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VIDEO: Why is Nintendo 64 emulation still a broken mess in 2025?
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this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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N64 stuff runs brilliant on MisterFpga tho.
FPGA mimics hardware 1:1 without overhead, which is why it works well. This is talking about software emulation, which has to use lots of shortcuts to make it fast enough (for most machines). The N64 has a weird architecture though that makes it difficult to find shortcuts that work well.
People tend to overstate FPGAs. They are designed as software in a funny programming language and then "burned in" to hardware. They can and do have inaccuracies and bugs.
In the long run, real hardware is going to disappear through the attrition of time, so we do need this stuff for the sake of preservation. But people tend to put it on a pedestal without really understanding it.
I did some FPGA programming in school, so I totally get it. The hardware is really amazing, but the janky proprietary development toolchains not so much. Plus, Verilog is kind of a pain in the ass.
Even hypervisors can have software bugs - running GBA games on the ARM9 core in the DSi is possible and even closer to "actual hardware" than a FPGA, but there are still weird side cases and glitches that only happen on this setup rather than actual GBA hardware.
FPGAs aren't some magical hardware clone that bypasses software issues.