Nintendo 64 emulator gopher64 recently added save state slots and netplay cloud servers

If Nintendo 64 is your thing, keep an eye on the gopher64 emulator which is steadily adding in more features and has Linux support.

This is from the same main developer that worked on simple64, which was a originally started as a fork of Mupen64Plus. The simple64 project is no longer developed and the GitHub page archived, with the developer moving onto creating and maintaining gopher64.

Writing in the GitHub Discussions to give a little more detail on it the developer said:

It is not based on GLideN64 at all. For graphics (RDP) it uses parallel-rdp (https://github.com/Themaister/parallel-rdp). I am not the author of parallel-rdp, but it is used in a number of N64 emulators for low-level RDP emulation.

For the rest, it is a combination of original research, mupen64plus, and ares. For example, the CPU interpreter is original, it is not based on mupen64plus or ares. The cache emulation also works differently from both of those emulators. The RSP opcodes are mostly taken from ares, but not the interaction between the RSP/CPU.

Basically, for each component, I decided whether mupen64plus or ares had a really good implementation that I couldn't really improve on. If not, I wrote something new. Sometimes it is mostly taken from another emulator, but with some of my own improvements, etc... whatever worked best for each component of the emulator.

It also contains some features that aren't found in mupen64plus or ares, for example, SummerCart64/SD card emulation, CPU overclocking, Japanese VRU support, etc..

Over the last few weeks two new releases went up with these additions:

• Save state slots are supported. Press Alt+0-9 to change which save state you are saving/loading from.
• On-screen messages (no more robotic Scottish voice). These will let you know when you change your controller pak, save or load a state, when cheats are enabled, etc..
• Small improvements to the controller selection dropdowns.
• Update to latest versions of Rust and SDL.
• Use nearest filtering for final image rendering (results in a sharper image).
• On-demand netplay cloud servers. Previously, there were 3 always-running netplay servers (US West, US East, and Europe). Now, you can create a netplay server across many different regions (as of now, there are 12 regions, please let me know if you would like one that isn't there today).
  • This works by creating the server on demand when you request it. This means that when you create a server, it will take about 20-30 seconds for it to complete. This is the time it takes to provision the server.
  • There is also now a unified session browser. All games from across all regions are shown in the "Join Session" window.

You can find it on GitHub under the GPL license.