ODROID-Magazine-201506

NINTENDO 64 EMULATION
textures in a folder with the “short name” of the game in capital letters. For example,
Mario 64 is “SUPER MARIO 64”, and Mario Kart 64 is “MARIOKART64”.
A complete
remake of
the Mario
64 textures
gives the
game a
modern
look
Conclusion
Nintendo 64 emulation is generally working very well on ODROID devices, especially
on the U3 and XU3. The C1 has a lot of issues which prevent it from offering
the same gaming experience as on the other ODROID devices. The rice plugin, which
works without having to change color depth settings on your image, has major issues
with many games, but does a rather good job on other games.
The glide64mk2 plugin only works under 16-bit, and although most games are
running nicely, the ones that do run better with the rice plugin require a reboot in
order to be able to use it, since rice isn’t working with 16-bit. This leaves me rather unsatisfied,
since I always had to reboot the entire ODROID in order to switch between
different graphics plugins on the C1. The U3 and XU3 can do this without rebooting
the entire system, which makes it much easier to switch between the plugins.
Also, using 16-bit color depth prevents different applications such as XBMC
from running properly, which causes you to choose a emulator frontend that actually
supports 16-bit mode, or else you are forced to start N64 games through a
Terminal window.
This all makes me believe that C1 is not really suitable for N64, at least under
Linux. I think that the best way to play N64 games on the C1 is probably through the
Android app or a highly modified version using fbdev drivers and some scripts that are
able to switch color depths and applications to run. That setup would be very inconvenient
and certainly not suitable for beginners.
The U3 and XU3 both measure up very well when it comes to N64 emulation. Being
able to switch between graphic cores easily is a big benefit over the C1. N64 games
seem to need some occasional tweaking, and if you look at the configuration options
for either glide64mk2 or rice on the mupen64plus standalone emulator, there are a lot
of options to choose from.
The XU3 is the only board that can use libretro core of mupen64plus with Retroarch
at the moment. It integrates the controllers very nicely, and you can easily adapt
your gamepad layout to your own needs and have various controllers supported. Also,
the XU3 has extra CPU power, which often make the difference between full speed or
“nearly” full speed. The U3 does a very good job in emulating N64 games, and being
able to use high resolution textures in mupen64plus is really a cool thing to have.
ODROID MAGAZINE 25
ODROID MAGAZINE 25