The Nintendo 64 emulation scene has come a long way, and the latest recompilation project is revolutionizing native PC ports.
Our friends in Extension of time recently shared a post about N64Recomp – describing the tool as potentially transformative to the world of N64 emulation, as it streamlines the native porting process and adds modern enhancements such as unlimited frames per second, ultrawide monitor support and even ray tracing.
Now, technical experts at Digital foundry took an “in-depth” look at Zelda 64: Recompiled and the native PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask – summing it up as an “amazing” effort and mentioning how they can’t wait to see what’s next.
“Zelda 64 Recompiled, or more precisely N64Recomp by Mr. Wiseguy, represents a new era of playing Nintendo 64 games on the PC, as it is a technically new way to make it possible… This is not about emulating the behavior of the hardware. . . . .nor does it go so far as to decompile in an attempt to recreate the original source code…recompile takes the N64 binaries and recompiles them into C code, which is extremely portable and can then be compiled for any platform including PC … then new features and enhancements can also be added, and a new rendering engine can drive it all…”
This is just the first part of Zelda 64: Recompiled, and the creator mentions that Zelda: Ocarina of Time is also on the way.
“Zelda 64: Recompiled is a project that uses N64: Recompiled to statically recompile Majora’s Mask (and soon Ocarina of Time) into a native port with many new features and improvements. This project uses RT64 as a rendering engine to provide some of these improvements .”