Guide: Nintendo 64 Emulation on the PS Vita

[Music] hey everybody this is russ from retro gamecore today we're going to look at nintendo 64 emulation on the playstation vita in this video is a long time coming when i made my first playstation vita video where i basically reviewed this device as a retro handheld gaming console i didn't even test nintendo 64. because at the time the compatibility with nintendo 64 was just not that great and as fate would have it the very day that i dropped that video a new emulator was released as well and so for months now people have been leaving comments to say hey there is a good nintendo 64 emulator and i agree and this is the video for it now this emulator is called daedalus x64 and one of my favorite things about it is that it takes advantage of the vita's touchscreen so you can use it as a mouse pointer to do things like change your aspect ratio there on the fly or implement cheats while the game is still in progress and it's a very subtle thing but it's one of my favorite features of any emulator i've ever used on top of that the compatibility with nintendo 64 games is pretty good i would say at least half of the bat catalog is going to play just fine and another 25 of them are going to play with some limitations i know you've been waiting forever for this video so without any further delay let's jump into it now first things first in order to run this emulator you need to have a ps vita that's been permanently modded on top of that i would recommend using an sd card adapter and you can find guides for both of these on my youtube channel here speaking of guides we're going to go to my actual playstation vita written guide which i'll have linked in the video description and this is where we're going to get our emulator so go down to the standalone emulator section and then grab the daedalus x64 link and you can see here it was updated on december 13th of 2020 all you need to do is download this vpk that's available here and then find that downloaded file on your pc next turn on your playstation vita and then open up the vita shell app which you should already have installed if you've done a permanent mod now plug your ps vita into your computer press the start button to confirm that the select button is tied to the usb function next all you have to do is press select to start up the usb connection on your computer you're going to see your sd card pop up and if you don't already have a folder named vpks make one here and then drag that vbk inside back on the vita close the usb connection go to that vpk folder and then select that vpk it's going to ask you to install the package you say yes and then it's going to ask you do you really want to do this and you say yeah man i want to do it after that the vpk has been installed and then close out close close out of the app and there you should find it here bouncing around when you first start it up it's going to check for updates and download the latest compatibility list at that point you're not going to really see anything in the emulator but this is an important step because in the background it's made a bunch of data files that we're going to need to access next so go back into vitashell press the select button to start up a usb connection and now go into the data folder and you should find a deadlift folder here open that up and then within here create a folder named roms with a capital r and inside this folder you just want to drag and drop all of your nintendo 64 games so i'm going to grab 33 of my closest friends here and drag them over into the sd card after that you can close out the connection and close out of vita shell now when we open up the daedalus app again it's going to check for an update and then download that compatibility list again but after that we're gonna see all of our games listed and i'm gonna use my finger as the mouse cursor here just because it looks better visually but you can see on the right here it does show a little bit info about each of your games so let's mess around a little bit with the options and settings that we have available to us as you can see there's quite a bit of options available but a lot of these honestly you don't really want to mess with because the default settings are actually pretty well optimized maybe one of the first things you are going to want to do is change the aspect ratio to 4x3 so it doesn't stretch out your screen that's really going to be up to you on top of that you can increase the brightness and apply a bilinear filter if you'd like either way as you're playing through the games these are some of the things that you could mess with and i'll show you some of my recommended settings here later in this video but for now the most important thing is to download this data files here which is the top left option this is going to download all the box art and media available for all the games on the nintendo 64 catalog now when we close out of this app and then start it back up again now we have these beautiful big box arts it kind of turns this whole experience into a joy to navigate now i know you're waiting for gameplay so let's jump into that next in general both of the zelda games seem to play pretty well there's a little bit of slowdown as it caches a new scene for example when you first jump into water it's going to cache the fact that it splashes up but then after that when you jump into the water again it's not going to have any stuttering some of the easier to play games for example mario kart 64 play flawlessly right out of the box not a hint of slowdown at all and personally with this game in particular i like to stretch it to 16x9 because it looks really good stretch out on this big screen now with other games for example mario 64 which also runs beautifully i prefer to play it in 4x3 and it's really hard to convey just how good this looks on the ps vita and remember i'm using the ps vita 2000 here so it's actually just an lcd display the oled version looks even better now unfortunately there's no way to show a constant frames per second on the top right what i have to do is tap the screen every few seconds to show you what the frames per second are in real time so you're going to see me tapping here pretty often on the screen but like i mentioned mario 64 is just beautiful on this and i was surprised to find that super smash brothers actually plays pretty well too i have no idea how to play this game but if you're into smash this might be pretty fun some other games that are pretty hard to play for example yoshi's story runs actually really well same thing with the majora's mask i detected a little bit of audio stuttering but visually the game looks really good and this is a good time to show you some of the settings that are available like i mentioned earlier you can implement cheats here in real time and they're already pre-loaded for every one of these games that's pretty awesome also save game management is super easy you can either save the game in game or you can just go into this menu here and select save save state and loading them up is just as easy this is also the menu you're going to use to close out of your roms now f0 does have some texture issues so if you go into the graphics setting and then you mess around with the texture caching settings you're probably going to find something that works for you at least for me using the fast setting fixed all my issues now the frame rate on some of these games is a little bit wonky paper mario is a great example if you see here it's actually running at 69 frames per second and you get a little bit of audio stuttering too now if you go into the settings and turn on frame limiting it is going to limit it to 60 frames per second but what i found is the audio gets even worse and the game starts to stutter even more so it actually plays better at 69 frames per second it does have a little bit of wobbliness to it in the fact that it plays a little bit fast and then a little bit slow and kind of in between there so let's try some other things by far the easiest thing you can do to fix performance with nintendo 64 is to disable the audio because the nintendo 64 didn't have a dedicated audio chip everything ran through the cpu so by turning off audio you're actually going to tax the cpu a little bit less so as you see when i turn off the audio the frame rate jumps up to over 100 frames per second but paradoxically if we go and turn on that frame limiter again it is going to keep it at 60 frames per second but it's gonna feel just as sluggish as it did when the audio was on so in that sense i think it's better to just leave the audio on and then take that frame limit off and just deal with that little bit of wonkiness when it comes to speeding up and slowing down just by a hair now i'd love to say that this emulator is perfect but it's not there are several games like mario tennis that'll just crash outright and then other games like cruise in usa played about 75 full speed and it's going to be up to you whether or not you consider this to be playable personally i don't so as always i got a couple tricks up my sleeve so let's go into auto plugin and mess with some overclocking options if you don't have autoplugin installed already i have instructions in my written guide first thing we're going to try out is this plug-in called lolita 444 and what this does is across the system it increases the cpu clock speed from 333 megahertz to 444 so let's try it out now with a higher clock speed we'll start with cruising usa and as you can see here it just crashes automatically so that's one of the things that are going to happen when you try to overclock certain games now other games are going to work okay for example goldeneye 007 is going to run at about 27 frames per second when you use this 444 megahertz overclock now the audio is still going to be really janky and you can definitely feel some slowdown in the gameplay itself so let's see what other options we have first i'm going to uninstall the lolita plugin and there's a 500 megahertz version of this plugin as well but we're going to try something else the next one we're going to try is called psv shell and this one actually gives you an overclocking menu to be able to configure your settings on the fly to do that you hold down select and press up which will bring up the menus so i'm going to set the cpu clock speed to 444 again and as you can see here we're averaging about 25-ish frames per second so we're definitely still having some issues here and it's funny but the frame rate really depends on where your character is facing if it's facing away from other characters or from wide open space it actually runs pretty well so now let's try to max out all the settings and see how it performs so as you can see here we're getting about 30 frames per second again we're still having some audio issues and you definitely have some slowdown in the gameplay but this is definitely an improvement in performance that being said i'm never really big fan of overclocking because i don't want to over tax my cpu or other components and it does significantly affect the life of your battery both in terms of gameplay and the overall life of the battery over time so in general i tend to not use overclock at all and then just kind of deal with the limited performance on certain games but that's all really up to you okay before we wrap up let me show you a couple other tips back in the menu if you go into the extra section you can turn off the auto update as well as the compatibility list that happens when you first boot up the system also i recommend you select the scale ui text option which is going to increase the font of the text in the menu and then finally you have a couple different themes you can play around with there's a light one which looks terrible but i do like this classic one which has a nice purple color to it but personally i'm going to stick with the original dark one because it matches the color of my vita itself but yeah that's much better i like this bigger text okay now anytime you make any changes to the settings that you want to keep make sure you select save global settings now let's close out of the app and see what it's like when it first boots up and now it's not checking for new updates and also not re-downloading that compatibility list so that might be something you want to do like once a month or so but overall i prefer to have it this way because it boots up the emulator that much faster okay really that's it in a nutshell this nintendo 64 emulator is actually pretty simple and thankfully it's well optimized out of the box so really all you have to do is install the emulator load your roms into that specific folder download the box art and then just start having fun i think overall you'll actually be surprised at how well nintendo 64 plays on this new emulator and who knows maybe they'll have even better updates here in the future regardless i'm happy to report that nintendo 64 plays really well on the ps vita it's one of my favorite systems to emulate on this console that's it for this video i really appreciate you watching let me know if you have any questions in the comments below and be sure to like and subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 205,606

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Id: 7IMSK5PmlRE

Length: 12min 17sec (737 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 10 2021