I am looking forward to the mods that this will enable. I highly recommend trying mario 64 on dolphin EMU at 1080P with a texture pack. A HD mod that added a few more polygons would really round out the experience.
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> I highly recommend trying mario 64 on dolphin EMU
Wrong console?
There was a virtual console release for Mario 64, so it's still applicable
Would this help improve the Virtual Console release?
As silly as it may seem to use an emulator to run another emulator, Dolphin makes it quite easy to create and load custom textures, so it's a solid choice in this instance.
It would only help if the virtual console release is emulated.
Mupen64 for N64, with a python GUI. Was playing last night, best Mario ever.
Is a raspberry pi a good-enough platform to run N64 1080P games on?
No.
N64 emulators are all pretty bad (inaccurate, use a decent amount of resources) and upscaling is relatively expensive. At least, way too expensive for an rpi to handle.
It will work fine as an emu at 240p though
The question is now, would it be possible for someone to make a port of Mario 64 that runs on the Pi, instead of trying to emulate it?
Usually after you get source releases to games, you get people that port them to different platforms. Like how we had Doom on iPods and Kodak digital cameras.
There's still a lot of assembly code
N64 only supported up to 240p, or in rare cases, 480i, which is basically the same thing computationally. Displaying on higher resolution just involves scaling (or up-sampling, but at that kind of resolution jump scaling is probably more appropriate).
I haven't tested N64 games on a RPi personally, but I imagine it would have no trouble with it, and there seem to be several retro-gaming projects that involve N64 games and use the Rpi.
Super Mario 64 is a 3D game. The emulator can render the polygons at any resolution. The 2D textures should be replaced or carefully scaled, though.
I got a pi 3b+ as I romanticized the idea of it, but it struggles a bit with SM64. I just use OpenEmu on my higher-powered laptop and HDMI out instead.
Pi format is still fun to tinker with and I encourage you to get one if you're at all interested. The 3b+ just wasn't the right tool for the job in my case. I haven't tried the pi 4, however.
You'll want the Raspberry Pi 4. The 3B+ is not powerful enough for plenty of games.
Not even close.