Homebrew About N64 and the Virtual Console

[Antibiotics]

I know that N64 emulation on computers sucks and it will always be like that, but what about the Wii? I'm looking to play some N64 games and almost every game I wanna play has been ported to the Wii via Virtual Console. Can I just download the .WADs and play them? Because I have been googling a little and it looks like "pirating" N64 Virtual Console games doesn't really work at all. Why is that? Do you have some sort of list of .WADs that do work? Also, what are "injection .WADs"?

I'm really looking into playing N64 and I want to buy a Classic Controller Pro for it, but before I do it I wanna make sure that I'll be able to play at least 3 games.

Thanks.

 

[Clydefrosch]

...what makes you think n64 on pc sucks?
even 10 years ago, my weak pc was able to emulate n64 pretty well. i'd expect that its perfect now. all you need is a good controller or n64 to usb adapter.
personally, classic controller (pro) isnt that good, n64 games play rather awkwardly with it.

seeing as i got every n64 game on my wii by promotion, i never looked into wads, however, i dont see why they wouldnt work.
bigger problem would be to actually find working sources for those.
i'd guess, if you install your game by wad, you cant move it to the sd menu though, which would limit the ammount of games you could have on your wii at one given time.

if you just want to play 3 games, you may consider just paying for them though, they're just 10 bucks a piece i think

 

[Arm73]

Well, I wouldn't know anything about piracy, as it is not tolerated around here on these forums.
But strictly speaking of wads, you can install them on your Wii if your Wii is softmodded.
If it's not ( or if your softmod is outdated ), then I would highly recommend you to visit the Modmii topic as it is probably the only stop you need in order to get things done.
After your Wii is properly modded with all the latest and stable ios, you can use something lie Multi Mod Manager to install wads of your choices.
If you follow this steps, you shouldn't have any problem.http://gbatemp.net/threads/mmm-multi-mod-manager-a-collection-of-tools.208281/

 

[Antibiotics]

No, N64 emulation on PC is faaaaaaaaar from perfect right now and I would said it hasn't advanced much in the last 10 years. It's actually stuck and will always be like this because there are technical things on a N64 that you just can't reproduce on a modern computer (that's what I've read). Project 64 is the best emulator right now and It's kinda meh.

But anyway, I just checked and it looks like the .WADs do work, the problem comes when you try to force games that weren't released on the Virtual Console by werid methods (I think that's what "injecting .WADs" means). If I'm correct, does someone has a list of working N64 .WADs? It would be awesome to play games that weren't released on the VC.

 

[Clydefrosch]

well, granted, due to controller issues i never played much n64 on my pc, but all the games i tried seemed to work pretty normal.

if you get the original wads of the games on this list, they should work
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Virtual_Console_games_for_Wii_(North_America)#Nintendo_64

here is a list for injections.
http://vettacossx.wordpress.com/200...cting-n64-roms-into-virtual-console-channels/

 

[nakata6790]

Hi Antibiotics.

First off i see you are in a NTSC region so you are lucky that you can play VC N64 WADS natively @ 60hz without needing to resort to hacks like those of us in pal regions.
There's 21 official N64 wads by Nintendo, they all play 99.99999% great and stabler than any emulated solution. There's a list on the post above me with the names of those 21 releases so you know what to look out for.

Moving on, about the injected wads. While a good idea in theory, most of them have issues (not saving or glitches). There are many dozens of those injects out there, after testing many of them, here are the only ones worth looking into, IMHO:
http://gbatemp.net/threads/i-have-q...share-with-friends.344719/page-2#post-4591158

Finally, Not64 for other games, read these threads:
http://gbatemp.net/threads/not64-update.333569/
http://www.gc-forever.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=842

So far, about 140 N64 games can be played/completed on Wii via the various methods depicted above. There are many more than cannot yet be played on Wii, like Conker, Turok 2,3 etc etc but hopefully we'll get there.

Enjoy N64, while it certainly has its' faults (and there were many) it really was a great system with timeless games.

 

[Antibiotics]

Thanks to both of you, I'm gonna turn my old Wii into an emulation-beast.

 

[RchUncleSkeleton]

You guys all realize that playing virtual console games is basically emulation, right? Emulation on the PC of course is a bit behind due to the nature of unofficial teams and resources being used, these people have lives and are not paid to develope their emulators. If there was money behind it I'm sure n64 emulation would be much better than it currently is. Also, the Wii is basically a computer so I don't know why you guys seem to think it's not possible to have good emulation on a pc. The performance varies greatly depending on hardware, in my experience Intel processors do a much better job with emulation than AMD does. My 6 year old laptop with Intel core processor and integrated Intel graphics does a better job emulating with pj64 than my friends 2 year old AMD dual core does. Also, yeah I can play many games near perfectly using pj64 on my laptop with very minimal glitches or slowdown.

 

[Foxi4]

No, N64 emulation on PC is faaaaaaaaar from perfect right now and I would said it hasn't advanced much in the last 10 years. It's actually stuck and will always be like this because there are technical things on a N64 that you just can't reproduce on a modern computer (that's what I've read). Project 64 is the best emulator right now and It's kinda meh.

There's 1964 and Mupen64 y'know.

But anyway, I just checked and it looks like the .WADs do work, the problem comes when you try to force games that weren't released on the Virtual Console by werid methods (I think that's what "injecting .WADs" means). If I'm correct, does someone has a list of working N64 .WADs? It would be awesome to play games that weren't released on the VC.

Most of Rareware games are problematic because they used modified SDK's as well as some programming tricks with their games and that cannot be replicated on the Wii well just yet.

The PC always was and always will be the best platform to emulate anything on unless another machine is natively backwards compatible with a system in question - you won't get better N64 emulation results on any other platform and N64 emulators have gone a long, long way in the last 10 years.

 

[the_randomizer]

No, N64 emulation on PC is faaaaaaaaar from perfect right now and I would said it hasn't advanced much in the last 10 years. It's actually stuck and will always be like this because there are technical things on a N64 that you just can't reproduce on a modern computer (that's what I've read). Project 64 is the best emulator right now and It's kinda meh.

But anyway, I just checked and it looks like the .WADs do work, the problem comes when you try to force games that weren't released on the Virtual Console by werid methods (I think that's what "injecting .WADs" means). If I'm correct, does someone has a list of working N64 .WADs? It would be awesome to play games that weren't
released on the VC.

Uh, actually it has. The Wii only had a paltry 21 N64 games released on the catalog. Yes, many games can be injected as WAD files and many do in fact work, but to call N64 emulation on the PC crappy without any evidence whatsoever is hardly worthy of an argument.

N64 on PC
========
Able to load games with custom microcode (Factor 5, Rare and a few others used this to go beyond the N64 limits, the Wii cannot handle those games properly)
Many injected WAD games do not function properly and have other game-breaking bugs.

You clearly have been out of the loop for far too long to know what is and isn't up to date, haven't you?
PJ64 2.0 development is active and getting better, the compatibility always has been and always will exceed the pathetic list of games on the VC.

Let me know when the Wii VC can play injected ROMs with these games full speed and without game-breaking bugs






Wii N64 emulation > PC N64 emulation