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By William Pérez Published: 1/22/2000 |
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IntroductionEmulation of arcade games and home consoles on personal computers has been around for the past few years and has gotten quite popular recently. The intention is to emulate the original hardware so that the games are completely authentic as opposed to a simulation which is often a pale imitation of the original game. This is done to preserve many games which are part of our cultural history but are no longer available. Also as a reference for educational and documentation purposes. 
MAME (multi arcade machine emulation) is one of the most popular as it currently emulates about a thousand unique arcade games (almost 2 thousand including clones) and has been ported to many operating systems including Mac OS. As for consoles, you can easily find specific emulators for various systems that were made by Atari, Nintendo, Sega, etc. For the most part, until recently, emulation has focused on the older generation. Generally the older hardware is less complicated and easier to emulate but also more in danger of being lost forever. However 1999 was the year of the "next-generation" emulators. We saw Connectix (who brought us Virtual PC) introduce the first Sony Playstation emulator to the Mac OS with a live demonstration on stage at MacWorld Expo and later Bleem did the same for Windows. While several projects were ongoing to try and emulate Nintendo 64, "RealityMan" did it first with UltraHLE which stands for "ultra high level emulation". His successful approach was to use dynamic recompilation which would recompile the code on the fly during program execution. It worked surprisingly well but unfortunately Nintendo found out and decided to apply legal pressure. The result was that UltraHLE has not been updated since its initial release, it runs on Windows only and you have to use a Voodoo card. Sony also applied legal pressure and took both Connectix and Bleem to court with both cases still pending. 
Since then other Nintendo 64 emulators have emerged. The ones that have had success and have been ported to the Mac OS are True Reality and 1964. Both emulators support Game Sprockets and use OpenGL for 3D rendering. An actual Nintendo 64 controller has many buttons so using a gamepad is recommended over the keyboard approach.
Both N64 emulators require:
A fast G3 CPU is preferable, anything less is too slow.
Systems Used for this Review: I tested on the following systems:
Mac True RealitySo far this emulator is able to play many commercial games like Super Mario 64, Starfox 64, Mario Kart, Wave Race 64 and the Bomberman series but in my experience the OpenGL implementation only works well with ATi cards. Voodoo cards with 3dfx's OpenGL drivers do not work so well either causing graphical glitches or locking up your computer. I'm still very impressed at how many games actually work! Because it only runs in full screen, I was not able to get any screenshots. Although it has not been updated in 3 months, Gil Pedersen recently posted a status update letting us know that he is now "working on it again at full strength." We're looking forward to it! Mac 1964This emulator is fast and works fine with ATi cards supporting both window and full screen modes. It also works with 3dfx's OpenGL on Voodoo 2 or 3 cards but you must run it in full screen. At this time if you have more then one monitor or 3D accelerator, Mac 1964 will behave unexpectedly. Unfortunately the only commercial game I could get to work completely was Super Mario 64. 
 I tried loading some other games like Mario Kart 64 and Wave Race 64 but both had serious graphical problems making them unplayable. Demo games just to test the emulator like "fire" and "pong" seem to work fine though. Gerrit Goossen has also made a "carbon" version available which should work quite well under Mac OS 9 but it should also work with Mac OS X when it becomes available! 
While the emulation programmers have made some significant progress in recent years, Nintendo 64 emulation still has a way to go which is not surprising considering how relatively modern this gaming console is. Please do not ask us for cartridge ROMs to play with these emulators. If you own a particular cartridge then by law you are entitled to have a backup copy but please keep in mind that these games are copyright and are otherwise illegal to posses. --William Pérez
Game Images and Logos contain trademarks of Red Storm. |
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