If you're familiar with retrogaming and emulation, you'll no doubt know that some consoles are harder to emulate than others. Among them, the Nintendo 64 is often considered a real bête noire.

The site Time Extension recently shared an article with a video from Modern Vintage Gamer on YouTube. The video, which is in English but can be automatically subtitled in French via the settings, explains in an accessible way why Nintendo 64 emulation is so complex.

To put it simply (and with a lot of shortcuts), the Nintendo 64 has a atypical architecture. While some consoles have similarities with the architecture of PCs, the Nintendo 64 has radically different hardware.

Emulation of the Nintendo 64 began in the early 2000s, at a time when PCs were often less powerful than the console itself, which was released in 1996. To get round this problem, developers had to use custom ‘micro-codes’ for each game, to ensure faithful, high-performance emulation.

At the same time, specific plug-ins were developed to emulate the graphics, sound and joystick management sub-systems. However, these solutions, adapted to specific games, proved ineffective, and even problematic, for other titles.

So why does this problem persist with modern PCs? Because it's not just a question of power, it's a question of methodology. The basics of Nintendo 64 emulation haven't really changed for 25 years.

Even Nintendo's official emulation struggles to faithfully reproduce Nintendo 64 games on its Virtual Console.

When we asked Recalbox which version of the Raspberry Pi we were able to use to offer a correct solution, BkG2k's response was apt:

It's hard to say. On the Pi3 there were games that already ran well. It was more a question of emulation than power. Then new emulators/cores came along, and they all evolved. It's quite hard to say really.

The Time Extension article concludes, through this video, that the problem stems from the very approach to Nintendo 64 emulation. Cobbled-together solutions, such as plug-ins and other micro-codes, must be abandoned in favour of a rethought emulation dedicated to the console's unique architecture.