The Nintendo 64 has always been a difficult machine to emulate correctly. But in 2025 - we should be well and truly past all of it right? Not exactly. Issues with Plugins, performance, graphical glitches, stutters. Unless you have a very powerful machine, these are common things many of us will run into when emulating the Nintendo 64. But why? And Is there any hope for fast, accurate N64 emulation in 2025 and beyond?
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.
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.