N64 Emulation is far too much work

[J1800]

I recently tried playing through N64 games hoping that emulation has been improved in the 7-8 years since I last tried it, but while it has, it's still plagued with problems. Games have various graphical glitches, and an attempt to find help doesn't give a reply "thanks, we'll update it" they instead they say "download this extra plugin" or "change this obscure setting like RAMBUFFER2xPIPELINE". Settings which give no advice or guidelines on what they actually do or why I need them.

The result is that to simply change games has taken me more time googling and downloading things then actually playing. I'm frustrated enough to give up.

Why don't people just make an emulator which bundles in the plugins and loads the right one depending on the game? Which changes these settings for us? Most people just want to play games, we're not programmers, it's too much effort to do all this weird stuff.

[rakanishu]

Man the N64 emulation has been frozen for a lot of time, I suppose programmers are not interested in emulating it any longer, but Project64 and Mupen64Plus can run most of the games with no problems, some times they need some "exotic" plugins or configurations to run those games, only a few games doesn't run properly and had no fix, so if you want to play that games you need to learn how to emulate them.

[mavdude73]

sad reality

[Jale]

No emulator is perfect and since it runs on a totally different hardware and it was done with reverse engineering, it needs a lot of patching. No easy stuff, man.

[DB81397]

I've ran Project64 on Vista and worked without trouble... Its just really hard to play depending on your game. I'll just say that. Some games for the 64 require a sOOOOper plug-in and add-on .EXEs for proper running, such as Pokemon Stadium.

[ulaoulao]

Why don't people just make an emulator which bundles in the plugins and loads the right one depending on the game?

This is the entire idea of plugins? So that other people can write them and it allows the author to work on more important things. I agree its a pain, but the entire concept of plugs is to allow other to contribute. IMO all plugin based emulators should have "good" default plugins.