Went over to my friends houses and he looked at me and asked me to sit down at his pc. He started this emulator and I started looking for where he hid the console. This was unheard of, it was amazing.
MrJibaku i remember almost finishing Mario 64 on pc, i felt in the future. I also remember waiting like crazy for Pokemon stadium emulation, and we got it only years later with PJ64 Emulator .
@@fullmetalu320 Yeah, it just makes me think of how the future will be, I mean I have followed emulation for years, and it never ceases to impress me, especially with the Wii U, Switch, PS3, and Xbox 360 emulator(s) out there.. My PC is a whole heaping pile of consoles at this point, easily accessible from my Steam Big Picture library, hell I'm even crazy enough to use the Steam Controller Mapping options to make every game controller compatible, even World of Warcraft of all games I have a full setup on that is comfortable as hell to use. I'd say the future is now, but really that's exactly what you said so many years ago, and I've been there, so really I can't wait to see what more the future holds.
@@ProtoPropski Ever played an emulated game in stereoscopic 3D? I do since 2004, when I used to play Project64 with the nVidia stereoscopic drivers and the eDimensional shutterglasses. I have followed the evolution of emulation, stereoscopic drivers and head-mounted displays, and now I use ReShade to run Project64g_plasma.MD3 Dolphin, nullDC, PPSSPP, PCSX2, Cemu and the Model 2 emulator in stereoscopy, viewing them with my homemade HMD.
Dude that’s awesome! I still remember when my dad would pirate movies on our slow apartment DSL . Movies would take a whole day to download lol brings back all the memories.
My pc couldn't handle this. It may have been able to play snes, but I couldn't understand a damn thing on the menu. Anyway, my first emulator was gameboy, I remember my tech friend at school telling me about emulators, I said thats amazing! Went home and downloaded a glitchy version of pokemon gold before it was released, it was awesome! Couldn't read anything but managed to get pretty far in the game. Good times
@@fryncyaryorvjink2140 Haha, this is pretty relatable. I was playing a japanese version of Pokemon Gold on an emulator while other kids where playing Pokemon Yellow on their Game Boys. It's pretty incredible how far you can get in a game as a kid while not understanding the language at all!
I remember the same thing. And in fact, I think this and Napster came out roughly the same time. It was such a crazy time, especially if you were in college on ethernet.
Aiming in Zelda is already hard with the controller lol, I remember having to slow down the speed of the analog stick when I was playing with keyboard to get through Majoras Mask archery.
@@benyoder9473 Oh I _LONG_ ago got ahold of a N64 (or any retro controller, really) to USB adapter that works on both my modded original Xbox and my PC, though it required rewiring the controller's connector into a DB9 serial connection. And I'm sure there are some games that mapped out to normal controllers fine, but the N64 had LOADS of games that just didn't feel natural controlling with anything but an actual N64 controller.
UltraHLE changed my life. I wrote a couple of Glide wrappers for it at the time (XGlide and OpenGlide), and that was the kickstart of my career in CG. Awesome times
Though to be fair, as the video states, only a relative handful of the total N64 library worked, and even then there were glitches. Also the whole 32 vs. 64 bit thing was funny given that most devs avoided 64 bit instructions on the Nintendo 64 because 32 bit was more efficient/saved on cart space.
@@MarkMcDaniel There were no 64 bit home PCs when UltraHLE was released. The Athlon 64 (The first x64 CPU for PC) came out in 2003, UltraHLE came out in 1999
@@joshuawalker7054 -- Did they have any multi-core processors? Because, threading commands through a 32-bit multi-core processor could closely emulate a 64-bit processor pretty well.
@@jankjason - They made some great and humorous software back in the mid-90's...their emulators are outdated now, but I highly recommend checking out their old DOS games on DOSBox. Noggin Knockers 1&2, Executioners, and Time Slaughter...great indie titles. They should be available for free on archive.org, they apparently also made some minigames for Troma that I missed. archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Bloodlust+Software%22
Snes9x is not called Snes9x becuase it's for Windows 95/98, it's called Snes9x because two previous emulator projects called Snes96 (created by Gary Henderson) and Snes97 (created by Jeremy Koot) were merged together. In fact Snes9x runs on a lot of operating systems other than Windows 95/98: it runs on Linux, Android, macOS, even the Nintendo Wii.
i also remember when ultrahle came out.. the emulation community back then was sure a functional emulator wouldnt come out for years.. the other emulators could barely open a loading screen of a game.. then ultrahle came out of no where, the first version of it played games near perfect,, there was no early versions slowly making progress, it just came out and worked, so it blew peoples minds.. and then the devs basically vanished straight after, but people were craving for more games to be supported.. the emulation scene was wild back then, with stuff like bleem being a product sold on shelves.. websites that were solely news websites for emulators, providing news on updates of emulators, emulator chat rooms.. so kinda exciting times, it was all new and fresh - emulators now just seem achievable if people put the resources into them (like you can get them on your phone, and it just seems like a typical app), back then they were a new concept.
I remember the Pac-Man emulator being released, then new games being added that used similar hardware.. often there were hourly updates with new arcade games being emulated and I'd be continually refreshing the Zophar's Domain web site - almost every time there were new emulator updates with more games added. It was a really exciting time.
*Emulator devs:* *_*makes emulators that can run commercial games._** *Random people:* *_*starts pirating and running commercial games._** *Emulator devs:* :o
That's the thing though, emulation isn't illegal. HOWEVER, sometimes emulators need things which would be illegal for them to distribute, like bios rom dumps, needed for later consoles, in order to bootstrap games properly. This also allowed you to play region locked games by grabbing the region bios you need to play it. Eventually, totally custom bios roms were made, making them totally legal again, but there was some gray in there for a while :P
@@rich1051414 Not to mention the fact that homebrew and demo develpment needs good tools and sometimes emulation is just the thing for that. So someone might LEGIT want to be able to make stuff for n64 and make an emulator, and share it because it's hella cool, but not want a huge amount of piracy to be happening. It's naive sure, but it's reasonable to think...
@@Lilithe You can't really punish tool makers for people doing illegal things with those tools. It can get morally confusing case by case, but sometimes you need to take a step back. As you said, emulation does have purpose outside of illegal things. And such, the tool itself should not be blamed.
I remember when UltraHLE came out and we couldn't believe it, it was very soon after the N64 was released here in the UK. My flatmate had just bought Zelda Ocarina and I was playing it on my PC before he brought it home haha. I was at Uni, which was a very useful place to download all this stuff and roms before broadband was a thing.....also useful for playing DukeNukem and C&C network games!
Back in the day people would download single rom files... today it's actually easier to find the complete romset for download rather than individual games
This brings back so many memories. UltraHLE was mind blowing and the early internet drama that came with it was fascinating to watch unfold. The late 90s were the golden age of emulation and this was definitely the most notable development at the time. I had just graduated college and built a monster Pentium II 450mhz PC with a Voodoo card - UltraHLE ran super smooth it was amazing.
Same! High school was now bearable for me because when I got home I could blast through homework then play Mario64. Anyone remember the Zelda64 non passable glitch at the end? Zelda would raise the gates at the end but you couldn’t go through them?
@@timmyp6297 corn wasn't magic. They used static recompilatiom rather than dynamic. Their compatibility was really bad but yes it did squeak out a few more fps. It wasn't really needed though because PCs of the time could do the job. Reminds me of another one I think it was called Pagan.
Same here, ZSNES and Nesticle were the first emulators I truly got into emulation via, such amazing software, being able to play NES games - with sound! - on my old 486, or playing SNES games - with sound disabled and some generous frameskip - too :D
The same here. People bragged that SNES9x was sooo good, but ZSNES and its assembly code optimizations made it so you could run it on a toaster (by those day's standards). SNES emulation is so very good these days, however, I remember playing ESNES on my 486... Final Fantasy IV Hard Type at 15-30fps... yeahhhhhh. No one could imagine frame rate like that for a SNES game today. lol
@@TheXev Hahaha!! Yep, my holy grail was FFVI - and being able to play that on my 486 of the time just absolutely blew my mind. Plenty of frameskip, music enabled for the fights/bosses, and I was delirious with happiness :D
It actually happens in reality (luckily no money was lost), but not Mario. It was a guy whose his initial is "BMW" in Indonesia when he creating a site, well that's an "euh" moment and it's normal to rich people which usually wants exclusivity even worser than consumerism (for example a luxury bag brand I forgot maybe LV or Chanel or whatever or usually luxury brands they do burn the unsold products for exclusivity). I hate rich people stereotypes and I might not a one whose disgusted common things, suppose I am rich. I more respect to knowledge than money, and art is beautiful and this thing saves money so much as I appreciate art so much and rid me from buying expensive boring design products (yes I do like luxury but I must think the priorities so I am not ended in bad moments)
I remember downloading this emulator, and then starting a download of a Mario64 ROM and going to bed (33.6k modem, at 14.4k speed). The next morning Mario64 was downloaded, and I couldn't believe how cool this game was! It was also pretty cool to see this game playing on my 5x86 game computer with a Voodoo2 vid card installed. I ended up going to Toys R Us that weekend and buying the console, Mario64, and Zelda-Ocarina of Time, because I wanted to play the games without any glitches. So I guess this emulator actually sold a console and two games.
I live in Brazil, and I have two friends of mine that did the same thing!!! (Buying an N64 console after seeing N64 games running on an old PC). One of them still plays the console to this day (the first one died and he bought a second one five years ago). He is a proud owner of an N64, a PS1, a PS2, a Gamecube and a Pentium 200 MMX just for nostalgia gaming. He built a shelf on one of the walls of the "gaming room", and it's full of games (CDs, DVDs, cartridges, etc), and he says that one doesn't need to buy a powerfull pc or an expensive console to do happy gaming. And I agree with him. But as I am not going to buy old hardware, I'm going to buy an Xbox Series S - it's not THAT expensive, and it can be used for emulating everything from Amiga to Gamecube and Wii. Way to go!
Unfortunately not mentioned in the video: The irony here is that while UltraHLE was doing HLE for the N64, many people who didn't have 3Dfx/Glide based video acceleration cards, were using Glide wrappers for doing HLE emulation of the Glide API itself. Glide wrappers were all the rage, and Zophar's Domain still has a whole page about them.
I'm not sure if a glide wrapper could be considered HLE emulation. Its a compatibility layer (like Wine for linux), that implements the glide API and translates it to directx or opengl. To count as being an emulator, it would have to be a piece of software that behaves like the hardware itself; that is, the *physical* voodoo card, which would mean that installing the original drivers would be possible. For instance, PCEM includes what is actually a voodoo card emulator. In a PCEM environment with voodoo enabled, you need to install the actual, original voodoo drivers instead of a glide wrapper to use it.
@@chrll I think that is exactly what HLE would be in this case, intercept the 3dfx call, and transpose it to a directx or glide call. What you are describing as emulating the hardware would be low level emulation.
@@boranblok I don't think HLE is an accurate term for a compatibility layer. Have you thought about the project name for Wine much? It was originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator"
I'd be really interested in seeing other console emulation histories like this for other consoles too! It seems like some other consoles had a very rocky history with emulation, could be interesting to document. Also, loving the PC98 Touhou music you snuck in there!
It was a very weird system. Not as bad as the Saturn, but difficult to develop for and emulate. I do love how people play two seconds of a handful of popular games and declare an emulator "perfect", when in many cases, even to boot the popular, non-edge case games it takes a lot of game-specific hacks/optimizations that sacrifice accuracy for speed.
It's because it was essentially an SGI Machine complete with your standard SGI processor that goes into said machine. The only exception was it had to be tailored for Nintendo. To make things more weird it worked alongside a Nintendo processor and several Nintendo chips. That's why it's so weird and hard to emulate. All games had to create their own operating system from scratch (Or Use the one Nintendo provides NuSys) because it used an SGI chip that was designed for operating systems like Linux/Unix ~and~ the game had to run the game code on top of the operating system that worked with both the Nintendo processor and the SGI processor and all the other Nintendo hardware. It was very weird and very complicated, and yea, try to emulate that rofl. ------ Side note emulators have gotten much better, I've been following Project64 for a long while now and it's far from perfect but I still recommend it to people because I think it's brilliant. Also apologies if I butchered any of that information lol
Project64 is wonderful. 1964 lets us play Goldeneye and Perfect Dark at 60fps - as even use a mouse instead of controller! These are mythical achievements, indeed.
accurate N64 emulators aren't still a myth - CEN64 (Cycle-accurate Emulator Nintendo 64) is in development and can run some games well on good hardware :)
@@junehanabi1756 what i find great about the 64 was that the ROM cart made everything SO much faster. I wonder if without the OS overhead it would've been even faster?
"People are downloading this emulator and intending to use it for piracy" Woah! Really!? What a shock!! If there is a way to pirate something. People will do it. You can never stop it.
The only way to stop piracy is to dream of doing it, however, it's only for a limited time until it happens again. At least in the dream, you stopped piracy. But in the real world? nah.
@@Supertimegamingify The way to stop piracy is to make their products more affordable and reasonable. There is no reason in hell for why a game that came out more than 2 years ago, should be the same price as a new game.
@@conversationtosaurusrex Gabe Newell said something along the lines of piracy being a problem of service and not pricing, piracy in Russia reduced after Steam was brought there and its Steam’s biggest market in Europe now. So I don’t think its a pricing issue but a service issue. If Nintendo released a catalog of all of their older games like Steam on their own platform for PC and switch they wouldn’t see as much piracy.
My good friend told me about this via AOL and I immediately signed out and drove to his house to see it for myself. This blew our minds! I really couldn't believe what I was seeing. The decision was instantly made to skip school the next day and pull an all-nighter with this thing with some Half-Life and Diablo thrown in. Good times.
Only thing I remember from 1998 is waiting days for a downloaded Nintendo game from teh dial-up modem connection only to find out that Windows alone is not enough to play that game :D ...We were so young...
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Was there, and remember it well. Playing through Ocarina for the first time through UltraHLE in glorious (at the time) 800x600 was an amazing experience to be sure :)
This is incredibly interesting to me... How did you first hear about emulation and it’s possibilities?
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@@philipp5756 As I remember it, my first introduction to emulation was around 1997-1998 when Nesticle and Genecyst were released. Was spending a lot of time on IRC back then, and that's where I first heard of emulation. Being able to suddenly play every Nes and Mega Drive / Genesis game was just incredible, especially as someone living over in Europe, which meant that prior to the release of those emulators, most of us living here were stuck playing poorly done PAL conversions on original hardware. As incredible as Nesticle and Genecyst were however, UltraHLE was just on a whole other level when it was first released. I remember everyone on IRC going crazy over it.. Since pretty much everyone was on modem back then, it took ages to even download a single rom. But, being able to play stuff like Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time at decent speed, and at resolutions that far surpassed what you would get on original hardware just felt like pure witchcraft. To this day, in regards to emulation, I've yet to see anything that comes close to matching the craze that surrounded the release of UltraHLE :)
I remember blowing my friends' minds by bringing over a floppy with an NES emulator (Nesticle I believe) with some roms on it and playing on even the crappiest PC. Love emulators
Ohhh, great memories. I remember downloading Ocarina of time for hours just to try if it was real. The moment I saw the title screen I went crazy, it was one of the most magical moments of my "computer-life", it was like black magic or something.
"In videogame emulation history, there are some moments when something truly revolutionary is unveiled that is both applauded and critiqued, even misunderstood..." Expecting to see Bleem! in a future video then!
@@teriinekoyama1369 I searched the channel but can't find it. Do you happen to remember the name of the video? I searched TH-cam and other people have made videos on Bleem
I remember finishing both Goldeneye and Mario 64 on my Pentium III in 2000, incredible times! What ever happened to Corn64? That was a pretty fast n64 emulator for the time
I was in college when this came out. I remember trying to run it on a 166MHz AMD based computer. It ran like trash but the fact I could actually see the concept was amazing. After I upgraded to a Celeron 300A and overclocked it to 450Mhz and added a 3D card it ran pretty well. Good times.
The irony being that the machine to run this limited emulator probably cost you 4x+ what an N64 would have at the time, but if you had a multi-media PC anyway....
I remember playing Super Mario 64 on my cousins old PC. My mind was blown how an old PC could run N64 games.. Six year old-me didn't knew what an emulator was at the time Those were the times haha
I had this with my Voodoo2 card. It was amazing! The resolution on Mario Kart was insane, especially on rainbow road. My Dad would play Starfox with the Microsoft Sidewinder. Thanks for posting this vid, awesome memories
I was also there when this launched. And I was completely blown away! It wasn't just seeing N64 emulated, but the higher resolution made it look even better, I couldn't believe it. It was unheard of at the time to have an emulator run along side a current gen system, let alone do it even better than the system itself!
I remember this! It was truly amazing. I couldn't believe that N64 emulation was beating SNES emulation at the time. I've always loved the very idea of emulation but now I love running stuff on the actual hardware!
Going through a bit of a hard time, and your content always manages to bring a smile to my face. Thanks so much for your contributions to the community, both as a TH-cam content producer and as a developer.
Wait, what? I remember one of these classic blogs, one of them were from a greek guy talking about "super mario bros 4" on the super famicom, it's so surreal, could greek bro be the same one?
Finally a video on UltraHLE 😄! I was part of the scene during this time. After other emulators of 2D-centric systems had hit the scene, we were all really excited about what would come next. I was hoping for a decent GBA emulator or something that would give the sound chip and the 3D compatibility layer of the SNES a run for its money. However, UltraHLE turned everything upside down. Suddenly, “advanced” 3D graphics was on the table. ... honestly, I never would have played Mario64 or Ocarina of Time if it wasn’t for that emulator. However. ... Even though UltraHLE was brilliant, the first iterations were hardware dependent. You needed a Voodoo accelerator in order to actually work it! - With that in mind, it evoked feelings of the Diamond gfx hardware and Sega Saturn games that would follow. The emulation seemed hollow. It relied on preexisting hardware instructions rather than the creation of an emulation layer allowing those instructions to be executed. Sounds complicated you say... It is, and I know. As the UltraHLE emulation was originally dependent on specific gpu hardware, a new emulation scene sprang up; namely that of the gpu emulation. After UltraHLE popped up on the scene, people were going crazy for compatibility with the hardware that was required. Not everyone had the exact right hardware. UltraHLE was brilliant, but it wasn’t generally accessible. Along came OpenGL-emulation and accessibility drivers. Before modern operating systems without memory limitations (transferring memory to swap files and whatnot) were a thing, high performance in emulation was a fickle beast. Before there was an open standard for 3D-enabled processing (like OpenGL), managing to fit compatibility drivers for your particular gfx hardware in the loadout of your boot sequence was a massive pain! Yes, UltraHLE was brilliant. However, I believe that it was a graphics exploit that might have done more harm to the community than could have been gained in the long run. Yes, it sparked a generation of 3D compatibility layers, but it missed the point of general accessibility.
Mario 64 in 800*600 looked amazing when I saw it running at almost full speed on my friends rig back in the day. The lack of an analogue controller was a bummer though. Still, I was totally impressed!
I was 13. My parents never bought me any vg consoles so I was big into emulation. I remember the rumors, fake emulators, all the chatter about whether n64 emulation was possible. I remember feeling like it was gonna be another 2-3, maybe 5 years away when UHLE came out suddenly. I got it the day it was released and was completely floored just like you and everyone else. Total watershed moment in the history of computing IMO.
A friend from school had an Amiga and they had a game called silk worm. I did a search for it at home and ran into a rom for it. Not understanding what it was or how to use it. This lead me to roms for the n64 and eventually ultraHLE. Have to give nemu64 a shout out also. I was like 13-14.
@@ltl-cx9xs Aaaah nemu64! That was the first emulator I tried. You unlocked this memory of mine. I think it never worked for me properly. I remember the initial "byte swapping" loading message and I didn't know what it meant until many years later when I learned the doctor v64 had the least significant bit not properly inverted.
@@DiThi It had pretty good compatibility but it was not perfect. It wasn't the fastest either but it was one of the options. There was also corn, pagan, and around that time I think they had Bleem for PS1.
That was a great historical breakdown. I had always wondered how UltraHLE pulled that off, and you unraveled the technical details behind it very well.
This was quite an amazing achievement at the time. If I remember correctly... Realityman didn't write the code except the UI, and he was the PR person. Epsilon was actually PSI from Future Crew and was the actual coder of the emulator.
Looks great, yes, I can give it that, but plays like dogshit, it's so boring... (Quake 2 also is... I'm not a blind hypocrite) Doom and DukeNukem are more fun than it even after multiple playthroughs.
@@whoevertf funny you say that, because I was thinking the same thing... I am currently playing one of the official expansions, playing on little short sessions day on and day off.... but you know what I've noticed? even though the game feels a little bit "bland", I can't put it down once I start playing it... It actually delivers the role of what a "game" is supposed to achieve... So well, there's that, I cannot deny it XDDD
@@whoevertf just one thing: even on modern machines, do you experience long loading times with Quake 2? I'm using the Yamagi engine... reloading a save after dying takes up to 5 seconds, I did not expect that from such old game (specially from id who were masters in optimization)
I was only 9 when this was all going on and it's very interesting to hear about emulation history in detail like this.. and the PC98 Touhou music was a nice touch!
@@kenrickkahn the ps4 emulator will probably be running full speed by the end of 2020. AFAIK orbital is the only one and they are really close to run all the base things you need for it to run homebrew
I had forgotten about Ultra HLE. For sure was amazing at the time. I had most of the games it could emulate so I mostly just showed friends who were in disbelief.
Well the RSP did most of the work graphically, the RDP just rasterized pixels and reads a FIFO. The RCP is both chips combined. The RSP is what the developers like Factor 5 and Nintendo themselves had to write custom microcode for to tap into the real potential of the N64. The CPU handled the sound, it's all done in software and the terrible RDRAM latency is a testament to how talented and intelligent those developers were.
Fellipe Melo Wait, does N64 use crossbar switch like SGI workstations? When I watched Ben Heck’s N64 teardown, he basically said that there would be bottleneck issues because CPU, cartridge, RAM was connected to the center chip(which is RCP) and control the memory access. But if RCP was acting as crossbar switch, that design would make sense.
ZSNES is a very old emulator back then but fortunately, you still can run it in 2020 on a Windows 10 based computer. I never heard of Nesticle but it looks like a good emulator for the 90s.
I remember we had some decent computers at the back of the classroom, and would always finish my work early to play some mame, SNES, and n64. Playing Mario kart 64 at the back of the class was amazing, an I was the one making copies and showing my friends about emulators.
Wow. I remember using UltraHLE on dial up and being extra skeptical about it. My PC couldn't really run it well at all but I definitely remember that day. It was really hard to even find good rom dumps then.
The Nintendo 64 was my first console and is still one of my favorites. So many good games and it's a great system to bring to a party: Super Smash Bros., Mario Kart, Goldeneye 007.
@referral madness Yes.... lol I was born in 1985, and I was in gr.8 or 9 at the time. I found an article saying ADSL was commercially available in 1997. Maybe I was closer to gr. 10 or 11....
Very nostalgic video, thank you, UltraHLE was a big part of my childhood. It absolutely blew me away and although I never owned a real N64 it was all thanks to UltraHLE that I was able to experience it.
I cherish the history of emulation, one of the most fascinating technologies to come from home PC's, and a vital part of video game preservation. The first time I saw the SM64 title screen on my computer monitor, it BLEW MY MIND. That Quake you had running on that old Pentium looked so beautiful man.
I remember the moment when mario showed up, ittts a meee mariooo. On my pc!!! That was so magical. It also made me realize who powerfull the n64 actualy was, because i had to buy the best vidcard at that moment. I still hold a huge respect for the emulator scene, how much time they spend their free time on it, not for playing games or piracy, but just to make it damn work, most of the time working together.
This is actually what inspired me to learn C++ and formed my desire to program and create an emulator of my own. Quite a pivotal moment in my life actually. Except I had to use glide wrappers.
I was waiting for this episode, I knew it had to come someday. When all my friends got n64s, Iasked for a voodoo 1 instead, and when UltraHLE came out, I felt so vindicated.
Hahah, yes!! Basically the same story here. I had the Canopus Pure 3D. Best Voodoo 1 card available. Only Voodoo 1 with 6mb instead of 4MB. Oh those times were special.
I've followed emulation efforts of systems before and it's a super slow process with seemingly years between tiny gains. I was blown away with UltraHLE, i've never before or since seen an emulator come onto the scene 100% perfect while other emulators were at basically zero. The rest of the world was a decade off working emulation.
Yes! thanks for keeping these stories alive. I remember playing with Nesticle and Genecyst as well as Snes96 and Snes97 on my P166 MMX before they became Snes9X! UltraHLE was a whole new ball game though - I think I played N64 games on it with a Celeron 366 before I even got the N64 console.
I remember getting my hands on UltraHLE for the first time and realizing what a game changer it was. Especially when I remember how poorly some of the NES and SNES emulators ran at the time. The SNES emulators took sooo long to perfect, I remember having to sometimes enable/disable certain layers of the game just to make certain parts viewable as things like transparency weren't full implemented yet.
I did, but not until 2001, when I got an NOS Voodoo 3 3000 AGP video card! (That was in April, 2001, IIRC) (20 years old) I got it, because of Glide! Boy, I feel old, LOL! (now 41 years old)
4:56 OMG, I'm finally hearing the title screen the same way I did on my old CRT in 2002, with missing cymbals! Tell me how did you record that!! My childhood wants to know so bad!
I remember the release of UltraHLE as well. I had been following emulation for quite awhile, and when it dropped, I was amazed. I went out and bought my very first "3D accelerator" card, a voodoo2, specifically to be able to use UltraHLE. I hadn't really considered buying a 3D accelerator at all previously, figuring the performance I saw in Quake 2 and such was fine as it was. Upon trying out Quake 2 with the 3D card though, I realized I had been wrong. I only expected it to be a little faster. It was, instead, monumentally fast AND the image quality was fundamentally better. It made it into a whole new game. They must have done a terrible job marketing those cards, because I honestly was completely surprised by this. I expected an improved framerate and not much else. Instead, it was a whole new world. It was amazing. Then I got UltraHLE running and it was fantastic. The only thing I wanted to run was Conker's Bad Fur Day, and it worked well. I didn't own a controller at the time, and using a keyboard for it was torture, so I ended up buying my first controller for UltraHLE as well! That thing sold hardware!
Id like to see you explore other emulators as they popped up over time and explain what important steps the next emulator was able to do over the other.
This is really very interesting. I missed out on UltraHLE as I was busy playing my N64 at the time, but as a fan of emulation I appreciate you explaining it's significance and some of the history of Nintendo dealing with it's authors.
Thanks for the in-depth intro. I didn't notice emulator itself could be just another software masterpiece as great as the original console and games. I still remember the days trying to run bleem on my Pentium 2 Win 98 PC. It was a nightmare. Might be it was due to lack of decent graphics card at then
I remember playing NeoGeo on Pentium 1 MMX in the garage what a great time love those old computers and the sound of the hard drive so nostalgic so much great memories
I was about to be minus nine months old when UltraHLE was made, give or take. So I was just hanging around in a pair of bodies, that's what I was doing.
Ultra HLE and later Project 64 is how I experienced all of the N64 classics that I couldn’t get access to back in the day (it was never officially sold in my home country). I had a 366Mhz Celeron and and Voodoo 3 3000. Good times.
Nice RARE t shirt. I remember playing with this emulator back in the day and first played Mario 64 via an emulator, but since I was an Amiga disciple, I was more interested in the SNES emulators that ran popular Amiga titles such as The Chaos Engine( Soldiers of Fortune). Another fantastic video thank you!
Ahaha, reminds me of trying to download Majora's Mask rom on dial up and having it fail a few times. Took several hours for 20 megs at the time. I remember an mp3 taking an hour at least.
I was 8/9ish remember my cousin downloading it, then the neorage, I thought it was the biggest thing ever, that computers are getting advance to play videogames, not in a sense that console are limited, but in a sense that the hard drives where improving and one day I thought we will be able to carry the whole Nintendo/Sega/etc game catalog in our computers.....
UltraHLE did OS-level emulation. This increased compatibility in specific games but rendered other games where the OS function was not found incompatible. Further projects such as SupraHLE increased compatibility by inserting more OS functions. From the RCP point of view, the HLE concept was indeed reproduced to help produce modern emulators. It was certainly a pioneer for 3D emulation and proved we could emulate at an API level.
I love these historical emu videos. i was right in the thick of it back then, the emulation scene was so exciting. It seemed like every other week someone was released.
Went over to my friends houses and he looked at me and asked me to sit down at his pc. He started this emulator and I started looking for where he hid the console. This was unheard of, it was amazing.
MrJibaku i remember almost finishing Mario 64 on pc, i felt in the future.
I also remember waiting like crazy for Pokemon stadium emulation, and we got it only years later with PJ64 Emulator .
@@fullmetalu320
Yeah, it just makes me think of how the future will be, I mean I have followed emulation for years, and it never ceases to impress me, especially with the Wii U, Switch, PS3, and Xbox 360 emulator(s) out there.. My PC is a whole heaping pile of consoles at this point, easily accessible from my Steam Big Picture library, hell I'm even crazy enough to use the Steam Controller Mapping options to make every game controller compatible, even World of Warcraft of all games I have a full setup on that is comfortable as hell to use.
I'd say the future is now, but really that's exactly what you said so many years ago, and I've been there, so really I can't wait to see what more the future holds.
I'd only seen Project 64 and had heard of Ultra 64. UltraHLE looks friggin' cool.
similar experience, then stated trying to work out how i was going to afford a voodoo2 and pentium 2
@@ProtoPropski Ever played an emulated game in stereoscopic 3D? I do since 2004, when I used to play Project64 with the nVidia stereoscopic drivers and the eDimensional shutterglasses. I have followed the evolution of emulation, stereoscopic drivers and head-mounted displays, and now I use ReShade to run Project64g_plasma.MD3 Dolphin, nullDC, PPSSPP, PCSX2, Cemu and the Model 2 emulator in stereoscopy, viewing them with my homemade HMD.
I use to think my dad was a wizard back when he set up a bunch of emulators for me, that ultrahle menu takes me way back!
Hagrid voice: Yer a wizard Daddy
Dude that’s awesome!
I still remember when my dad would pirate movies on our slow apartment DSL . Movies would take a whole day to download lol brings back all the memories.
My pc couldn't handle this. It may have been able to play snes, but I couldn't understand a damn thing on the menu. Anyway, my first emulator was gameboy, I remember my tech friend at school telling me about emulators, I said thats amazing! Went home and downloaded a glitchy version of pokemon gold before it was released, it was awesome! Couldn't read anything but managed to get pretty far in the game. Good times
Good times!
@@fryncyaryorvjink2140 Haha, this is pretty relatable. I was playing a japanese version of Pokemon Gold on an emulator while other kids where playing Pokemon Yellow on their Game Boys. It's pretty incredible how far you can get in a game as a kid while not understanding the language at all!
I remember when this came out, I was in college, and "its-a-me mario" loaded up on my PC. I skipped all my classes that day.
I remember the same thing. And in fact, I think this and Napster came out roughly the same time. It was such a crazy time, especially if you were in college on ethernet.
bs
Vinny LT what
I've made it a policy to never start up any new game I might get sucked in to unless I'm sure I have a good chunk of time free, like the weekend.
@@cheeseboi588 bullshit*
Just a hater, don't pay them attention
I remember when UltraHLE came out.... that's when I found out it's nearly impossible to play a N64 game without a proper N64 controller....
Aiming in Zelda is already hard with the controller lol, I remember having to slow down the speed of the analog stick when I was playing with keyboard to get through Majoras Mask archery.
You shoulda bought some adaptoids
Literally any controller with an analog stick works really well with N64 games
@@BOXXYwhat The problem isn't the d-pad/analog stick, it's the button layout.
@@benyoder9473 Oh I _LONG_ ago got ahold of a N64 (or any retro controller, really) to USB adapter that works on both my modded original Xbox and my PC, though it required rewiring the controller's connector into a DB9 serial connection.
And I'm sure there are some games that mapped out to normal controllers fine, but the N64 had LOADS of games that just didn't feel natural controlling with anything but an actual N64 controller.
UltraHLE changed my life. I wrote a couple of Glide wrappers for it at the time (XGlide and OpenGlide), and that was the kickstart of my career in CG. Awesome times
"It's impossible to emulate an N64 in a PC. A PC is only 32 bit and the N64 is 64 bit!" - I heard this back in the day.
Though to be fair, as the video states, only a relative handful of the total N64 library worked, and even then there were glitches. Also the whole 32 vs. 64 bit thing was funny given that most devs avoided 64 bit instructions on the Nintendo 64 because 32 bit was more efficient/saved on cart space.
I own a 64-bit PC.
@@MarkMcDaniel There were no 64 bit home PCs when UltraHLE was released. The Athlon 64 (The first x64 CPU for PC) came out in 2003, UltraHLE came out in 1999
@@joshuawalker7054 -- Did they have any multi-core processors? Because, threading commands through a 32-bit multi-core processor could closely emulate a 64-bit processor pretty well.
What, I play this on a 32-bits Laptop that I give to a cousin.
I love how the name "NESticle" is ingrained in emulation history.
Proves that the creators back then had some balls ^^
Thanks Shitman!
Bloodlust Software was tha shiznat!!! }:-D>
I never heard of NESticle before now.
@@jankjason - They made some great and humorous software back in the mid-90's...their emulators are outdated now, but I highly recommend checking out their old DOS games on DOSBox. Noggin Knockers 1&2, Executioners, and Time Slaughter...great indie titles. They should be available for free on archive.org, they apparently also made some minigames for Troma that I missed. archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Bloodlust+Software%22
So that's why it's called Snes9x! I appreciate the emulator history lessons.
I thought it had to do with being for Windows 95/98! Interesting. lol
I still use SNES9X to this day. ZNES is cool but still running SNES9X, almost 20 years.
Snes9x is not called Snes9x becuase it's for Windows 95/98, it's called Snes9x because two previous emulator projects called Snes96 (created by Gary Henderson) and Snes97 (created by Jeremy Koot) were merged together. In fact Snes9x runs on a lot of operating systems other than Windows 95/98: it runs on Linux, Android, macOS, even the Nintendo Wii.
@@babyboomertwerkteam5662 yes we saw the video, too
I like more ZNES
i also remember when ultrahle came out.. the emulation community back then was sure a functional emulator wouldnt come out for years.. the other emulators could barely open a loading screen of a game.. then ultrahle came out of no where, the first version of it played games near perfect,, there was no early versions slowly making progress, it just came out and worked, so it blew peoples minds.. and then the devs basically vanished straight after, but people were craving for more games to be supported.. the emulation scene was wild back then, with stuff like bleem being a product sold on shelves.. websites that were solely news websites for emulators, providing news on updates of emulators, emulator chat rooms.. so kinda exciting times, it was all new and fresh - emulators now just seem achievable if people put the resources into them (like you can get them on your phone, and it just seems like a typical app), back then they were a new concept.
Kocham cię miłość cały obiadu kawy
wtf is a coffee dinner?
why does a n64 emulator for Windows 98 run better than n64 on Windows 10 haha
Maybe the hardware of the time shared more properties with N64
@Windows XP Never Forgetten!
He said it in the video. 3DFX Glide api was similar to the n64
An* N64 emulator...
He said it in the video bruh
I love to see a MAME history recap like this...
True
Billy
I remember the Pac-Man emulator being released, then new games being added that used similar hardware.. often there were hourly updates with new arcade games being emulated and I'd be continually refreshing the Zophar's Domain web site - almost every time there were new emulator updates with more games added. It was a really exciting time.
Yep, and the story of Nicola Salmoria in MAME
That would take hours...
*Emulator devs:* *_*makes emulators that can run commercial games._**
*Random people:* *_*starts pirating and running commercial games._**
*Emulator devs:* :o
*Nintendo: Threatens to sue emulator devs*
*Devs:* We never intended our emulator to be used for emulation 🤷
*Nintendo: Sues emulator devs*
@Lassi Kinnunen emulation isn't illegal itself
That's the thing though, emulation isn't illegal.
HOWEVER, sometimes emulators need things which would be illegal for them to distribute, like bios rom dumps, needed for later consoles, in order to bootstrap games properly. This also allowed you to play region locked games by grabbing the region bios you need to play it.
Eventually, totally custom bios roms were made, making them totally legal again, but there was some gray in there for a while :P
@@rich1051414 Not to mention the fact that homebrew and demo develpment needs good tools and sometimes emulation is just the thing for that. So someone might LEGIT want to be able to make stuff for n64 and make an emulator, and share it because it's hella cool, but not want a huge amount of piracy to be happening.
It's naive sure, but it's reasonable to think...
@@Lilithe You can't really punish tool makers for people doing illegal things with those tools. It can get morally confusing case by case, but sometimes you need to take a step back.
As you said, emulation does have purpose outside of illegal things. And such, the tool itself should not be blamed.
I remember when UltraHLE came out and we couldn't believe it, it was very soon after the N64 was released here in the UK. My flatmate had just bought Zelda Ocarina and I was playing it on my PC before he brought it home haha. I was at Uni, which was a very useful place to download all this stuff and roms before broadband was a thing.....also useful for playing DukeNukem and C&C network games!
N64 Roms in 1999: hours to download
N64 Roms in 2019: merely 5 seconds
@Dark Otaku Lol true.
Max 64 megabyte apparently. That's a little over 2 seconds here in Belgium (300 mbps)
Dark Otaku speak for yourself. Still my shitty internet sometimes takes 6 minutes just to download a 19MB file let alone a 1.7GB file
More like instantaneous (500mb connection).
Back in the day people would download single rom files... today it's actually easier to find the complete romset for download rather than individual games
This brings back so many memories. UltraHLE was mind blowing and the early internet drama that came with it was fascinating to watch unfold. The late 90s were the golden age of emulation and this was definitely the most notable development at the time. I had just graduated college and built a monster Pentium II 450mhz PC with a Voodoo card - UltraHLE ran super smooth it was amazing.
Corn was the magic emulator from the era. UltraHLE was just first,
@@timmyp6297 yeaaah that thing ran full speed on a K6-II 233mhz ... a small miracle :D
@@ziggbg Its strange how its so forgotten, yet this was real magic. That guy could program very well.
Same! High school was now bearable for me because when I got home I could blast through homework then play Mario64. Anyone remember the Zelda64 non passable glitch at the end? Zelda would raise the gates at the end but you couldn’t go through them?
@@timmyp6297 corn wasn't magic. They used static recompilatiom rather than dynamic. Their compatibility was really bad but yes it did squeak out a few more fps. It wasn't really needed though because PCs of the time could do the job. Reminds me of another one I think it was called Pagan.
SNES9x and ZSNES were my first adventures into emulation. I was only a freshman is high school.
Same here, ZSNES and Nesticle were the first emulators I truly got into emulation via, such amazing software, being able to play NES games - with sound! - on my old 486, or playing SNES games - with sound disabled and some generous frameskip - too :D
The same here. People bragged that SNES9x was sooo good, but ZSNES and its assembly code optimizations made it so you could run it on a toaster (by those day's standards). SNES emulation is so very good these days, however, I remember playing ESNES on my 486... Final Fantasy IV Hard Type at 15-30fps... yeahhhhhh.
No one could imagine frame rate like that for a SNES game today. lol
@@TheXev Hahaha!! Yep, my holy grail was FFVI - and being able to play that on my 486 of the time just absolutely blew my mind. Plenty of frameskip, music enabled for the fights/bosses, and I was delirious with happiness :D
Mine was a Japanese Dragonball z fighting game that was halfway translated to English. It was awesome.
I used to play smw romhacks on zsnes, but then more and more hacks were made incompatible so I switched to ZMZ
"Nesticles". "Genecyst" lmao these 2000s programmers had jokes
Classy names for sure.
90s actually. And the same team made both!
When the internet wasn't infected with pc culture.
Neil Huston NO$GB also a good emulator with hilarious name
@@schmeat7609 did this suddenly get political?
"My brother's name is Mario"
Nintendo: Call the lawyers.
I'm surprised Nintendo didn't try to sue Mario Segale.
Assasins Creed 2: "It's a-me, Mario!"
Nintendo: Call the lawyers.
th-cam.com/video/RJcPc6OQ384/w-d-xo.html
It actually happens in reality (luckily no money was lost), but not Mario. It was a guy whose his initial is "BMW" in Indonesia when he creating a site, well that's an "euh" moment and it's normal to rich people which usually wants exclusivity even worser than consumerism (for example a luxury bag brand I forgot maybe LV or Chanel or whatever or usually luxury brands they do burn the unsold products for exclusivity). I hate rich people stereotypes and I might not a one whose disgusted common things, suppose I am rich. I more respect to knowledge than money, and art is beautiful and this thing saves money so much as I appreciate art so much and rid me from buying expensive boring design products (yes I do like luxury but I must think the priorities so I am not ended in bad moments)
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
400th like
“Only on Nintendo64” -the box
It isn't totally false....
@Frax it wasn’t leaked, it was reverse engineerd
I remember when they said emulating the ps3 on pc was impossible
Soo...it's possible?
@@jsjhdhg533 Of course it is! RPCS3 has done some amazing progress in the last few years
Well i bought a PS3 for 20$ and bought cheap used games in ebay.
well in 2019 you still need $1000+ PC to emulate console from 2006 and only get like 20-30 fps, it's silly.
@@extracoolboy it's not silly. You have no idea how emulation works or how difficult it is.
I remember downloading this emulator, and then starting a download of a Mario64 ROM and going to bed (33.6k modem, at 14.4k speed). The next morning Mario64 was downloaded, and I couldn't believe how cool this game was! It was also pretty cool to see this game playing on my 5x86 game computer with a Voodoo2 vid card installed. I ended up going to Toys R Us that weekend and buying the console, Mario64, and Zelda-Ocarina of Time, because I wanted to play the games without any glitches.
So I guess this emulator actually sold a console and two games.
I live in Brazil, and I have two friends of mine that did the same thing!!! (Buying an N64 console after seeing N64 games running on an old PC). One of them still plays the console to this day (the first one died and he bought a second one five years ago). He is a proud owner of an N64, a PS1, a PS2, a Gamecube and a Pentium 200 MMX just for nostalgia gaming. He built a shelf on one of the walls of the "gaming room", and it's full of games (CDs, DVDs, cartridges, etc), and he says that one doesn't need to buy a powerfull pc or an expensive console to do happy gaming. And I agree with him. But as I am not going to buy old hardware, I'm going to buy an Xbox Series S - it's not THAT expensive, and it can be used for emulating everything from Amiga to Gamecube and Wii. Way to go!
Unfortunately not mentioned in the video: The irony here is that while UltraHLE was doing HLE for the N64, many people who didn't have 3Dfx/Glide based video acceleration cards, were using Glide wrappers for doing HLE emulation of the Glide API itself. Glide wrappers were all the rage, and Zophar's Domain still has a whole page about them.
I'm not sure if a glide wrapper could be considered HLE emulation. Its a compatibility layer (like Wine for linux), that implements the glide API and translates it to directx or opengl. To count as being an emulator, it would have to be a piece of software that behaves like the hardware itself; that is, the *physical* voodoo card, which would mean that installing the original drivers would be possible.
For instance, PCEM includes what is actually a voodoo card emulator. In a PCEM environment with voodoo enabled, you need to install the actual, original voodoo drivers instead of a glide wrapper to use it.
@@chrll
I think that is exactly what HLE would be in this case, intercept the 3dfx call, and transpose it to a directx or glide call.
What you are describing as emulating the hardware would be low level emulation.
I had a Glide wrapper to run UltraHLE on my Riva card!
I found NEMU sufficient, but I was using a Pentium 3
@@boranblok I don't think HLE is an accurate term for a compatibility layer. Have you thought about the project name for Wine much? It was originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator"
I'd be really interested in seeing other console emulation histories like this for other consoles too! It seems like some other consoles had a very rocky history with emulation, could be interesting to document.
Also, loving the PC98 Touhou music you snuck in there!
I'm not the only one who noticed it then ^.^
The original PlayStation emulation scene is a great story. Gaming historian covered bleemcast pretty well imo.
Me too. These emulators take me way back to my kid teenage years
I wanna see how the SNES and Sega Genesis History of emulation..
nesticle and genecyst.... the two emus that really started it all.
This is 2019 and accurate N64 emulators are still a myth, fascinating.
It was a very weird system. Not as bad as the Saturn, but difficult to develop for and emulate. I do love how people play two seconds of a handful of popular games and declare an emulator "perfect", when in many cases, even to boot the popular, non-edge case games it takes a lot of game-specific hacks/optimizations that sacrifice accuracy for speed.
It's because it was essentially an SGI Machine complete with your standard SGI processor that goes into said machine. The only exception was it had to be tailored for Nintendo. To make things more weird it worked alongside a Nintendo processor and several Nintendo chips. That's why it's so weird and hard to emulate. All games had to create their own operating system from scratch (Or Use the one Nintendo provides NuSys) because it used an SGI chip that was designed for operating systems like Linux/Unix ~and~ the game had to run the game code on top of the operating system that worked with both the Nintendo processor and the SGI processor and all the other Nintendo hardware. It was very weird and very complicated, and yea, try to emulate that rofl. ------ Side note emulators have gotten much better, I've been following Project64 for a long while now and it's far from perfect but I still recommend it to people because I think it's brilliant.
Also apologies if I butchered any of that information lol
Project64 is wonderful. 1964 lets us play Goldeneye and Perfect Dark at 60fps - as even use a mouse instead of controller!
These are mythical achievements, indeed.
accurate N64 emulators aren't still a myth - CEN64 (Cycle-accurate Emulator Nintendo 64) is in development and can run some games well on good hardware :)
@@junehanabi1756 what i find great about the 64 was that the ROM cart made everything SO much faster. I wonder if without the OS overhead it would've been even faster?
"People are downloading this emulator and intending to use it for piracy"
Woah! Really!? What a shock!! If there is a way to pirate something. People will do it. You can never stop it.
It's disgusting. PAH!
The only way to stop piracy is to dream of doing it, however, it's only for a limited time until it happens again. At least in the dream, you stopped piracy. But in the real world?
nah.
@@Supertimegamingify The way to stop piracy is to make their products more affordable and reasonable. There is no reason in hell for why a game that came out more than 2 years ago, should be the same price as a new game.
@@conversationtosaurusrex Gabe Newell said something along the lines of piracy being a problem of service and not pricing, piracy in Russia reduced after Steam was brought there and its Steam’s biggest market in Europe now.
So I don’t think its a pricing issue but a service issue. If Nintendo released a catalog of all of their older games like Steam on their own platform for PC and switch they wouldn’t see as much piracy.
@@kirschitz64 the thing with steam is the sales
My good friend told me about this via AOL and I immediately signed out and drove to his house to see it for myself. This blew our minds! I really couldn't believe what I was seeing. The decision was instantly made to skip school the next day and pull an all-nighter with this thing with some Half-Life and Diablo thrown in. Good times.
Only thing I remember from 1998 is waiting days for a downloaded Nintendo game from teh dial-up modem connection only to find out that Windows alone is not enough to play that game :D
...We were so young...
Was there, and remember it well. Playing through Ocarina for the first time through UltraHLE in glorious (at the time) 800x600 was an amazing experience to be sure :)
This is incredibly interesting to me... How did you first hear about emulation and it’s possibilities?
@@philipp5756 As I remember it, my first introduction to emulation was around 1997-1998 when Nesticle and Genecyst were released. Was spending a lot of time on IRC back then, and that's where I first heard of emulation. Being able to suddenly play every Nes and Mega Drive / Genesis game was just incredible, especially as someone living over in Europe, which meant that prior to the release of those emulators, most of us living here were stuck playing poorly done PAL conversions on original hardware.
As incredible as Nesticle and Genecyst were however, UltraHLE was just on a whole other level when it was first released. I remember everyone on IRC going crazy over it.. Since pretty much everyone was on modem back then, it took ages to even download a single rom. But, being able to play stuff like Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time at decent speed, and at resolutions that far surpassed what you would get on original hardware just felt like pure witchcraft.
To this day, in regards to emulation, I've yet to see anything that comes close to matching the craze that surrounded the release of UltraHLE :)
COol lie dude, any more?
I remember blowing my friends' minds by bringing over a floppy with an NES emulator (Nesticle I believe) with some roms on it and playing on even the crappiest PC. Love emulators
Ohhh, great memories. I remember downloading Ocarina of time for hours just to try if it was real. The moment I saw the title screen I went crazy, it was one of the most magical moments of my "computer-life", it was like black magic or something.
"In videogame emulation history, there are some moments when something truly revolutionary is unveiled that is both applauded and critiqued, even misunderstood..." Expecting to see Bleem! in a future video then!
He already did a video on Bleem.
You mean 'previous video'. Go search the channel, because it's there.
@@teriinekoyama1369 I searched the channel but can't find it. Do you happen to remember the name of the video? I searched TH-cam and other people have made videos on Bleem
@@niespeludo In that case, Dreamcast would definitely be next. Forums exploded the day Chankast got released.
I remember finishing both Goldeneye and Mario 64 on my Pentium III in 2000, incredible times! What ever happened to Corn64? That was a pretty fast n64 emulator for the time
I was in college when this came out. I remember trying to run it on a 166MHz AMD based computer. It ran like trash but the fact I could actually see the concept was amazing. After I upgraded to a Celeron 300A and overclocked it to 450Mhz and added a 3D card it ran pretty well. Good times.
The irony being that the machine to run this limited emulator probably cost you 4x+ what an N64 would have at the time, but if you had a multi-media PC anyway....
Oh I remember that setup, 300A OC to 450MHz with the slot 1 adapter. That was awesome for a cheap price.
I remember playing Super Mario 64 on my cousins old PC.
My mind was blown how an old PC could run N64 games..
Six year old-me didn't knew what an emulator was at the time
Those were the times haha
I love how much effort you put into your editing. I can tell it’s important to you.
I had this with my Voodoo2 card. It was amazing! The resolution on Mario Kart was insane, especially on rainbow road. My Dad would play Starfox with the Microsoft Sidewinder. Thanks for posting this vid, awesome memories
I had the same graphics card.i played mario kart with blazin speeds...
That’s awesome, hard to believe that the old computer handled n64 so well, also Waverace was crazy beautiful with up resolution!
I was also there when this launched. And I was completely blown away! It wasn't just seeing N64 emulated, but the higher resolution made it look even better, I couldn't believe it. It was unheard of at the time to have an emulator run along side a current gen system, let alone do it even better than the system itself!
I remember this! It was truly amazing. I couldn't believe that N64 emulation was beating SNES emulation at the time. I've always loved the very idea of emulation but now I love running stuff on the actual hardware!
Going through a bit of a hard time, and your content always manages to bring a smile to my face. Thanks so much for your contributions to the community, both as a TH-cam content producer and as a developer.
“I got it from a guy in Greece” lmfao ok
but i can't show it to you
Lol i am form greece
Wait, what? I remember one of these classic blogs, one of them were from a greek guy talking about "super mario bros 4" on the super famicom, it's so surreal, could greek bro be the same one?
@@nikosx125grfks3 and do you have it?
Finally a video on UltraHLE 😄!
I was part of the scene during this time. After other emulators of 2D-centric systems had hit the scene, we were all really excited about what would come next.
I was hoping for a decent GBA emulator or something that would give the sound chip and the 3D compatibility layer of the SNES a run for its money.
However, UltraHLE turned everything upside down.
Suddenly, “advanced” 3D graphics was on the table. ... honestly, I never would have played Mario64 or Ocarina of Time if it wasn’t for that emulator.
However. ...
Even though UltraHLE was brilliant, the first iterations were hardware dependent. You needed a Voodoo accelerator in order to actually work it! - With that in mind, it evoked feelings of the Diamond gfx hardware and Sega Saturn games that would follow.
The emulation seemed hollow. It relied on preexisting hardware instructions rather than the creation of an emulation layer allowing those instructions to be executed. Sounds complicated you say... It is, and I know.
As the UltraHLE emulation was originally dependent on specific gpu hardware, a new emulation scene sprang up; namely that of the gpu emulation.
After UltraHLE popped up on the scene, people were going crazy for compatibility with the hardware that was required. Not everyone had the exact right hardware. UltraHLE was brilliant, but it wasn’t generally accessible.
Along came OpenGL-emulation and accessibility drivers.
Before modern operating systems without memory limitations (transferring memory to swap files and whatnot) were a thing, high performance in emulation was a fickle beast. Before there was an open standard for 3D-enabled processing (like OpenGL), managing to fit compatibility drivers for your particular gfx hardware in the loadout of your boot sequence was a massive pain!
Yes, UltraHLE was brilliant. However, I believe that it was a graphics exploit that might have done more harm to the community than could have been gained in the long run. Yes, it sparked a generation of 3D compatibility layers, but it missed the point of general accessibility.
Mario 64 in 800*600 looked amazing when I saw it running at almost full speed on my friends rig back in the day. The lack of an analogue controller was a bummer though. Still, I was totally impressed!
I was 13. My parents never bought me any vg consoles so I was big into emulation. I remember the rumors, fake emulators, all the chatter about whether n64 emulation was possible. I remember feeling like it was gonna be another 2-3, maybe 5 years away when UHLE came out suddenly. I got it the day it was released and was completely floored just like you and everyone else. Total watershed moment in the history of computing IMO.
A friend from school had an Amiga and they had a game called silk worm. I did a search for it at home and ran into a rom for it. Not understanding what it was or how to use it. This lead me to roms for the n64 and eventually ultraHLE. Have to give nemu64 a shout out also. I was like 13-14.
Man I had these exact memories but for 3DS emulation and Citra
@@ltl-cx9xs Aaaah nemu64! That was the first emulator I tried. You unlocked this memory of mine. I think it never worked for me properly. I remember the initial "byte swapping" loading message and I didn't know what it meant until many years later when I learned the doctor v64 had the least significant bit not properly inverted.
@@DiThi It had pretty good compatibility but it was not perfect. It wasn't the fastest either but it was one of the options. There was also corn, pagan, and around that time I think they had Bleem for PS1.
This has got to be my favorite channel on all of TH-cam. Keep up the great work!
That was a great historical breakdown. I had always wondered how UltraHLE pulled that off, and you unraveled the technical details behind it very well.
This was quite an amazing achievement at the time. If I remember correctly... Realityman didn't write the code except the UI, and he was the PR person. Epsilon was actually PSI from Future Crew and was the actual coder of the emulator.
Liked after only 5 seconds for the retro synth music opening.
When Unreal still looks great on 2019...
Looks great, yes, I can give it that, but plays like dogshit, it's so boring... (Quake 2 also is... I'm not a blind hypocrite) Doom and DukeNukem are more fun than it even after multiple playthroughs.
@@FeelingShred I agree, Duke Nukem 3D was far more enjoyable. I loved the atmosphere in Unreal but the shooting wasn't the best
@@FeelingShred I dunno.... Quake 2 with that jamming soundtrack, even if it didn't have a very "quake" vibe, it was plenty of fun for me. lol
@@whoevertf funny you say that, because I was thinking the same thing... I am currently playing one of the official expansions, playing on little short sessions day on and day off.... but you know what I've noticed? even though the game feels a little bit "bland", I can't put it down once I start playing it... It actually delivers the role of what a "game" is supposed to achieve... So well, there's that, I cannot deny it XDDD
@@whoevertf just one thing: even on modern machines, do you experience long loading times with Quake 2? I'm using the Yamagi engine... reloading a save after dying takes up to 5 seconds, I did not expect that from such old game (specially from id who were masters in optimization)
I was only 9 when this was all going on and it's very interesting to hear about emulation history in detail like this.. and the PC98 Touhou music was a nice touch!
where's that PC98 Touhou music?
MVG I just wanted to say I love your content, you make a type of content no one else in the world comes close to in quality. Thank you.
I really wanted the fake emulator at 3:30 to be true. I'm still laughing at the idea of it being legit 🤣
nin64.exe
There r lots fake PS4 emu nowadays.
@@MiiMaker Fake it until it really happens.. Look at how the N64 started.. PS4 will be around the corner in 2022 or 2023..
@@kenrickkahn the ps4 emulator will probably be running full speed by the end of 2020. AFAIK orbital is the only one and they are really close to run all the base things you need for it to run homebrew
@@C4CH3S yeah part of it is modern consoles don't have squat for hardware so emulation is catching up much faster.
2:20 that Unreal attract loop... That takes me back.
I had forgotten about Ultra HLE. For sure was amazing at the time. I had most of the games it could emulate so I mostly just showed friends who were in disbelief.
2:40 Thanks for the Touhou PC-98 music.
Haha mvg is a fuckin weeb
cheers for noticing too
apology for bad english
where were you when ultra hle release?
i was at home eating dorito when phone ring
"ultra hle is release"
"yes".
Dont quit your day language chode!
@@wessteinfeld3337 I don't think you've heard of the "club penguin is kil" meme.
"It came complete with a powerful chip known as the Reality Display Processor or RDP"
*Zooms in on RSP*
Reality Warp Graphic Accelerator Generator Display Processing Micro Silicon Chip
RDP is actually a part of RCP.
That chip is an ASIC that contains the sound processor, the RDP, the crossbar switch and etc....
Well the RSP did most of the work graphically, the RDP just rasterized pixels and reads a FIFO. The RCP is both chips combined.
The RSP is what the developers like Factor 5 and Nintendo themselves had to write custom microcode for to tap into the real potential of the N64. The CPU handled the sound, it's all done in software and the terrible RDRAM latency is a testament to how talented and intelligent those developers were.
Fellipe Melo Wait, does N64 use crossbar switch like SGI workstations?
When I watched Ben Heck’s N64 teardown, he basically said that there would be bottleneck issues because CPU, cartridge, RAM was connected to the center chip(which is RCP) and control the memory access.
But if RCP was acting as crossbar switch, that design would make sense.
That took me wayyyyy back seeing the ZSNES menu and Nesticle.
What emulator are you using now for SNES? :o
ZSNES is a very old emulator back then but fortunately, you still can run it in 2020 on a Windows 10 based computer.
I never heard of Nesticle but it looks like a good emulator for the 90s.
ZSNES, SNES9X, DosBox, Project64, Dolphin, MAME, PCSX2, ePSXe, Chancast, Kega Fusion, CEMU, cxbx,...those were the days.
@@BeatmasterAC
umm cemu is 3 years old
@@omargt738
ok not that old...but still kinda old^^
I remember we had some decent computers at the back of the classroom, and would always finish my work early to play some mame, SNES, and n64. Playing Mario kart 64 at the back of the class was amazing, an I was the one making copies and showing my friends about emulators.
Wish I knew this even in 2003. I would have been King of computer class for a day.
Wow. I remember using UltraHLE on dial up and being extra skeptical about it. My PC couldn't really run it well at all but I definitely remember that day. It was really hard to even find good rom dumps then.
Such awesome topics! Keep it up! The HLE information is something I won't soon forget
The Nintendo 64 was my first console and is still one of my favorites. So many good games and it's a great system to bring to a party: Super Smash Bros., Mario Kart, Goldeneye 007.
I remember: at that time I didn't have internet, i bring nintendo 64 games home in floppy discs from school (ten floppy was 14mb)
I used to bring floppies to school (they had fast internet) and download SNES roms to them.
I thought that I was the only one who did that🤣
@referral madness Back when I was on 56k dialup and my school had broadband. I remember it being called T1 or T3.
@referral madness Yes.... lol I was born in 1985, and I was in gr.8 or 9 at the time.
I found an article saying ADSL was commercially available in 1997.
Maybe I was closer to gr. 10 or 11....
I had Genesis games on a floppy
Very nostalgic video, thank you, UltraHLE was a big part of my childhood. It absolutely blew me away and although I never owned a real N64 it was all thanks to UltraHLE that I was able to experience it.
person: No fast n64 emulator exists
UltraHLE: *_I'm about to do what's called an epic gamer moment_*
PJ64 has worked fine for years.
Unreal is still my favorite game. I'm part of the Unreal Redux project, a remaster of that masterpiece.
I cherish the history of emulation, one of the most fascinating technologies to come from home PC's, and a vital part of video game preservation. The first time I saw the SM64 title screen on my computer monitor, it BLEW MY MIND. That Quake you had running on that old Pentium looked so beautiful man.
I remember the moment when mario showed up, ittts a meee mariooo.
On my pc!!!
That was so magical.
It also made me realize who powerfull the n64 actualy was, because i had to buy the best vidcard at that moment.
I still hold a huge respect for the emulator scene, how much time they spend their free time on it, not for playing games or piracy, but just to make it damn work, most of the time working together.
I remember that week when it came out. I bought a voodoo sister card that weekend to give it a try.
Fascinating and well-produced! Love this subject matter, and your handling of it. All good wishes!
This is actually what inspired me to learn C++ and formed my desire to program and create an emulator of my own. Quite a pivotal moment in my life actually. Except I had to use glide wrappers.
No, the big N did not skip 32-bit processors. The Virtual Boy used a 32-bit processor.
Voodoo Banshee running Ocarina of Time: EPIC!
I was waiting for this episode, I knew it had to come someday. When all my friends got n64s, Iasked for a voodoo 1 instead, and when UltraHLE came out, I felt so vindicated.
Hahah, yes!!
Basically the same story here. I had the Canopus Pure 3D. Best Voodoo 1 card available.
Only Voodoo 1 with 6mb instead of 4MB. Oh those times were special.
I've followed emulation efforts of systems before and it's a super slow process with seemingly years between tiny gains. I was blown away with UltraHLE, i've never before or since seen an emulator come onto the scene 100% perfect while other emulators were at basically zero. The rest of the world was a decade off working emulation.
Yes! thanks for keeping these stories alive. I remember playing with Nesticle and Genecyst as well as Snes96 and Snes97 on my P166 MMX before they became Snes9X! UltraHLE was a whole new ball game though - I think I played N64 games on it with a Celeron 366 before I even got the N64 console.
I remember getting my hands on UltraHLE for the first time and realizing what a game changer it was. Especially when I remember how poorly some of the NES and SNES emulators ran at the time. The SNES emulators took sooo long to perfect, I remember having to sometimes enable/disable certain layers of the game just to make certain parts viewable as things like transparency weren't full implemented yet.
I did, but not until 2001, when I got an NOS Voodoo 3 3000 AGP video card! (That was in April, 2001, IIRC) (20 years old) I got it, because of Glide! Boy, I feel old, LOL! (now 41 years old)
It's cool to see your channel grow so fast, keep up the great vids mate. From sunny Perth 🤙
4:56
OMG, I'm finally hearing the title screen the same way I did on my old CRT in 2002, with missing cymbals! Tell me how did you record that!! My childhood wants to know so bad!
I remember the release of UltraHLE as well. I had been following emulation for quite awhile, and when it dropped, I was amazed. I went out and bought my very first "3D accelerator" card, a voodoo2, specifically to be able to use UltraHLE. I hadn't really considered buying a 3D accelerator at all previously, figuring the performance I saw in Quake 2 and such was fine as it was. Upon trying out Quake 2 with the 3D card though, I realized I had been wrong. I only expected it to be a little faster. It was, instead, monumentally fast AND the image quality was fundamentally better. It made it into a whole new game. They must have done a terrible job marketing those cards, because I honestly was completely surprised by this. I expected an improved framerate and not much else. Instead, it was a whole new world. It was amazing. Then I got UltraHLE running and it was fantastic. The only thing I wanted to run was Conker's Bad Fur Day, and it worked well. I didn't own a controller at the time, and using a keyboard for it was torture, so I ended up buying my first controller for UltraHLE as well! That thing sold hardware!
People just don't realize how amazing these graphics were at the time. It felt like I could fall into the tv. Truly a stunning time in gaming history.
Id like to see you explore other emulators as they popped up over time and explain what important steps the next emulator was able to do over the other.
Ah yes, another Dandy
I don't see that too often
youve just described the bulk of what this channel does
@@wojiaobill Well I mean n64 in particular.
He should have kept going beyond UltraHLE and talked about other n64 emulator advancements.
"I am gonna sue you ..unless you work for us"
Nintendo never disappoint me.
How to tell if an emulator is fake.. when the first line of the post says "it is not a fake emu" lol
This is really very interesting. I missed out on UltraHLE as I was busy playing my N64 at the time, but as a fan of emulation I appreciate you explaining it's significance and some of the history of Nintendo dealing with it's authors.
Thanks for the in-depth intro. I didn't notice emulator itself could be just another software masterpiece as great as the original console and games. I still remember the days trying to run bleem on my Pentium 2 Win 98 PC. It was a nightmare. Might be it was due to lack of decent graphics card at then
I remember playing NeoGeo on Pentium 1 MMX in the garage what a great time love those old computers and the sound of the hard drive so nostalgic so much great memories
I was about to be minus nine months old when UltraHLE was made, give or take. So I was just hanging around in a pair of bodies, that's what I was doing.
Duron 800 with a Voodoo Banshee. Great times using UltraHLE back then!
Haha, I remember the pain of dial-up and acquiring legal backups as well :)
Ultra HLE and later Project 64 is how I experienced all of the N64 classics that I couldn’t get access to back in the day (it was never officially sold in my home country). I had a 366Mhz Celeron and and Voodoo 3 3000. Good times.
Nice RARE t shirt. I remember playing with this emulator back in the day and first played Mario 64 via an emulator, but since I was an Amiga disciple, I was more interested in the SNES emulators that ran popular Amiga titles such as The Chaos Engine( Soldiers of Fortune). Another fantastic video thank you!
1:40 oh yeah !! Axelay soundtrack hype!! One of my favorites!
Ahaha, reminds me of trying to download Majora's Mask rom on dial up and having it fail a few times. Took several hours for 20 megs at the time. I remember an mp3 taking an hour at least.
I used to que up limewire with at least 5 mp3 before bed haha
Well if you want to be nostalgic, my internet is so slow it makes me think Im a time traveler.
Street Fighter the movie, 2 gigs. 26.6 dialup connecton... Weeks, but worth it :)
@@DarkLinkAD - The Mortal Kombat movie was WAY better...
I remember having a similar reaction once Bleem came out. It blew my mind.
4:07
"Epsilon and RealityMan proudly bring to you what will no doubt be one of the emulation releases of 1999...."
safe to say.
These videos are so good. Thank you for your time and effort in making them.
You forget that the Virtual Boy had a 32 bit processor, even if it was somewhat handheld
And two whole migraine-inducing colors...
@@JohnnyProctor9 and no strap
I appreciate the Touhou 4: Lotus Land Story music.
Yep. Caught me very off-guard honestly.
Same
He's either a fan, or wanted an in-era music piece. And Zun music is amazing, so he probably heard it with no knowledge and said that fits.
@@AshKaperdon also the game was released in 1998
I knew it was familiar, early Touhou soundtracks have a sound that is easy to recognize
I was 8/9ish remember my cousin downloading it, then the neorage, I thought it was the biggest thing ever, that computers are getting advance to play videogames, not in a sense that console are limited, but in a sense that the hard drives where improving and one day I thought we will be able to carry the whole Nintendo/Sega/etc game catalog in our computers.....
and we can now
UltraHLE did OS-level emulation. This increased compatibility in specific games but rendered other games where the OS function was not found incompatible. Further projects such as SupraHLE increased compatibility by inserting more OS functions. From the RCP point of view, the HLE concept was indeed reproduced to help produce modern emulators. It was certainly a pioneer for 3D emulation and proved we could emulate at an API level.
I love these historical emu videos. i was right in the thick of it back then, the emulation scene was so exciting. It seemed like every other week someone was released.