It's more easy to emulate it through slower but more accurate 'brute force' methods. The rest use custom microcode programs whose behavior was never doucmented, and since the documentation for the GPU is poor, it's very hard to reverse engineer what they were supposed do.Īlso while the Saturn was ridiculously complex machine it was also a less powerful and more primitive machine. Since most N64 games use one of two different microcode programs, ones who's behavior, if not implementation, was well documented by Nintendo, emulating the N64 GPU for these games is easy. The only practical solution is to figure out what each microcode program is supposed to do and use the PC's GPU to do the equivilent operations. The second is that it's designed to be run on a GPU with specialized hardware, and emulated interpretation or recompilation of the microcode on the CPU, like is done for the main N64 CPU, would probably end up being way too slow.

It's hard to emulate for two reasons, one is that it's all essentially undocumented, so the emulator writers just don't know what all the individual microcode instructions are supposed to do. The Nintendo 64 (N64), released in mid-1996 as Nintendos runner in the console wars back then, it had a class of its own.

Click to expand.The 'microcodes' are entire programs for the Nintendo 64's GPU, so there's potentially an unlimited number of them.

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