Star Fox 64 on Wii VC has crackling audio

bignutishere · 2026-07-31T17:27:09+0100

Hi, I'm discovering the joys of owning a Wii in the year of 2026. Better late than never.

Been playing the NTSC Virtual Console version of Star Fox 64 a bunch, and there's this annoying audio distortion that's hard to ignore throughout the game, like the audio is crackling.
It's most noticable in the end credits. This video I found on youtube shows it off as well, so I know the issue isn't just on my end: (45:56 in case the timestamp doesn't work)

I was surprised how nobody online seems to have discussed this over the years. Has anyone else noticed this or similar issues on other n64 VC releases? Is the cause known? Out of curiosity, I did try the PAL Lylat Wars release, and the audio was perfectly fine in that one.

Disorarara · 2026-08-01T10:32:21+0100

Now that is a crazy discovery! It's like when people first discovered there was a flicker filter applied to all Wii software, necessitating deflicker codes

I would say it's even worth investigating if other Wii N64 VC games have this issue or if it's just Star Fox 64 on NTSC systems, that it's missing from the PAL version must mean they were aware of the bug but never decided to update or patch it in any way for NTSC regions.

bignutishere · 2026-08-01T13:22:20+0100

As someone who has absolutely 0 technical knowledge on the wii, n64 or emulation, I figured the issue would either be in the rom, or the emulator/WAD the rom is packed in. So I did a little experiment out of curiosity.

FIrst, I unpacked the n64 rom from the NTSC virtual console wad, and played it on project64. No audio issues present
Then, I used FriishProduce to pack an SF64 rom (dumped from an n64 cart, not the one extracted form the wad previously) into the Lylat Wars VC WAD, audio issues still remain.

It's interesting that the same virtual console emulator would have these audio problems for the NTSC rom, but not the PAL one. Perhaps the different framerates also play a part in it? This affects both the 1.0 and 1.3 VC releases btw, and is reproducible in Dolphin as well, not just real hardware.

I guess because it's most apparent in the credits (I'd say the 2nd most noticeable scenario is the music you hear when you beat a level), and might be less noticeable if you're using speakers and not headphones like me, maybe it hasn't bothered too many people. And of course we have so many ways to play these games now, doing it on the wii is kind of a novelty at this point

Star Fox 64 on Wii VC has crackling audio

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