N64 emulator
?
well they got super mario sunshine after alls..... so..
one of the issues that plague nintendo emulations is that you cant transfer your game from one platform to another.
imagine if you purchased your games on steam, and every 5 years you had to buy again in order to keep playing it...
i can understand the hardware is different and the emulator have to be rewriten each gen, but i can also understand why people are frustrated.
Nintendo is truely antiValve. Beat piracy with better service? No, with better lawyers and worse service to tempt them to it [evil laugh]
and now it's even worse because you never get to purchase the games at all. you only get limited access to them.
for $50 you could buy 5 Wii VC N64 games and be able to play them forever as long as your console didn't crap out (and even then i'm pretty sure you can back them up to SD cards to make them playable on other WIis without even hacking it). That was only like 10 years after a lot of those games came out, too. Now if you pay $50 and can't afford to pay it again next year, you're SOL and your games are gone.
@@ilfirinms At least Nintendo still makes games. I'm very glad they're not like Valve who do nothing all day except sit on their giant pile of money.
You can say the same thing for Sony on PS3 PSN Digital service... The fact Sony NEVER transferred any of those digital versions of arcade ports, PS1/PS2 digital ports to PS4 / PS5 store is a big loss.
As for PS3 digital games, thats understandable since the games run on different architecture .
I mean, to be fair, thats the reason they don't even have a VC anymore, because they knew they'd eventually not be able to keep selling the same games to us every generation, so they had to either make it possible to transfer all your games over from one system to the next, which would ensure they never sell another VC game ever again, or, they make it so that you can NEVER own a VC game and instead you have to eternally rent a bunch of them. This way, they'll never stop making money off of VC games, and the fanboys will cry out "you should be happy, entitled POS".
This video is overlooking that Majora's Mask on Gamecube tended to crash a lot. Especially combining that with the Save system led to lots of progress loss and frustration.
Not a *lot*, but yeah, I remember losing probably an hour of progress from that once.
I'm not even sure that it happened again, but just knowing that it _could_ happen made the game more stressful than it needed to be.
The save system was so much more bearable when I replayed the game on Project 64, as I could save as often as I needed to. (Of course, it didn't crash there, but that extra security is nice.)
Bruh Majora's Mask crashing is the worst that could happen in videogame history
Majora's Mask was also Available on Gamecube.
Zelda Collector's Edition came with the GC in 2002 or 2003 Holiday season
Bro MVG goes to the real in-depth from the main information I love this, I learn something new every video I watch!
You just give me more valid reasons to not get the "plus" NO services.
For the high price they ask i would expect a way better service.
using unofficial emulators is a much better choice imo since there's 4k and 60fps, despite that I bought nso expansion anyways and plan on renewing
@@smexysaladd And...just why did you do that?
Yeah, I have the base tier of NSO and quite frankly I only got that for Tetris 99 and a few other games. The cheap nes and snes emulation was simply a nice bonus, not a selling point. Somehow Nintendo went full alzheimers mode and forgot that people wanted a usable online service first and foremost.
“Nintendo cares about emulation, they have for a while now.”
I think Nintendo cares about money and they know their fans are suckers for playing old games, me included. If they cared about emulation they wouldn’t crap out this service like this. The whole take away I had from the video was they don’t care. Mario 64 and Sunshine running 30 FPS on the all stars Collection supports this.
Nintendo stopped caring about emulation the moment they released the Switch without backwards compatibility and without any kind of VC.
@@sceerane8662 it's a shame. Now you don't even own the titles, either. I'm sure there is a petition to bring back the VC but if its lazy then what's the point now.
Those games are framerate dependent; Boosting the framerate may break the game with inaccurate behavior.
Modders have done it, right? I don’t understand how it works but I remember digital foundry talking about how it was a shame Vicarious Visions didn’t use “graphical interpolation” on Diablo 2 to run the classic graphics at full speed and that game is designed around 25 frames a second.
@@X2011racer Both have been modded to run at 60fps.
Super Mario 64 is complicated, and I think the solution was to use graphical interpolation only (so the graphics render at 60fps, but much of the game is actually running at 30fps in the background). Nothing is broken, as far as I know, though a few elements animate at 30fps.
Super Mario Sunshine is less complicated to run at 60fps, as the engine was already built for it, but there are a few issues, like some bosses moving too quickly. Also, I have to admit, there's no way Nintendo could have pulled it off without doing a full port of the game. GameCube emulation on Switch is already a feat, but GameCube at 2x performance is just unattainable.
Short awnser: they got lazy and just want the most amount of money without putting alot of work into it.
Lol I remember the WiiU days when they tried at least
Why try when you can make something half baked knowing people are still gonna eat it up. Or we will fix it later with a patch.
@@oktyabrinagadon4956 stay Christian. Pray to god.
While this video is mostly correct, based on personal experiences, the Master Quest disc, along with the Zelda Collector's Edition is pretty well known due to Master Quest being a replacement for what was coming to the N64 Disk Drive, or at least, what It was supposed to be as it seems they just ended up cutting even more content they planned for that project.
Also, in Collectors Edition, you do have also Majora's running on the same emulator :D
Basically, the TLDR is, when Stephen left, they lost their emulation captain, and without a captain, all hell broke loose... and that's what we have today with NSO.
Shit bro! Did you get a new camera? The vision looks amazing in this episode! #smooth
I wish Nintendo would just do a straight forward native port instead of emulation
You want to pay $60 a pop for "native" N64 games with few/no improvements over the original games? (Well, it worked for Skyward Sword, so I guess anything is possible).
@@yellowblanka6058 doesn't take that much effort to port
@@aisback1990 And this has to do with their pricing, quality of the port how? I'm sure Skyward Sword didn't take much effort to port either, and they asked $60.
@@yellowblanka6058 skyward sword took more effort then you realise
@@yellowblanka6058 Skyward Sword fixed a TON of issues the original had and thus was much better though
I'll tell ya what happened.
Nintendo knows they have a fanbase of mindless drones who will happily buy any broken half assed shit they throw on the wall.
So rather than take the time to make sure the online service is up to par, and put the effort into making the emulation service respectable, they half assed it.
Because they know people will just buy it anyways.
And that folks, is why we see what we see.
Stop empowering, and encouraging this company, speak with your wallet.
That's basically all console companies how can we still have these drones around
So everyone is talking about the N64 emulation, but do you know enough to comment on the quality of the Genesis emulation? I've seen literally zero coverage on it, and since I never played with the Sega Genesis before, I don't actually know if the games are being emulated well or not.
I mean you could run genesis pretty easily on low end devices fine while n64 has always been kinda notorious.
@@Drilbit And you could run N64 games pretty flawlessly on the Wii, but Nintendo still managed to screw that up. Just because it can be done well doesn't mean Nintendo *did* do it well.
What is the scope of this question, running Genesis emulation on Nintendo hardware specifically? (stupid question perhaps)
@@gondoravalon7540 Nintendo just put N64 and Genesis games on the Switch, but everyone only talks about the flaws in the N64 emulation they're using. I want to know if the Genesis emulation they're using as part of the same service is perfect, bad, or just good enough, but all anyone talks about is the N64 games on the Switch.
When you're playing Oakareiner of Tiem.
While not as apparent, there was another version of Ocarina of Time on Gamecube. A few Gamecube console bundles came with the Zelda Collectors Edition, which came with Zelda 1, Zelda 2, OoT, Majora's Mask, and a demo of Wind Waker. I believe that these versions of OoT and MM used this same emulator.
ocariner of time
“Nintendo used to be good at N64 emulation. What happened?”
The Switch. The Switch happened.
Money happened
Lazy, greed, live service services
yeah, the switch, they made from good to bad.
most overrated console ever made
@@matthi321 not really overrated the switch is better than the wii and the wii u their not lazy they got greedy
What happened ? Nintendo has been doing the bare minimum for years, I understand the switch is a success but it feels like they need a shake up of management
They've grown their ego after the failure of a good concept that being the WiiU
It's interesting to me how, before NSO came out with the gamaes, people had been talking for years about how poor the emulation was on the Gamecube versions. And now that NSO N64 stuff is out, suddenly people are looking back and saying, "Oh yeah the Gamecube emulation was fantastic." Just a weird shift.
My reaction too. How do you forget that Majora's Mask had a formal warning screen about its performance issues?
I always wondered who worked on the GameCube port, for the Ocarina of Time collection. It felt, and played so smooth. Graphics, audio, and visuals. Kept the game intact. How is this missable 20 years later?
Hopefully the technical issues are looked into, and resolved soon
Only Nintendo can release a "expansion pack" that does not come with the real expansion pack.
what if dk64 was planned for launch but they couldn't even figure out how to get that working due to the expansion pak requirement
@@DeanStuff That would mean Majora's Mask is boned, too
@@DeanStuff That's just nonsense, the expansion pak is just more RAM. Literally all they need to do to emulate that is to double a number in the source code. They are probably just going to trickle games out over time like they always have.
@@Johncw87 It was a joke, but it would be hilarious if they ran into errors and just skipped that game to focus on MM