Nintendo 64 emulator gopher64 adds controller hotkeys and auto-reconnect

By Liam Dawe - 8 May 2026 at 9:36 am UTC

The free and open source Nintendo 64 emulator gopher64 has another useful new release out now, bringing a few more features to make it easier.

The developer has been making some pretty rapid improvements to it. Over the last month they've added Achievements support, SDL3, an improved speed limiter, VSync, drag and drop ROM loading and more. With the new version 1.1.20 out now there's these additions too:

Controller hotkeys (see here and here)

The button that was bound to "pak change" (Select, by default) is now the hotkey activator. To change paks, you now do: hotkey activator+B.

Auto-reconnect disconnected controllers

Added option for SSAA downscaling

Minor bug fixes

It's quickly becoming my favourite way to run Nintendo 64 games on Linux / SteamOS.

See more on the GitHub.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Tags: Emulation, Misc, New Release, Nintendo, Open Source

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About the author - Liam Dawe

I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. You can follow me personally on Mastodon [External Link].
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1 comment

TheLinuxPleb 3 hours ago

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I use Mupen64-Next in Retroarch cause i can get game capture to play nicely with it when parallel is set the plugin. That way it plays with Vulkan and game capture can capture it. I just set my Retroarch to run with OpenGL in general so that the UI won't interfere with the capture.

Gopher seems to lack cropping of the image so you get black bars in top and bottom. Also it seems that you can't just do a folder for games to be picked. It seems to run in Vulkan though which is nice for game capture.

Also it seems that the CPU overclocking does not play that nicely compared to Retroarch Mupen64-Next's fullspeed setting which makes it 60fps constant.

I think i will still stay with Retroarch Mupen64-Next as it has much more verbose options.

Last edited by TheLinuxPleb on 8 May 2026 at 2:01 pm UTC

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