N64 Compatibility List!

[herbfargus]

So lots of people have been curious on N64 emulation so I created a list of all the games (I kept regional varations out just to keep it simple) for the community to contribute to.

First and foremost for consistency’s sake its best for those contributing to it to be using a Raspberry Pi 2 and using the Mupen64plus-Testing emulator (installed from the experimental menu in the retropie setup script.)

With those contingencies being met there are 3 columns to edit- one for the plugin being used (gles2n64 or Rice), the second for status- again a simple stable or unstable, and third a column for notes explaining the nature of the instability.

Here’s the Sheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Wjzbu90l6eCEW1w6ar9NtfyDBQrSPILQL5MbRSpYSzw/edit?usp=sharing

[gutossn]

Great! Good idea.

[epe9686518]

Great list Herb, just updated it with all my working games and tested games, thanks for putting this together!

[herbfargus]

Thanks for your contributions :) I’ll add a link to the compatibility list on the wiki page as well.

[thatguyinfl]

Great idea!

[MRKane]

herbfargus,

Do you mind if we add to that list? I’ve been hitting up the N64 emulator as my primary (as I’m a bit of a nut for that system) and could post things as I figure them out or come across them. I’ll do my best to adhere to your style guide that’s present. Alternatively I could send through information for you to add.

[herbfargus]

By all means!- that’s what its for. I made it editable for anyone to change as they have things to offer.

I created the template so the results would be consistent (the drop down menus only allow for certain responses and color code themselves accordingly when chosen) but I also left a notes column for anything extra that may need to be noted. If you feel like there is anything else that needs to be added or can be improved I’m open to new ideas.

On the mame compatibility lists I had 3 options. Ok, has issues, doesn’t work. Would it make more sense to have those three on this list as well or should I just keep it to stable and unstable?

[MRKane]

I’ve hit a few that flat out won’t work (off the top of my head all I can think of is Gauntlet Legends, but there were a few more…I think Space Station Silicon Valley might be another) would a drop-down be necessary for one of these or perhaps just a note?

The only other thing I suppose would be the beta roms – although in theory they should behave like their release counterparts.

And I shall endeavour to add to your list as I get the time to test them! Bloody good work by the way – it’s a brilliantly setup little document!

[herbfargus]

For roms that don’t work, just mark them as unstable in the dropdown and in the notes column just state doesn’t work on either plugin (assuming its unstable on both)

Should I have two columns for the plugins? or should I just leave it with the one column and have people choose which plugin works the best? (I think how it is right now is probably simplest)

as far as beta roms go- you can test the regular version and the beta version and see if there is any difference. If there is, then just add another row for the beta rom and mark them accordingly.

Thank you for your contributions :)

[MRKane]

I think that’ll work – and have noted one already :)

As far as the plugins are concerned I feel that setup is great – if they both work, or there’s parts of the game that need one over the other it can be noted in the column you’ve provided. As they always say: the best things in life are simple! Now wait for someone to come along and add another plugin just to complicate matters hehehe

Edit: got a few done and actually ran into one that caused issues in emulationstation after it crashed. I think “shadowman” might have done my setup a little corruption somehow. I’m sure there’s irony in that somewhere.

EDIT2: Something seems to have happened to the sheet with the rows now being hidden. Go away – come back – and something is wrong. Did I do that? I can’t seem to fix it!

EDIT3: Somehow a filter was on. Filter is now off. Right…where was I…

[MRKane]

Just had another thought while I was going through and testing:
Sometimes with the rice plugin there’ll be a latency when you begin emulating where the text displayed with come up with at note and assorted numbers (sorry about my poor explanation there!) Sometimes it’ll come around and start running, other times it won’t begin even if left for half an hour. To keep this list consistent: how long until we call it and say that a rom isn’t running presently?

[herbfargus]

I figure as long as is reasonable to wait. Even if it takes a bit you can always make a note of it and leave it to the user to decide if its worth their time to wait that long for their game to load.

[MRKane]

Ok. I might revise my additions and note where this does happen :) I also wonder how much tweaking the mupen config file might affect games that do a lot of 2D screen draws – for example Yoshis Story or Chefs. I’ve been surprised that many of the games will have what appears to be fully interactive based off of what I can hear, just don’t get any picture.

Given that I’m just a new user feel free to cross-check anything I’ve put up there and change as you see fit!

[herbfargus]

There seem to be endless configs to tweak for n64, so it can be tedious at times. I’ll verify things as I test as well. Thanks for all your work on this.

[MRKane]

No need to thank me – it’s a labour of love. I’m part of a little group of retro-gamers where the xBox 360 will gather dust and the N64 and GameCube controllers are always out (and we sink untold hours into casemods, internal lighting, electrical tweaks/overclocks and other odd experiments like ambidextrous N64 controllers…I’m not sure if it’s pathetic or awesome actually)

[corn]

For 2D games you should stay away from applying any frame skip (Yoshi story).
Some games like Rayman2 and Donald duck renders stuff directly to the framebuffer and it will take a while before they show something on the screen. Once that happens start pressing the start button and you will get to the menu (unfortunately with scrambled fonts…).

On a second note how do you go about installing mupen64plus (not libretro) for development?
Compiling from source will wipe out the source once all is compiled…

[dankcushions]

[quote=103252]Should I have two columns for the plugins? or should I just leave it with the one column and have people choose which plugin works the best? (I think how it is right now is probably simplest)
[/quote]

for me i think we should have 2 columns for the plugins, and arguably 2 more for the plugins of the regular mupen64plus (the testing is for just that, no? or is it actually going to be mergedback into the regular, or made into a proper branch?). maybe even another 3 for the libretro version!

right now i feel like it’s not obvious that the plugin used is the best one – has the other even been tested? anyway, just my opinion :)

[herbfargus]

As far as I understand it, the mupen64plus-testing has optimised configs for the games that perhaps the others don’t have. I could be mistaken though. Gizmo is the one who would know the most about it as its his repo. I’m not sure about the long term plans for integration with the main mupen64plus core but I’m guessing once configs are sorted out then maybe it would be integrated?

I guess it just depends on how thorough people want to be with their testing. I don’t have as much time for testing as I’d like to have. I’m all for being thorough as long as it is easy to understand. Perhaps for now we can start with mupen64plus-testing (I’ve ammended the column title to say best video plugin) but we could duplicate the page and add another sheet for the regular mupen64plus emulator and another sheet for the lr-mupen64plus emulator as well if you’d like.

And these are all just assuming that there are no config changes- there are a whole bunch of settings within the configs that may be able to be altered in order to get the games to be more playable and those could be a whole other set of sheets… it can get complicated pretty fast :P

[dankcushions]

that’s fair enough! i confess i sidelined n64 testing when i got odd issues with sound lag in mario 64 – i get a small delay in sound effects (but otherwise perfect performance), compared to videos online which seem perfect. i feel like the n64 emulators are more GPU dependent so things like resolution, GPU memory split, and all manner of config settings, could explain it, but i gave up fiddling.

right now it works great with the mupen64plus (vanilla) for 4 player mario kart and f-zero, which is all i really wanted. i’ll do a fresh install when 3.0 goes final and try again from there :)

[herbfargus]

Sounds good, thanks for your contributions :) in the mean time I’ve created two new sheets on the compatibility list for vanilla mupen64plus and lr-mupen64plus if people are feeling ambitious.

[MRKane]

I’ll just chime in and say that I’ve been testing with an untampered mupen64plus on 3.0 RC1 if that helps clarify my additions a little :)

[epe9686518]

There really isn’t any point to using the vanilla mupen64plus install at this point, as unless I am missing something, the testing version is simply the vanilla core with tested per game configs for both rice and gles2N64 for all the games. This is the proper emulator settings and per game configs to get the games that we can get playable right now. Using the vanilla version would simply be doing the same thing we are already doing with the testing core over again.

As far as the GPU goes, the N64 appears to use slightly more GPU memory than other emulators, but nothing major, so as long as you are giving the gpu 128 to 256 it should run the games fine, the ones that will run. Giving it more wont make any difference in which games play at this point, and cutting back the cpu memory will actually cause problems in games when you reach a certain point of gpu memory.

[dankcushions]

I’m a bit lost with the various mupen64plus versions now – I can’t find the github/whatever page for ‘mupen64plus-testing’, but mupen64plus core (https://github.com/mupen64plus/mupen64plus-core) and the various video plugins:
https://github.com/mupen64plus/mupen64plus-video-glide64
https://github.com/mupen64plus/mupen64plus-video-glide64mk2
https://github.com/mupen64plus/mupen64plus-video-rice
…all have received updates.

when you rebuild mupen64plus does it grab the latest builds of the plugins? because they’re on separate repos it seems.

i’m not sure what mupen64plus-testing rebuilds from?

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