Author Best N64 Emulator. Updated Over a year ago. Last revision This year. Dolphin Emulator 5. RetroArch 1. DraStic r2. DamonPS2 4. Ok We use our own and third-party cookies for advertising, session, analytic, and social network purposes.
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Check our Privacy Policy. An unfortunate side effect of that power, ironically, is that creating games that take advantage of it requires enormous studios with multi-million dollar budgets for each and every game. This is great in one way — we get some amazing modern games. Fortunately, however, there are ways to still enjoy those great legacy games even on modern hardware — even fairly simple hardware like Android tablets or smartphones. All computing devices grow more and more powerful each year.
Only two decades ago, the Nintendo 64 was one of the most popular consoles on the market, famous for revolutionizing the 3D gaming scene. Yet a modern Android tablet or phone has significantly superior hardware capabilities compared to any of those consoles. That means that there is plenty of room for emulators, that is, software programs that run on the Android and let it pretend to be a Nintendo 64 console, and actually run N64 games.
And those games are terrific! Super Mario 64 showed competing companies just how 3D platforming should be done, and still holds up today as one of the best Mario titles Nintendo ever produced. Super Smash Bros. And no one will ever forget their first time playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a game that still holds the heart of many as the greatest game of all time. There are dozens of classic games available for the N So, with the exponential growth of mobile processing power and the revolution of emulators, you can take them on-the-go, playing in long car rides or over your commute to work.
Unlike many consoles, there are quite a few selections for emulators on Android, and it might be a bit confusing which one to choose. I tested several different emulators on Android, selecting based on user rating and amount of downloads on Google Play. The majority of these emulators are built off the open-source Mupen64 emulator on Windows and MacOS, first developed in the early s.
While both of these emulators perform about as well as the other, I have to give my overall pick to Mupen64Plus FZ, a great performing emulator that also happens to be completely free.
One of my favorite features of Mupen64Plus is the ability to unzip files immediately. Mupen allows you to immediately unzip these files in-app, thus sparring the user from having to do so in a file manager application. Definitely cool. Mapping my controller for the Shield was a quick and easy process, and I was up and running in minutes. I tested two games, both of which I own physical copies of for the N Super Mario 64 is, in many ways, the go-to game for the console: it was a launch title for the device and still holds up today.
It also used the Expansion Pak, which provided additional RAM for the console to use in powering the game. This included a global scaler, upressing the graphics to a higher resolution to suit the p display on the Shield Tablet.
Still, this would be my preferred method of playing the game, with performance, as expected, quite outstanding. Pokemon Stadium 2, a game that is not only difficult to run but notoriously buggy and problematic on emulators, originally looked like a wash.
The game was crawling, with noticeable slowdown to under 15 frames per second. I also experienced a crash fairly early in my testing. Restarting the game, the performance boost of Stadium 2 was immediately noticeable, with the game running at or slightly under 30FPS through the menus.
Unlike Mario, I did experience the occasional bug, either with text being displayed incorrectly or textures popping in and out on occasion. I also experienced difficulty with my controller, with the game occasionally not responding to my presses or, in some cases, outright ignoring them.
And finally, as I should note, I only got one battle to work without the game crashing. This happened on every emulator I tested, which makes me think that Pokemon Stadium 2 is, at its core, a difficult game to emulate.
The time I did get the emulator to work, though, was purely magic. Playing a full-fledged 3D Pokemon game on my tablet was a great experience—when it worked. The important thing with N64 emulation is to remember to keep your expectations in check. The N64 is a notoriously difficult console to emulate, and not every game is going to run without issues.
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