Holding true to my recent inability to only recommend open-source software, I have to first mention Project64. Project64 is Windows only, but it’s so amazing I can’t pass up talking about it for a moment. The one thing that I have to say is that it just works. On boot everything from video to audio to controls works flawlessly, and it runs like a Swiss watch straight from the factory.
I suppose I should back up. Maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about! Well, you know those awesome games that have a special place in your heart from the Nintendo 64 era? You can play those games on your PC! The N64 emulators allow you to play those games, as long as you have the ROMs of the games (I don’t know the legal stuff, so I’ll just tell you to do a Google search for Nintendo 64 Roms).
While Project64 and Mupen64 are both emulators, not all emulators are created equal. The sad truth is that, compared to Project64, Mupen64 is okay at best and frustratingly incompetent at worst. You have to do quite a bit of tinkering at first. The video finally does fairly well from the get-go (your mileage may vary), but my audio was crap. I had to play with the plug-ins (I think it was an ALSA vs. Pulse issue, as well as different audio plug-ins of various qualities) to get it right. Following those initial tinkerings, and after changing the controls around, I was ready to start playing. That went… fairly well. I’ve yet to get it working fullscreen, and the entire experience is sort of- close, but not quite there. There are quite a few bugs, and there have been many times when it locked up my computer and forced me to kill the power and reboot. Honestly, I’m not entirely convinced that this software is ready for prime time. That being said, it is indeed the best open source Nintendo 64 emulator around, as well as best Linux-compatible N64 emulator.
Additional Note
I noted that I felt the software wasn’t quite ready for “Prime time,” but I failed to notice the fact that the software still appears to be in beta (version 0.5 is the latest as of the time of this posting). As such, it’s important not to be too critical, and to note that we should all work together to make the experience better. I have quite a bit of faith in the future quality of the “final” product.
Downloads
Available in the Ubuntu Software Center
