Video: Digital Foundry Takes A Look At Zelda 64 Recompiled: Majora’s Mask

“A revolution in N64 native ports for PC”

by Liam Doolan 20h ago

The Nintendo 64 emulation scene has come a long way and the latest recompilation project revolutionises native PC ports.

Our friends at Time Extension shared a post recently about N64Recomp – describing the tool as potentially transformative to the world of N64 emulation, as it streamlines the process of native ports and adds modern enhancements such as uncapped frame rates, ultrawide monitor support and even ray tracing.

Now, the tech experts at Digital Foundry have taken an “in depth” look at Zelda 64: Recompiled and the native PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask – summing it up as an “amazing” effort and mentioning how it can’t wait to see what’s next.

“Zelda 64 Recompiled, or more specifically N64Recomp from Mr. Wiseguy, represents a new era of playing Nintendo 64 games on PC, as it is technically a new way of making that possible…Here it is not emulating the behaviour of the hardware…nor is it going as far as decompilation in attempting to recreate the original source code…recompliation takes N64 binaries and recompiles them into C code, which is emintently portable, and then that they can be compiled for any platform including PC… then new features and enhancements can be added as well and a new rendering engine can drive it all…”

This is just part one of Zelda 64: Recompiled, with the creator mentioning how Zelda: Ocarina of Time is also on the way.

“Zelda 64: Recompiled is a project that uses N64: Recompiled to statically recompile Majora’s Mask (and soon Ocarina of Time) into a native port with many new features and enhancements. This project uses RT64 as the rendering engine to provide some of these enhancements.”

What do you think about this new revolution in the N64 emulation scene? Let us know in the comments.

[source youtu.be]

Liam is a news writer and reviewer for Nintendo Life and Pure Xbox. He’s been writing about games for more than 15 years and is a lifelong fan of Mario and Master Chief. He’s also got a soft spot for Sonic the Hedgehog.

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